At the end of the class, I told Marina that I had made up my mind—I would go to Madrid. “Good girl!” she said. We got takeaway coffees from the café and sat on a bench overlooking the beach to talk through the plan for my new life.
“A lot of the girls getting into the companies these days are foreigners,” she said. But to get a job in a company, it wasn’t enough just to be able to dance flamenco. Company dancers need classical Spanish, which is like ballet combined with traditional Spanish folk dancing. And I was all for folk dancing, but not in pointe shoes.
I didn’t want to have to learn ballet. Much as I would have loved to be able to move with the perfect control of a classically trained dancer, the idea of going into an adult ballet class terrified me. Though I could fudge my way through a flamenco turn—sometimes I’d even fluke a double or triple turn—there was no way I could pirouette in ballet slippers like a doll out of a music box. But Marina told me that if I wanted to take my dancing to the next level, there was nothing for it.
To survive over there, Marina told me, I could teach English. Madrid, she said, was full of academies that organized teachers for in-office classes in big companies; the work would give me enough to live on if I was prepared to live simply. I was lucky because I had dual nationality—a British passport as well as my Australian one—that allowed me to work legally in Spain.
I wanted to leave straightaway. But of course that wasn’t possible. Marina pulled a pen and a little notepad out of her dance bag and calculated a budget for me.
“Okay, so to survive and dance for three months, you’re going to need three thousand euro, which is about five thousand dollars, plus your flight. So let’s say seven thousand dollars.”
Seven thousand dollars? There was no way I could get seven thousand dollars. It would take me a year to save up that money. “What if I get a job in my first month?” I asked.
Marina redid her calculations and came up with the slightly more attainable amount of five thousand dollars.
Okay, I said to myself. It’s May now, and if I do nothing but work until Christmas, I should be able to make it. And if not, I’ll just go with what I have. I’d make it happen, because I was sure about one thing—on December 31, I would be in Madrid ready to start my new year Spanish.
THE DAYS OF CHRISTMAS
Or
Four fetching sweaters, three stone slacks, two trench coats, and a pinstriped Max Mara suit…
Mi tía tiene un gato negro. My aunt has a black cat. Mi tía tiene un gato negro,” I repeated as I stepped off the bus onto the busy city street. “Mi hermana tiene una camisa blanca. My sister has a white shirt.” The serious man’s voice came to me through my iPod earphones. “Mi hermana tiene una camisa blanca,” I repeated, just as seriously, as I walked to work.
I had promised myself that I would learn as much Spanish as I could before moving to Madrid, and Learn Spanish in Your Car was part of that promise. Of course I didn’t have a car, so I renamed the program “Learn Spanish on the Bus.”
But time was going by so fast, and my vocabulary was still limited to family members, animals, numbers, colors, and days of the week. I was still having trouble with sentence structure and verb conjugation, and tenses just did my head in.
I walked up the street toward the department store, then stopped and stared. It couldn’t be. Not yet. The new season spring fashion in the window had been replaced by…gingerbread houses. A line of wooden toy soldiers stared out through the glass, and around them a model train set ran through an inch of fake snow.
Surely it wasn’t Christmas already? How was that possible? It seemed only weeks ago that I’d made the decision to move to Madrid on New Year’s Eve.
At the bag check counter, I saw a sign pinned to the wall announcing that auditions for Santa’s Cave would be taking place in the lunchroom at noon. This can’t be happening, I thought. I’m not ready for this. It’s too soon. And I haven’t even learned any Spanish yet! “My sister has a white shirt” and “my aunt has a black cat” weren’t going to help me get an apartment and open a bank account in Madrid.
When I stepped out onto Level Two, there were men in overalls on top of ladders fixing garlands of tinsel to the roof. Stop it! I wanted to yell at them. It’s not Christmas yet. It’s too early!
Not that I could talk. I was notorious for getting Christmas fever in November. I just always loved Christmas, so I’d plan a decoration concept for the house, choosing the color palette, writing shopping lists, looking at MarthaStewart.com for cute gift ideas. I’d plan my Christmas baking, and on December 1, I’d already be rolling out gingerbread to Bing Crosby Christmas albums.
But this year was different. This year Christmas meant packing up and going off to face an uncertain future on the other side of the world. And though I wanted that more than anything, I still had the panicky feeling that the clocks were being wound forward on me.
“I suppose I should say Merry Christmas,” I said to Sascha as I went into the stockroom to clip on my name tag.
“I hate Christmas,” Sascha said.
“You can’t hate Christmas,” I said. “Christmas is reindeers and pudding and baby Jesus, and it’s the only time of year you get to hear Dean Martin on commercial radio.”
Sascha raised one eyebrow. “Maybe you should audition for Santa’s Cave. You’d make a good elf.”
A new roster was pinned up on the wall with our hours up until Christmas. I ran my eyes over it: I was going to be working six-day weeks for the next month. “We’re on Christmas hours already? You’ve got to be kidding me.” While I was happy for the extra money, I was going to have to negotiate to get Saturdays off so I could have some classes with Marina before leaving.
