Heaven Is Paved with Oreos (10 page)

Now I am back in the hotel room and it is evening and we have eaten all the pizza, and Z has taken a long bath and she looks better. A little better. She says she had a little too much wine last night. I agree with that. She thanked me for the pizza, and I said
prego.
She is extremely proud of me for being so adventurous and independent. She said, “You remind me of me.”

There was a bit of an awkward pause while we both thought about how much I was not like her at all—not in the ways that might hurt people and hurt their lives.

That is a depressing thing to think about. I will not think about that. Instead I will think that, except for the depressing parts and the Z-is-so-sad parts, today has actually not been bad. I will never forget the first time I bought foreign pizza all by myself. No one else in Red Bend High School has ever done that, I bet. And I will never forget that store. Plus tomorrow we complete our pilgrimage! Z completes it after forty-six years, and I complete it after five days. I will be a successful pilgrim + catacomber. So what if we are not official dressed-in-brown or singing-in-St.-Paul's pilgrims—I am sure that going to all seven churches gives you a boost into heaven no matter what.

 

 

We are at breakfast. Our waiter asked Z if she was sick and needed the aspirin. We said, “No, grazie.” I am writing in my journal right now—you should see the bump on my finger! Z says I am an inspiration to her. Those were her exact words. I am writing a lot, but I am not writing everything.

 

 

We have not gone to San Sebastiano yet. Miss Hesselgrave would be deeply disappointed. So am I—but at least we are going this afternoon! Instead we did something that was a lot more fun, even if it won't get us into heaven: we went back to that Roman paper store.

Z told me to pick out a new blank journal for myself “for future adventures”—I will store it away until I'm grownup, as a promise to me—and I got gifts for everyone, and Z is also getting a journal—in Italian it's called a
giornale,
which means “journal” because Italians don't use
j
—and a fountain pen.

Here are the gifts I have bought:

1. A little blank book with graph paper instead of lines. The pages are long and skinny and it definitely ≠ a Red Bend school notebook
   
2. A pencil case
   
3. Fancy paper napkins
   
4. Colored pencils in a real tin box
   
5. Another blank notebook with an amazing cover
   
6. Pushpins that look extremely un-Wisconsin
   
7. An eraser: ditto
   

I have not figured out who's getting what—I will be honest and say that at least one of these things I want to give to Curtis. I just can't figure out which one yet, because I can't figure out which thing I like the most.

Now I am waiting for Z.

 

 

We are not going to Sebastiano after all! I will not get to be an official seven-church pilgrim! I will not get to see the catacombs!

Darn it!

This morning, as I said, we went to the paper store, and Z took forever to pick out a pen. But she did, finally, and by that point it was lunchtime, so we got some of those squishy white sandwiches again. As we ate, Z kept looking at the pages of her journal . . . 
which were blank.
That was weird. Then she said that she “wasn't up for” going to the last church! I kept asking
why,
and finally she came out and said, with a sad expression, that she wasn't going to make it to the Oreos. Those were her exact words: “I'm not going to make it to the Oreos.”

In other words, she doesn't think she's going to go to heaven, because obviously she can “make it to the Oreos” if you mean Oreos literally. I bet there are even Oreos in Rome if you know where to shop. Real Oreos, not pavement stones.

I know Z has been through an enormous amount in the last two days—which I am not writing down why because I do not want to think about it, but I know she has been suffering severely. I feel extremely bad for her because she is my grandmother and I love her and it is not a good feeling when someone has been crying and you don't know how to cheer her up.

So I did not say that I was irked that we are missing the catacombs, because Z knows already that I am irked. But I also did not say, “Oh, come, come, of course you'll make it to heaven!” because at the moment I do not 100% believe it.

 

Dear Curtis . . .

 

Never mind.

 

 

So, we did not go to Sebastiano/number seven, and we did not go to the catacombs, but at least we went to the church with that St.-Paul-falling-off-his-horse painting so I could look at it some more.

I know: why would a non–art lover (= me) want to do that? But the church was nearby for one thing (no buses! no
fuori le mura
!) and also I decided that if I'm ever going to understand Z, and a lot of things and people around Z, I need to understand that picture. So I asked if we could go back and look at it again, and Z said yes.

She didn't go into the church with me, though. We both understood she couldn't face it. She stayed outside by a fountain, watching people. I walked through the church by myself, doing my best not to step on half-rubbed-out tombstones. Then I looked at the painting for a long time—looked and not-listened to the English-speaking tour guides.

I have seen a lot of paintings in the past week. Roman churches are bursting with paintings. But this Caravaggio painting is completely different from any of them. For one thing, most of the painting is pitch-black, which is a strange thing to do in a painting. And even though it's huge, it only has two people in it—two people and a horse. No angels or puffy clouds or halos. In fact, the biggest thing in the picture is the horse's butt (!). And the people in the painting look the way that two people and a horse would actually look in real life. St. Paul is lying on the ground, and the other man is looking extremely concerned, and the horse is looking just as confused but doing its best (good horse!) not to step on anyone.

