Making the Move, part 7

We soon acquired my car for our stay—a white Alfa Romeo 4-door sedan that had been the company car of Mike’s colleague Marino. I came to love this ornery thing, dirty and cramped though it was. I hadn’t driven a standard transmission car in about twenty years, and I jerked the kids around pretty well the first few days. Its main idiosyncrasy, I was to learn, was that on hot days, if you stopped for gas, you’d have to wait twenty minutes for the engine to cool down before it was willing to start up again.

I had a friend in Stamford who had lived in Madrid for six months in 1993, and she had supplied me with some useful information. Like me, she was a member of a 12-Step recovery program, and she’d given me some names and numbers for that.

My eating and my weight had troubled me for many years. I had lost and regained weight many times. My father had been obese most of his adult life, and when he was 45 he had been diagnosed with Type II diabetes. That helped me to get serious about my eating problems in 1989, when I was 37. I believed that I was headed in the same direction as my dad, and I didn’t want the diabetes or the many cardiovascular problems his diabetes had caused him.

Upon finding my recovery program, I immediately knew I was in the right place. I had attended recovery meetings in and around Stamford for five years, and I knew I’d need similar help in Spain. In fact, I knew I’d need the help even more, because I was going to be away from my comfortable home and from many of the people who cared about me. It seemed no less than a miracle that my friend was able to put me in touch with the English-speaking recovery group in Madrid.

The same friend had also given me the contact information for two women’s organizations: The American Women’s Club, which had a clubhouse in the city and ran various activities, and the International Newcomers Club, which met at members’ homes and in hotel meeting rooms.

I still had a day with the kids before school started, and I thought up some tasks to keep us busy. I figured the kids and I could go down to the AWC and check it out.

We went into Madrid by train. The weather was sunny—Mike had been told not to bother carrying an umbrella in his briefcase till November—and we made our way by subway to Plaza de la República del Ecuador, a shaded roundabout in the northeast part of the city. It took a few minutes of searching up and down the street to find the green door to the club, but we located it, rang the bell, and were buzzed in.

There was just a small living room setup, with a little office in back and a kitchen where a waitress prepared snacks and drinks. Several older ladies were chatting and playing cards, and Erma, the manager, welcomed me and signed me up. The club, she said, sponsored lectures, trips, bridge nights, charity events and cocktail parties, and as a member I’d receive the newsletter announcing upcoming activities.

Julie and Lisa were patient through this excursion, so I thought I’d treat them by letting them choose a place for lunch. There was a Burger King nearby, and that’s what I thought they’d pick, but just down the street was a Chinese restaurant with a red lacquer façade. “Let’s get Chinese food!” Julie said. Chinese wasn’t Lisa’s favorite, but she agreed to go along.

Of course, we were early—we hadn’t yet been able to wait for a 2 p.m. lunch—so we ate alone. And we came to suspect what we later confirmed: You can get all the bad Chinese food you want in Spain. Over time we ate at Chinese restaurants throughout the country—they were a godsend in their willingness to serve at any hour—and they all slathered everything in sweet, gelatinous sauces. But for the kids, it was enough to get an egg roll and a plate of fried rice, so they were content.

Making the Move, part 6

During the weekend Christine and Peter Lotto did come over, along with their daughter Alison. The three girls had a great time splashing in the pool. Peter worked in systems for Carrier Corporation, and Christine was a librarian. No amateur at PTA-type activities, she said she was in charge of finding hosts for parents’ get-togethers for each grade at the school. I remembered having spoken to Marisa Brandao, a Brazilian woman who had integrated herself swiftly into the Westover PTO in Stamford. I had asked her, anticipating my move to Spain, how she’d done it. “I just went to the meeting, and they needed somebody to run the membership drive, and I said I would do it,” she said. I signed on to do the fifth grade parents’ social.

* * *

We took a day trip down south of the city that first Sunday, before Mike was to return to work, to Aranjuez, where there is a Bourbon palace with formal gardens. It was the typical Madrid thing to do, to get out of the city on a Sunday and find a pastoral spot for a relaxed meal and a walk. On the way we drove through a pueblo (village) of charming white houses, with strings of lights hanging above the streets. It was unexpected and delightful to see, but only because I was not yet used to the fact that nearly every little town in Spain is charming.

On this beautiful sunny day we parked not far from the palace and walked through the gardens, full of red and white flowers. Just across the little Tajo river was a shady street that led to the Casa del Labrador, a tiny palace, and we walked down to look at it. Lisa spotted a stand where a boatman was selling tickets for brief river excursions. “Can we go on a boat trip? Please?”

