At Home, part 18

On Sunday we decided that the whole family would take Eileen up to Chinchón, one of the pleasant day-trip towns outside of Madrid that we hadn’t seen yet. It was a cold but sunny February day, and we piled into the Mercedes for a regular Madrid-style Sunday excursion: a little walk, a little sightseeing, and a nice big lunch. We let Mike do the driving this time.

It wasn’t till we parked in Chinchón and got out of the car that Eileen, an experienced mom, noticed that something was missing. “Lisa, where’s your jacket?” she asked.

“I didn’t bring one,” she said.

I looked at her in horror as I felt the cold air hit me. “You didn’t bring a jacket?” I said.

“No,” she said, apparently mystified by all the fuss.

I took a breath. “This is February,” I said. “Does it seem a little cold to you?”

“I don’t know,” she said, looking sheepish.

“Lisa, it’s freezing!” I said. “How can you go out without a jacket?”

“I didn’t think of it,” she said. “It’s okay, though. I’ll be fine without a jacket.”

I thought about what a bad mother I must be to have let my seven-year-old out of the house without a jacket, and then I thought about the fact that a seven-year-old should really be able to figure out on her own to bring a jacket for an excursion in February, but I kept these thoughts to myself.

“Lisa, do you want to borrow my jacket?” Eileen offered.

“No, I’m fine! Really! Thanks anyway,” Lisa replied, not at all perturbed.

We set off for an abbreviated walk around Chinchón, which had a circular Plaza Mayor ringed by white colonnaded buildings. Eileen and I worked out a system where we kept our arms around Lisa as she walked, so at least she would have some warmth, and we ducked in and out of shops we passed to get a little heat. Elaborately sculpted and braided breads were a specialty of the town, and we bought a few loaves before finding a steamy restaurant in which to have lunch.

It was a large place with big picture windows that let in lots of light. There were several rooms just starting to fill up with other day-trippers from Madrid, all in search of the classic Sunday lunch—cordero asado, roasted young lamb, or cochinillo, roasted suckling pig.

This presented a problem for Julie, who didn’t like meat other than McDonald’s hamburgers, but she as usual she was able to make a meal out of soup and bread and french fries and salad. Lisa, however, let Eileen coax her into ordering some lamb.

“Come on, try it, Lisa,” Eileen said. “I really think you’ll like it! And if you don’t like it, someone else will eat it, and we’ll order something else for you.”

“I don’t know,” Lisa said, dubious.

“You know, you need to listen to someone else’s advice about this,” Eileen teased her. “You didn’t make such a good decision about whether to bring a jacket. I think that choosing not to have lamb would be another decision you’d regret.”

Lisa giggled. “Okay, I’ll have it,” she said.

The moment the lamb arrived—fragrant, though seasoned only with salt—Lisa dived into it, and she did a creditable job of eating it, with only a little carving assistance from Mike.

“So how did you like your cordero?” Eileen asked at the end of the meal, eyeing Lisa’s near-empty plate.

“It was pretty good!” she said. “I think I’ll try that again sometime!”

The next day we had to get to CC3 and pick up Eileen’s finished coat early so she could make it to the airport for her flight home. The store wasn’t open when we got to town, so we walked to another purveyor of Spanish luxury goods—Seseña, the famous cape maker. Hillary Clinton had recently been in Madrid, and she had gone to the century-old store for an elegant Spanish cape.

We spent a good half-hour trying on capes of all kinds, assisted by a saleslady who taught us how to toss the free end of a cape over the shoulder in the elegantly casual manner of a Spanish lady. Eileen ended up buying a black wool cape, and I got a fancy gray one that buttoned down the front, so I didn’t have to replicate that hard-to-master toss.

CC3 was open when we returned, and Eileen tried on her perfectly fitting new coat, which she could now wear home. At the airport I watched that brown coat moving away as Eileen went through security and back toward her gate. “Thanks for coming!” I called. “I’ll miss you!”

“It was wonderful seeing you!” she answered. “Keep having fun!”

It was only a few days later that Doug Taylor, my sister’s husband, was due to visit on the way home from a business trip to Germany. He and Mike had worked out a plan whereby Doug would take a taxi from the airport to Mike’s office (an easy-to-find destination for any taxi driver) in the late afternoon, and Mike would drive him to the house.

“When you get to Price Waterhouse, if I’m not in my office, tell the receptionist to call my secretary, Victoria,” Mike told Doug on the phone. “I’ll tell her you’re coming, and she can park you in my office, where you can use the phone or just relax.”

“That’ll be perfect,” Doug said.

So I was a little surprised when the two of them arrived home an hour later than I’d expected. I welcomed Doug—I was really excited to see him—and asked what had caused the delay.

Mike and Doug looked at each other and started to laugh. “We had a series of—oh, I guess you’d call them mishaps,” Doug said.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Well, I spoke to Victoria like I’d planned,” Mike said. “I told her that my brother-in-law was coming, and I told her that if I was kept late in my meeting she should just put him in my office and see if he needed anything, and I’d be along later. And then I told her that if I was really late, and she needed to go home, she should just leave word with the receptionist downstairs that when Doug arrived he should be shown up to my office to wait.”

Doug picked up the story. “So I get to the lobby of the building, and I go up to the receptionist and ask for Mike Haubenstock. And she calls upstairs, but apparently nobody picks up the phone. So she’s very helpful, she calls around to a couple other secretaries upstairs, but they say that Mike’s secretary is gone for the day, and they don’t know anything about a visitor.”

“It wasn’t even late!” Mike interjected. “It was about six o’clock! Victoria just took off and never said a word to anyone.”

“I sat in the lobby, and the receptionist there kept giving me the hairy eyeball,” Doug continued.

“And when I got back to my office I had no idea that Doug was there,” Mike said. “Nobody had left me any kind of message, and it wasn’t particularly late, so I didn’t think anything of it.”

“I sat there for about an hour, wondering if I had gotten the instructions wrong, and finally I asked the receptionist to try Mike’s office again, and this time he was there.”

“I’m going to kill Victoria tomorrow,” Mike said.