Heaven Is Paved with Oreos (11 page)

 

 

 

Dear Paul and Sarah:

 

I am writing this because you need to understand where you came from. Sarah, you deserve it especially because of our trip to Rome, and Paul . . . you will see why you do. I hope I can be honest. I have never been honest about this—not to your father or his father and certainly not to myself. I am terrible at explaining and terrible at apologizing—but I am very good at making mistakes! I hope that by writing this down, honestly, I will begin to make up for some of my mistakes.

Goodness, isn't that a depressing way to begin!

As you know, I was born in Two Geese, Wisconsin. Two Geese is a small town now, but it was even smaller in 1949. Smaller in a lot of ways. Good girls ironed their skirts and crossed their legs and did what their parents and teachers told them. Bad girls—well, no one talked about bad girls. Everyone warned us about bad girls, but no one talked about them. I didn't know what bad girls did, but I knew I never wanted to be a bad girl. Terrible things happened to them!

Grandma Ann had me and Johnny and Janie and Ruthie and then eight years later—oops!—little Tommy. (That's what “oops!” meant back then: pregnant.) As the oldest girl, I spent the first seventeen years of my life as a maid. A second mother. I washed and I changed (this was before disposable diapers!) and I cleaned and I minded . 
.
 . I ironed enough clothes to cover Wisconsin. Who cared if a toddler's shirt was ironed? Grandma Ann, that's who. Grandma Ann and every other woman in Two Geese. Every woman and every good girl. (Possibly every bad girl too, but I did not know any bad girls then. I befriended many “bad girls” later in life, and some of them were remarkably conscientious about ironing. The world is full of surprises.)

Every girl I knew married a boy I knew. They stayed in Two Geese or close by, and they popped out babies like gumballs. I wanted to get married like everyone else, but I didn't want babies to pop out of me. Not immediately. I wanted to know what I wanted first.

And then I saw the Beatles. They first appeared on American television when I was your age, Sarah, and my life changed forever. This was music I had to have; this was an experience I had to be part of! I had three girlfriends in Two Geese who loved the Beatles as much as I did, and we would plot how to meet them and buy their records and marry them. Not necessarily in that order.

From the Beatles, I discovered folk music, and rock and roll, and Motown. (Did you know you couldn't buy Motown in Two Geese? I'm sure I've told you this before, but to this day I am appalled. The record store would not sell certain records because of the color of the performers' skin!)

I cannot say if it was the music or the era or me, but even before I fell in love with the Beatles, I knew that I could not remain in Two Geese. I could not live in my parents' home working as an unpaid slave (I did not phrase it like this back then, but I felt it) until I became the slave of the man I married. I had to get out. And the only way a girl—a good girl—could get out of rural Wisconsin was with beauty or with brains. Well, I didn't have much beauty, but I certainly had the will to study. I won a scholarship—beating a number of boys who had never once paused to think that a girl could actually best them in calculus and biology. (Sarah, you're my granddaughter!) All while also serving as president and corresponding secretary of the Two Geese, Wisconsin, Beatles Fan Club.

I left Two Geese for a fancy East Coast women's college. I spent my freshman year going to classes and attending student teas and ironing my skirts, all while listening to folk music and doing what I could for civil rights (which was very little, but at the time I thought I was making a tremendous difference—I couldn't wait for Martin Luther King, Jr., to thank Alice Zorn!)
.
Oh, there was a lot of gum flapping back home about how the Zorn girl would get herself in trouble and how she was aiming above herself—but I didn't care. I was going to prove them wrong. I listened to so much Bob Dylan that I practically wore out the album. We all did. We were all of us rolling stones.

The summer after my freshman year, a professor offered a tour of Italy for art history majors. I wanted that tour so badly I could taste it. I wanted it almost as much as I wanted Paul McCartney, the very cutest and most talented Beatle. When I was in Italy, I might even meet Paul McCartney! Italy was on the same continent as England, after all. We could meet in a Tuscan church while discussing the early Renaissance . 
.
 . perhaps he would even kiss me. In fact, I was almost sure I'd meet him somewhere in Europe. It was fate.

Every weekend night I spent baby-sitting to earn money for the trip. Perhaps that's why I had so little energy for the civil-rights movement; I was too busy teaching professors' children the words to “The Times They Are A-Changing.” I talked my way onto that tour. Ten of us girls plus one fusty male professor who was probably very relieved to see us go to bed each night. I don't think he could have been older than thirty, but he certainly seemed old to us. Old and out of touch—he listened to jazz! He didn't even smoke. If he even realized the times were a-changing, he kept that realization to himself.

We visited Florence and Venice and Siena—the Italian cities of history and art. Our first day in Rome, we went to the Trevi Fountain and Piazza Navona and the Forum—all the classic sights. We visited St. Peter's Square, where that old man really did dance with me. I discovered a couple of other girls had also read Lillian Hesselgrave, and they adored her as much as I did. Grouchy Miss Hesselgrave—she was the crazy lady who said things no one else dared to say. She would have been appalled by my impromptu St. Peter's dance. And yet in touring Rome “unescorted,” Miss Hesselgrave did things that were equally radical and appalling. We needed to follow in her footsteps!