I’d been taking private classes with her in the Scouts hall opposite the beach, trying to get up to speed with what I’d need to know for the Amor de Dios. She’d taught me to dance sevillanas like they do in the theaters, not in the bars. How to dance with a fan, opening and closing it with a flick of the wrist, and of course the most important thing: castanets. She’d ordered a set for me from Spain, and I still remember my excitement the day they arrived.
She presented them to me in a box wrapped in maroon paper with thin gold stripes. I carefully lifted the sticky tape, like I was unwrapping a Christmas present, and opened the box. Inside was a little pouch that held my castanets. They were made of dark polished wood, and as I slipped them out of the pouch, they clattered together, making the most wonderful sound.
Marina showed me how to put my fingers into the woven cotton loops and then pull them tight so they fitted perfectly in the palms of my hands. She put hers on and demonstrated tapping her fingers so that they clicked together. Tac-a-tac-tac, tac-a-tac-tac.
“Come on, let’s give ’em a go,” she said. I got up off the bench, and Marina and I stood facing each other, our arms held out in front of us. She drummed her fingers on her castanets, and I tried to copy the rhythm. It was much harder than it looked, especially getting a sound with my little finger. Then we opened our arms wide and I tried again: tac-a-tac-tac.
Marina lifted her arms above her head and I did the same, trying to use the castanets at the same time. It was impossible. I could barely make a sound at all. Marina started circling her arms, clicking her castanets together. I tried to follow, but after a couple of minutes my arms were aching so much that I had to drop them.
In the three months since, I’d improved a lot, but dancing with castanets was still a challenge, and with Christmas approaching, there wasn’t going to be enough time for me to practice.
• • •
In retail, no one gets Christmas Eve off. In the department store, every section had all their staff out in force. The managers became like generals, assigning everyone specific tasks they were not allowed to deviate from, unless it was to bust a shoplifter.
Of all the jobs, mine was the worst, no question
about it. I’d have much preferred to be on the fitting rooms, hanger detail, or gift wrap, which was reserved for our Christmas temp, Victoria, who had a flair for neatly pleating tissue paper. Instead, I got the job of repricing all the stock in the three hours left before midnight, writing the reduced prices for each individual garment on little red stickers.
“Aren’t there machines to do this?” I asked as I went through the seven-page list. But I was talking to myself. Sascha was on the register, ringing up last-minute sales to stressed-out Christmas shoppers laden down with bags of pudding and chocolates, tinsel and lights.
I started out with suits, which were going down by thirty percent. I wrote $1,350 on twenty-two stickers. The red dots were swimming in front of my eyes. I’d been working since eight o’clock that morning and I was almost delirious. Around the floor I could see other girls doing the same task. Some sections had proper printed stickers that had been sent out from their head offices, while others even had fancy pricing guns. I was leaning on the glass display cabinet, squinting over the price list and writing up every sticker, my writing becoming increasingly illegible. But it was all going to be so worth it, I reminded myself. When I walked the corridors of the Amor de Dios, I’d be glad I suffered through one final Boxing Day sale.
The same Christmas mix had been playing over the speakers on a continual loop, and it was driving me crazy. I knew the playlist by heart: “Jingle Bell Rock” merged seamlessly into John Lennon’s “Happy Xmas,” adapted for synthesized panpipes. I could almost hear poor John rolling over in his grave. That then segued into “The Twelve Days of Christmas.”
“On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me,” I sang to myself, “a pinstriped Max Mara suit.”
This is insane, I thought again, looking around the floor. The same two-thousand-dollar beaded Dinnigan dress that would be unwrapped on Christmas morning was already hanging on the sales rack at fifty percent off. The Trent Nathan trench coat you bought for your mother was now forty percent off. And that red-and-green Moschino twinset that you just had to have for Christmas Day was already two hundred dollars cheaper.
I knew that those same pieces would be returned on Boxing Day. “They just didn’t fit right,” the regretful customers would say. And they would linger and wait until we went on our much-needed coffee breaks, then pick up the same items from the sales racks and buy them again at the reduced price.
“Can you blame them?” I asked no one in particular as I peeled the red stickers off the roll and tagged every T-shirt in the pile at thirty percent off. “On the fifth day of Christmas my true love gave to me, five white tees, four fetching sweaters, three stone slacks, two trench coats, and a pinstriped Max Mara suit.”
At the bottom of a pile of sweaters, I found a wad of scrunched-up green silk. I pulled it out; it was a floor-length Akira dress from the Australian Designers department. Come on, now. Is that the spirit of Christmas? What kind of person would come into a department store on Christmas Eve just to try to hide the last size eight Akira dress so that no one else could get it before the Boxing Day sales? They should be at home with their families or helping out at a soup kitchen or something, not trying to stash designer dresses under piles of knits.
The beautiful dress was crushed almost beyond recognition. I slipped it onto a hanger and carried it over to Liz, who I knew would be frantically combing the racks looking for it, dreading the thought of having to fill in a lost merchandise report.
“On the sixth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me, a bias-cut silk Akira dress, five white tees…” I sang as I skipped across the floor. Everywhere I looked the sales girls were trying to simultaneously swipe credit cards, reticket garments, and answer the persistently ringing phones without losing their cool. “Four fetching sweaters, three stone slacks, two trench coats, and a pinstriped Max Mara suit.”
