Settling In, part 20

Early in October Julie was invited to a sleepover for her classmate Natalie Scarritt’s birthday. She took the bus over to Natalie’s house after school, and Mike picked her up the next day, so I didn’t register the fact that Natalie was the daughter of Clarice Scarritt, the Brazilian woman I had met at the International Newcomers Club coffee. And a couple weeks later, when Mike and I attended the get-together for parents of second graders at the Scarritts’ house in Somosaguas, I failed to realize that Clarice had daughters in both my daughters’ grades.

The get-together was an eye-opening evening for me. It was too dark when we arrived for me to see the beautiful yard of Clarice’s house, but the living room furnishings definitely caught my attention—there was a huge old leather couch, some big comfy velvet chairs, heavy wooden chests from Hong Kong. There were antique glass display cases full of every kind of interesting knickknack—geodes, crystals, brass knives, glass objects, tiny figurines in metal and porcelain. Here was a collector, I thought.

A fire was burning, and the lights were low. I had seldom felt so comfortable in another person’s house. Clarice, with her long, thick black hair and her soft Brazilian accent, was a welcoming hostess. Her husband John, an American with salt-and-pepper hair and mustache, saw to everyone’s beverage graciously.

Mike and I chatted with the other parents there, enjoying ourselves, till a new arrival came in. Her name was Loretta Simpson, and she sounded miserable. “I just found out we’re being transferred to London,” she said.

We learned that she’d been in Madrid for nine years because of her husband’s job with an American bank, and she’d come to regard it as her home. “I don’t want to go!” she wailed. “London is awful! It’s so unfriendly, and the weather is horrible!”

I couldn’t imagine why she would be so unhappy about the move. London sounded great to me. But I hadn’t previously been aware of the fact that many people made this kind of foreign assignment a way of life. As I listened to the discussion, I heard Loretta and John Scarritt realize that as children they’d both attended the American School in Caracas, Venezuela at the same time. “My dad was with the U.S. State Department,” John said. “We lived in Caracas for four years, but we lived in Brussels for quite a while, too.” John had eventually decided that he wanted an international career, but not in government service. After going to college in the U.S. he went to work at an American school in Brazil, and that was where he had met Clarice.

John worked at the school for several years and then joined R.J. Reynolds Tobacco, which sent him to North Carolina and Hong Kong. He, Clarice and their two daughters had come to Madrid about nine months earlier.

When we left the party I pondered what I’d heard. “Somehow I assumed everyone here would be on a temporary tour of duty like we are,” I said to Mike. “But clearly some of these people go from one international assignment to another and never go back to the U.S.”

“Yeah, I never really thought about it,” Mike said. “But I remember one of the partners at Price Waterhouse in New York telling me that some people fall in love with these overseas assignments and sort of ‘go native.’”