“Sure,” Mike said, and we had a relaxing float down the Tajo.

We had a good Spanish lunch at a riverside restaurant, Rana Verde (Green Frog). We were there earlier than the real Spanish lunchtime, which is 2 p.m., and we were still puzzled by the menu, but we did get the job done.

Mike had gotten his company car, a little Mercedes whose best feature was the 12-CD changer in the trunk. It was a comfortable car, even for Mike’s 6’4” frame, and it was a lot of fun to drive. “What color would you call this?” Mike asked.

“Tan,” I said.

“Purple,” said Julie.

“I thought it was pink,” Lisa said. It was some kind of color that didn’t occur in nature, and we never figured out how to describe it.

Making the Move, part 5

One chore that had to be done was to buy school supplies. There was a list of needed items for each grade, and there was a little store out in back of the school, made of cinderblock and managed by a parent, Carol Marks. The line snaked out the door, but it moved pretty quickly, because Carol had a lot of assistants that day.

“What grade?” the clerk asked me when it was my turn.

“Second and fifth,” I told her. She scurried around behind the counter, amassing the items each kid was supposed to have. We paid and took our items home.

The kids had a good time looking through their new stuff, because much of it was unfamiliar. They each had several carpetas—these were large folders with attached elastics that could be used to hold them closed. The writing paper they’d been given was different from the 8 ½ by 11 that we were used to—it was a little longer and narrower, and eventually we found that flyers, computer paper—what have you—all came on this size paper.

Also, the pencils didn’t have erasers. Those had been purchased separately. It wasn’t till weeks later that somebody told us that Spanish pencils don’t have erasers because Spanish schoolchildren are expected to make no mistakes.

I had an additional mission to undertake when I got home. I had been given the phone number of another American School family, friends of a friend, who had been living in Madrid for two years. I screwed up my courage to call them. I got Christine Lotto on the phone, and she said she’d love to get together. Rather than make us try to find her house, which was far from the school, she offered to come over—and bring food!—during the weekend. She had a daughter between Julie’s and Lisa’s ages and two older sons, she said.

Another chore was to go to El Corte Inglés and buy plates. We drove into the city and figured out how to park in the store’s lot. Everything had to be learned; nothing was coming naturally. In this case, we missed the fact that the main parking area was underground, below the store. But we were lucky enough to find a space in a tiny surface lot just next door. We also had to learn that many parking facilities in Madrid required you to prepay at a cashier or a machine just before returning to your car. At El Corte Inglés you had to go to the basement level, pay a cashier, and receive a ticket that would get you out of the parking lot’s exit gate, as long as you reached that gate within twenty minutes. It was a challenge, but we were equal to it, and we loaded up on a nice set of flowered china and all the groceries we could manage.

I was terrified to use my Spanish, which I wasn’t sure would work on actual Spaniards, but I had an information sheet from the school that had the number for a dairy that delivered fresh milk. Spanish grocery stores sold ultrapasteurized milk in boxes, which had elicited a major “Yuck!” from my kids, so I took a deep breath and called the dairy. “Quisiera pedir la entrega de leche,” I began—I’d like to order milk delivery. Then came a response that was too fast for me to understand—for a few seconds. I found that if I didn’t immediately understand what I heard, it might still get through to my brain a second or two later. If I could slow down and not panic, I could answer! I told the clerk my address, how much skim milk I wanted, and how often. It worked!

Making the Move, part 4

Around the corner the Mazzillis, New Yorkers, looked younger than us, but their oldest son, Frank Jr., was in Julie’s grade. They had three kids and had been in Spain for two years. Lisa Mazzilli gave us some advice on where to find American kid food, like peanut butter, which was hard to come by.

Mike took us for a drive to see the area. He had gotten himself lost many times during the past couple weeks, trying to learn his way around, and he recommended that as a way for me to get oriented, too. “Just get in the car and drive,” he said. “I got you a good map. If you get lost, pull over and figure out what to do.” This didn’t sound like a great idea to me. I liked it better when someone wrote me detailed directions so I could get where I needed to go without stress. But meanwhile he showed me the way to the American School and the commercial strip on Avenida de Europa, getting lost a just a few times.

The next day I had an appointment with the Lower School principal so she could meet the kids. I took this opportunity to do as Eileen had advised me: I asked if any teachers did overnight babysitting. The principal explained that she was new to the school, but she had her secretary make me a list of two or three teachers who’d be happy for the extra work. I’d made progress on my first mission!