I was right: Liz was pulling her hair out trying to find the eighteen-hundred-dollar dress. And though she was relieved to have it back, the wrinkled silk would need an hour under a cool iron before it was fit to go back on the display rack, and on a night like Christmas Eve that was not an option.
“Darling…” I turned and saw Deborah standing coolly behind me in her impeccable gray suit. “I need someone to mind my section for an hour while I do my shopping. Sascha said she can spare you.” Thank God. Christmas had come early for me. I stuffed the roll of red stickers in my pocket and followed Deborah back to the Armani concession, a white marble oasis in the midst of the surrounding chaos.
“We haven’t been that busy this evening, so you shouldn’t have any trouble,” she said and dropped the stockroom keys into my hand. “Ciao, ciao.” She slung her Ferragamo bag over one shoulder and sauntered off into the madness.
I watched as customers darted past with their heavy shopping bags. Deborah was right: it was quiet in her corner. The night ticked slowly by, and I entertained myself by running my hands over the beautiful clothes.
One jacket in particular caught my attention. It was a warm cream-colored creation with mother-of-pearl buttons in a two, just my size. I took it off the rack and held it up to myself in the mirror. It was pure perfection. I wondered what it would look like on. Maybe I should try it. Why not? It was Christmas, after all, and everyone on the floor was too busy to pay any attention to what I was doing. So I unbuttoned my black blazer and slipped on the cream jacket. Wow. So this was what it felt like to wear beautiful clothes.
“Look at you!” It was Nathan from Moschino. He was wearing his green and red Christmas cravat with a sparkling red tiepin and carrying glasses and an open bottle of champagne. “Just thought I’d bring you a little Christmas cheer!” He set the glasses down on the register. “One of my good customers left it for us. Don’t let anybody see!” He stood with his back to the selling floor and poured out two glasses of bubbly. “Chin chin!” he said, as we clinked glasses. “I love the jacket! You should tell Deborah to put it away for you.”
Yeah, right. Even at half price it was still enough money for me to live and dance for a month in Madrid. “Bottoms up!” he said, downing the rest of his champers before scurrying off to spread more cheer.
My next visitor was Amanda from Escada. She was carrying a gold box full of chocolate truffles. “It’s quiet in here. Take one, quick!” she said, handing me the box.
“How’s it on your end?”
“It’s a madhouse!” She shook her head. “That jacket is divine. Don’t let Deborah catch you in it!” she warned as she crossed over to offer truffles to the girls at Collette.
This is more like it, I thought as I bit into the chocolate and took a sip of champagne. Merry Christmas. Then I looked up and saw Deborah walking across the floor toward me. I froze. She had asked me to watch her concession, and I was wearing a two-thousand-dollar jacket, drinking champagne, and eating chocolate.
Deborah saw me and stopped dead in her tracks. Her eyes blazed. It was too late for me to suck the melted chocolate off my fingers. She took two steps toward me, her red lips pressed together.
“It’s so you!”
It took me a moment to realize I wasn’t in trouble. Deborah hadn’t even noticed the chocolate or the bubbly. She was looking at the cut of the jacket. “You have to try it with the skirt,” she said, taking the cream skirt off its wooden hanger and shooing me into the fitting room. “Didn’t Nathan leave a glass of champagne for me?”
As I tried on the gorgeous cream skirt, I sang to myself, “On the seventh day of Christmas, my true love gave to me…a cream Armani jacket, a silk Akira dress, five white tees, four fetching sweaters, three stone slacks, two trench coats, and a pinstriped Max Mara suit.”
Definitely the worst thing about trying on clothes in Armani is having to take them off again. I sighed as I clipped the skirt back on its hanger, and reminded myself that I’d have no use for a cream suit in the Amor de Dios.
The doors of the departmen
t store closed at midnight, but we didn’t make it out of there until twelve thirty. The place was a mess. Frantic, near-hysterical customers had tossed merchandise off shelves and onto the floor, and every single item had to be returned neatly to its place before we were allowed to go home. Bright red sale signs had to be attached to mannequins and the glamorously named “dump bins.” When we finally dragged ourselves to the elevators, we were exhausted. It was officially Christmas Day.
“Merry Christmas,” I said to Sascha as we waited for the lift. Sascha gave me a look that told me exactly where I could put my “Merry Christmas,” and we boarded the elevator with a group of tired shopgirls and rode down to the ground floor.
I’d started work at eight, and I’d be getting home at one thirty on Christmas morning. But it’s all worth it, I said to myself as I walked down the dark street to the bus stop and waited for the twelve forty-five bus to arrive.
“On the twelfth day of Christmas,” I sang quietly, standing alone at the bus stop, “my true love gave to me, a brand-new life in Spain.”
THE AMOR DE DIOS
Or
I’m in Madrid; how cool is that?
The dancers lifted up onto their toes and spun around, clicking their heels one, two, three times and landing lightly. Then, lifting their arms like birds about to take flight, they twirled their wrists and stamped their feet into the floor.
Only in Spain Page 11