What's most amazing to me, though—and to the tour guides who I was not-listening to who I learned a lot from, especially the British tour guide, who would sound smart no matter what he said—is what's not in the picture. The reason St. Paul is lying there is that he's having a vision of Jesus—a vision so huge that it knocked him right off his horse. The other man can't see the vision, though. Neither can we. Neither can the horse. We can't even see St. Paul's face! Maybe he isn't actually seeing anything. Maybe he is simply hallucinating. But he believes he is seeing Jesus Christ. And the real-life St. Paul believed it so much that he wrote all those books of the Bible that changed millions of people's lives.

I even like how the painting is hard to see because it's in a corner. You have to work to understand it, but then when you finally see it you appreciate it more. It's kind of like Miss Hesselgrave's sentences.

I can understand now how someone looking at this painting could fall in love.

 

 

We are on the plane. We got up extremely early and walked our last walk to the train station, and now we're flying to Chicago. Then we have to go through customs and get on another plane to Minneapolis, where Mom will pick us up, and then we have to drive to Prophetstown to drop off Z, and then all the way to Red Bend! All in one day!

I used to complain about how far it is from Red Bend to Prophetstown—ha.

Z has her new journal out and her special expensive Roman fountain pen. She's staring at the first page like she doesn't know where to start. She looks at me:

“I'm going to write down what happened.”

“Okay,” I say. I don't need her to explain what she's talking about. We both know.

 

 

Everything in America looks different—the people and the signs and even the trash cans. Isn't that odd? My seven (There's that number again! Pilgrimage churches  . . . hills of Rome . . . days of the week . . . deadly sins—what is it with the number seven?) days in Rome have turned me upside down! Perhaps I was expecting things to be different in Rome so I was prepared for it, but back in the United States I thought that everything would be the same. And that, Miss Sarah Elizabeth Zorn, clearly isn't going to happen.

Mom and Paul picked us up—Paul came all the way from Planet Paul to be there. Mom said I must be coming down with a cold because everyone gets sick on airplanes. Normally I mind her feeling my forehead, but this time I was too tired to care.

The drive back to Red Bend took forever. Mom and Paul kept asking questions, and Z was telling them funny stories and describing the pizza and our breakfasts and the bossy tour guides, but I didn't say much. I mentioned the poached egg on my pizza, and the stationery store that I fell in love with. I said I found the store all by myself.

Mom sat up: “You walked around alone?” She asked me, but she was looking at Z.

“It was fine—” I began.

“You don't speak Italian! What would have happened if you got in trouble?” (
“In trouble?”
I thought.
Oh, I know all about that.
) “How would you explain yourself to the police? What if you got robbed?”

“Wendy darling, she wasn't going to get robbed—”

“How would you know? Where were you when this transpired? Was she carrying her passport? Was she carrying cash? How could you let this happen?” Mom frowned at me: “How could you be so irresponsible?”

Well, that was awkward. Then Mom asked what we did for Z's birthday, and Z said we'd had a nice quiet dinner together. Obviously she wasn't going to mention what really happened, which is fine with me.

After a while we talked about something else. I told Paul about the pilgrims singing in the St. Paul church and how much he would have liked it. I didn't say that it was the saddest song in the world. Paul said he was glad to have me back, and I don't think he meant just for the rides with D.J. I didn't ask, though.

We dropped off Z. Just before we got to her apartment, Z handed me her expensive journal-notebook from the stationery store. Every page was covered with her expensive-fountain-pen writing. She put it in my hands and gave me a kiss. “Keep this.”

I took it because Mom was watching and I didn't have any choice, and I thanked Z for the amazing adventure and I waved goodbye.

Once we were back on the road, Mom asked, “How was the trip really?”

“I grew up a lot,” I said. I didn't say anything more. I mean, I can say St. Peter's is huge and I liked Maria Maggiore and it's freaky how Romans put poached eggs on their pizzas, but that's not
what happened.

At one point Mom asked, “Did Z have any wine?” Hmm, Mom, what are you really saying?

“Sometimes. Everyone did. People drank wine with lunch.”

“Did you?” As if a fourteen-year-old drinking wine with lunch could be the worst thing ever to happen. I had to laugh.

“I tasted it once. It was fizzy, but it wasn't champagne—it's a European thing.”

“Oh, a European thing.” Mom raised her eyebrows.

“Yes. It is. But I only drank pop. Which is a European thing too. I had pop with lunch and supper.”

Mom didn't even really hear me because she was so busy with her next question. “Was it fun?”

“Parts of it were.”

“Was it safe?” she asked. Again.

“Yes! Mom, I'm really tired . . .”

Then we were home and I sleepwalked into the house and fell into bed and slept for hours and hours and hours. Today I woke up extremely late. I had some breakfast—a boring American breakfast of Cheerios from a box; no more tables of scrambled-egg pie—and I washed my clothes. They needed it.

I am thinking about calling Curtis, but I won't. I want to ask about Boris, but I won't do that either. Boris is fine or he isn't; that is the way it is sometimes with science.

I am going to put this journal away and I don't think I'm going to look at it for a long, long time.

I have put Z's notebook under my bed, under my box of American Girl clothes. No one will ever look for it there. I won't look there. I will definitely not read it.

But maybe I should read it. Right? I mean, I know what happened—that's what Z talked to me about on the Spanish Steps on the night of her birthday—talked about and cried. But I have a huge feeling that there's more to the story than what she told me. The
giornale
will have lots more of the story, probably . . . But maybe I don't want to know. I am conflicted.

 

 

Z's journal is still there.