After that there was an orientation for new students. Dying to make contact with other new parents, I saw a kid that had the same jagged-looking upper teeth as my seven-year-old. “What grade are you going into?” I asked her.

“Second,” she said.

“My daughter, too,” I told her. “This is Lisa.”

Her mom turned around to meet me, looking as apprehensive as I figured I did. “Hi, I’m Karen Irwin,” she said. Karen, a pretty brunette, had a younger son with her and a baby girl in her arms. Her husband, she said, was a State Department officer working at the embassy, and they were living in a townhouse near the school, in Aravaca.

We had a little speech from the headmaster and went off for a tour. I noticed that I saw one other mother in both Lisa’s and Julie’s classrooms—Graciela, her name was, and she said she’d just moved to Madrid from El Salvador. Her daughter Cristina was in Julie’s class, and her son Edwin in Lisa’s.

The second grade teacher was known for being good at science, and her room was full of creepy-looking skulls and specimens that the kids loved. And the fifth-grade teacher, Mike Tribe, had a reputation that preceded him—Lisa Mazzilli had said that he was a crazy Englishman whom everybody loved. He certainly was a loud and jovial guy, built like a barrel, with longish blond hair and a beard.

Making the Move, part 3

And then there was my nemesis, the washer/dryer. This devilish little machine could launder a small load of wash, but it took about 90 minutes to do so. Then you could, if you wanted, remove half the load and dry the rest in the same machine—if you had two hours to wait. The other half of the load would have to be hung out to dry in the air, which was the normal thing for Spanish people to do. The problem with this was that Spanish ladies or their maids would then iron every article of clothing that came off the line—and I had neither the skill nor the patience to do that. Marilu, the rental agent, had found me a lady to come in and clean two afternoons a week, and she was going to iron Mike’s shirts (the cost of commercial laundries was outrageous), but she wouldn’t have time to iron all our laundry. This was a problem that was going to have to be solved, by me, in all the free time I would have after everyone went off to work and to school, so I put it on my agenda.

At any rate, having inspected the house, dipped into the pool, and unpacked a little, we were running out of energy and lay down for a short midday nap, made easier by the heavy metal blinds—persianas—that could be lowered to cover every window. As an extra luxury, our house had electric persianas that were lowered by little motors instead of by muscle power. They made the rooms completely black, just the way I liked it.

After a little rest, I wanted to meet the neighbors. Living in the house the past few weeks, Mike had learned that there were two American families in the neighborhood, with kids who attended the American School. I was much too scared to think about meeting my Spanish neighbors, but I was eager to meet Americans who could say reassuring things about life in Spain.

“Across the street we have an American Air Force major married to a Spanish woman, Phil and Ana Douglas,” Mike had told me. “Their kids are older—maybe babysitting age. And around the corner are Frank and Lisa Mazzilli. Frank’s a Drug Enforcement Agency guy working at the American Embassy. Their kids are the same ages as our kids, more or less.”

I got Mike to take me to meet both families, jet-lagged as I was. Phil and Ana were sitting on their pool deck, enjoying the sun and some beers. Their kids, Carmen and Troy, were away at the beach for a couple more days till school started. Ana appeared to be in her early forties, maybe 5’5”, slim, with short red hair and a good tan. Phil was about the same age, short, without much hair, and he spoke with a strong Southern accent. They said they’d met when he was first stationed in Spain, and since getting married at age 18 they’d lived in Texas, Oklahoma, Korea and Germany, as well as having taken another tour of duty in Spain before this one.

Making the Move, part 2

There was a final round of goodbye dinners and lunches, and then it was time to go. We had a luxurious flight in TWA’s business-first class—awfully posh for two little girls, who were served whatever food they wanted by an attentive steward. We got some sleep, then arrived at Barajas airport, where Mike got us two taxis to take all of us and all of our luggage out to Pozuelo. There was some sign language required to direct the taxistas (taxi drivers) out to the suburb, but they were friendly and helpful, and Mike got his message across.

We pulled up to our new house, tired but excited. It was early in the morning of a sunny day, and the taxistas by now understood that we were moving in. They seemed to be excited for us as they helped us in with the bags, encouraging us with smiles and nods.

The kids ran upstairs to find their rooms, which they knew well from the photos. Julie’s room was white with green trim, and it boasted a skylight as well as a window. Lisa’s was all pink, with many built-in shelves. Mike and I had a nice-sized bedroom with a balcony. There were closets along one wall and a bathroom tiled from floor to ceiling. There was a sitting area outside the bedrooms with a television and a sofa.

The main floor had a living room, a dining area, and a small TV room as well as the kitchen. Sliding doors led onto a patio by the pool. The basement had a maid’s room, laundry room and storeroom, and the attic held the office and playroom.

The house had some quirks that we had to get used to. Like most Spanish residences, it had doors to close off every room—that was how Spaniards preserved their privacy in relatively close quarters, sometimes with maids sharing the same small space. We couldn’t stand all the doors closing the TV room off from the hall, the dining room from the kitchen, or the living room from the TV room, so we took several of them off their hinges and stored them in the basement. Mike showed me that the closets in our room weren’t deep enough to hold our clothes when they were hung up—the sliding closet doors pushed every single hanger on an angle as they closed. So we took those doors off, too.

This three-bedroom house had, all told, sleeping space for fourteen people. Beds were hidden inside sofas and under other beds. I eventually learned that when Spanish relatives visit one another, they always stay at the house—never at a hotel. To stay at a hotel would insult the family one was visiting, and to ask the visitor to stay at one would insult him. Hence there had to be plenty of room for guests.

The kids loved the front gate buzzer, which included a tiny video camera that showed us who was there. They ran in and out, taking turns pushing the buzzer and looking at each other on the little screen just inside the front door, making goofy faces at the camera. There was a miserable little oven in the kitchen, which was a hybrid convection/microwave oven—too small to hold a big chicken, and not very good at either microwaving or baking.

The carport was closed off from the street by a wide metal gate that rolled sideways, pulled by a small motor when you pushed the remote control. But the gate did not retract all the way—so while there was room for two cars side by side in the carport, the last one in had to be the first one out. There just wasn’t room for the car on the left to maneuver around the one on the right. It was a permanent annoyance.

Making the Move

The actual move from Stamford to Pozuelo took some planning. Since our rental house was furnished, we didn’t have to send furniture or other large items to Spain, but we decided to put our things into storage and rent our own house unfurnished. (It rented easily to the first family that looked at it.) We figured we would load up our suitcases with everything we might need the first few weeks, and we sent just one small shipment of larger items we’d like to have—cooking equipment, winter clothes, the computer—that would come in six weeks. “I think we should ship our paintings,” Mike said. “We’ll feel more at home if we have them on our walls.” We also sent plenty of books and CDs and some of the girls’ toys.

Mike came home for a week to help with the moving. We didn’t have to do the packing ourselves, but the big job was dividing things up so they would get to the right places. There were clothes going in suitcases, kitchen items going in an air shipment to Spain, and furniture going to storage, and everything had to be marked. The dining room was the staging area for the air shipment stuff, which overflowed the table and started to pile up on the floor.

My friend Eileen Kinnaird came up from Washington to say goodbye. A great traveler herself, she was excited for me. “I have a chance to go with Mike on a business trip to Paris a few weeks after I get there if I can figure out the babysitting,” I told her.

“Okay, let’s strategize this,” she said. “You get to the school, you meet with the principal, you ask if any teachers like to do overnight sitting for extra money.”

“Sounds great,” I said sarcastically, dubious about my ability to get this done.

“You’ve got to do it,” Eileen said. “It’s Paris! You can do it!”

Before she left, Eileen took Mike aside. “Don’t run off to work the minute you get there,” she warned him. “You can’t leave her alone right away.” He nodded dutifully as he put her on the train. She had picked up on my state of terror. I was stuck on the fact that after a few days of adjustment Mike would be in his work routine, the girls would be in school all day—and I would have to invent a life for myself. An exciting prospect for many people, I’m sure—and I felt some of that—but I was full of fear.

I talked to my sister Sally. “I can’t figure out how things are going to work,” I said. “When we were there in April, it was cold, and Mike’s apartment had no clothes dryer. We didn’t have enough warm clothes, so we washed what we had and hung it out on the balcony to dry, but it was too cold and damp. It took days to dry, and we had nothing warm to wear.”

“Look,” she said, “it’s like when I lived in France. You get used to a different way of doing things. Maybe you’re going to lose your American standards about how clothes have to look. Maybe you’re going to wear something a second or third time and not worry if it’s wrinkled. You’re going to learn where to buy more warm clothes, or where to buy a dryer. The point is, you’re going to be living somewhere else, and you’re going to learn how to do things their way.” I was mystified about what she meant.