We begged our professor to let us take the next day off—who wanted to spend a glorious sunny day stuck in the Vatican Museums? Not us! He agreed, finally—frankly, I think he was glad to see our backs—and so three of us spent the day marching through Rome, either ignoring the oogling men or oblivious to them, taking turns reading Miss Hesselgrave aloud at frequent café breaks. That's why I can't remember the churches—when we weren't drinking coffee, we were drinking wine! Three giddy college girls, mad with freedom and amused to no end by this bossy Victorian pilgrim. We saw St. Paul's (here's to you, Paul!)
,
St. John's, Santa Croce, Maria Maggiore, San Lorenzo . . . but we simply hadn't daylight and energy enough to make it to San Sebastiano. Also, by that time I believe we'd lost our map. We vowed to finish the next day.

The next day, however, we couldn't. We were supposed to have a special guest lecture from a famous professor, an expert on the great Italian painter Caravaggio. But the professor canceled—I believe his wife was sick, or he had better things to do in July than speak to a bunch of giggling American girls. So he sent one of his students, a thin young man with light brown hair and blue eyes and the softest smile. He spoke softly, too, in wonderful English. I do not remember a word he said about Caravaggio that morning, but I will never forget his face as he talked. I was mesmerized. We all were.

You can be sure there was a fair amount of jostling as to who would get to stand next to him and who would get to walk next to him as we went from church to church to see the paintings. I remember a girl from Virginia with false eyelashes and a dangerous smile who had the honor of sitting next to him at lunch. It was July 14, Bastille Day, my birthday—I was eighteen years old—and several of the girls wanted to buy me a birthday cake. They couldn't find one, however, so they presented me with a cream puff with a ridiculously large candle stuck in it—they may have pinched the candle from a church. There was a fair bit of laughter about that. The Italian student was delighted by this ritual, and by the song “Happy Birthday.”

Then we went to Santa Maria del Popolo—the very same church that Sarah and I visited. I don't know if it was the painting or the cigarettes or my birthday, but there was most definitely an atmosphere! All of us silly American girls lined in front of
The Conversion of St. Paul,
and no sooner did this young man start talking than I began to cry. I tried not to show it, but I was truly moved. He noticed.

After he finished lecturing, he took me aside to ask how I was—he was deeply impressed by how the painting had affected me—and we began to chat about my birthday and other things, and somehow it emerged that he was also a Beatles fan.

You must understand that
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
had come out the month before. It was the Beatles' new album, and it was . 
.
 . it was an earthquake. Nothing like
Sgt. Pepper
had ever happened in the history of music. It was crazy. I even took the album with me to Italy in the bottom of my luggage. Mind you, this was a huge vinyl LP, and we didn't have a record player—I had no way to play it! But when we were in hotel rooms, four to a room, I would take the album out, and we would gather around and study the cover. We would sing it. We all had it memorized. We weren't that bad, either.

On an impulse I decided to confide in this young man. I explained my predicament: after two weeks in hotel rooms, I needed to hear
Sgt. Pepper
sung by real Beatles. Did he have a record player? He didn't; he was only a poor student—but he could sing the songs to me.

“But you're not Paul McCartney,” I said—quite the flirt!

“No,” he said softly. “But my name is Paolo. I am the Paul McCartney of Rome.”

Well! From that moment, I was his. I was utterly, completely, engulfingly mad for Paolo Sanpietro, the Paul McCartney of Rome.

We were under the strictest of curfews—we had to eat dinner in the hotel, just to be safe!—but that night several of the girls honored love over virtue and helped me sneak out. Paolo said he would meet me on the Spanish Steps, and he did. He had a guitar and the loveliest singing voice, and we sat for hours discussing art and life and religion (we were both quite against religion's constraints) and singing our way through
Pepper.
He wanted me to explain the more obscure lyrics. I'm not sure how good a job I did—there are parts of that album that I'm not sure even the Beatles could explain—but I did my best. He hung on my every word, and I on his.

It was the kind of night you read about in fairy tales, when the fairy godmother grants the cinder girl one evening of happiness. Of course, fairy tales don't mention what happens later . 
.
 . but at that moment I didn't care. I was in the most romantic spot in the world, with the tenderest, smartest, most interesting man I had ever met. Granted, at that point in my life I'd met depressingly few men—Paolo would have cut a wide swath through Two Geese—but even with hindsight, I can say he was special.

We were convinced we were in love. That we, after only a few hours, were already in love. Perhaps we were—who can say what love is? We must have sung “When I'm Sixty-Four” twelve times! And each time we sang it, it felt more like a love song. We made a pact that night that we, too, would be together when we were sixty-four. That we would be together when I turned sixty-four. Oh, it was so romantic. We promised each other that no matter what else happened (and what could possibly happen that would interfere with love?)
,
we would meet on the Spanish Steps on the evening of my sixty-fourth birthday. “And I will kiss you and tell you you are beautiful,” he said, as only an Italian can.

I truly didn't think I could get pregnant. Can you imagine someone so dim? A college student with glaring examples all around me—my own mother!—and yet if I thought about it at all (which I barely did), I thought,
But this is Rome . . . He's so nice . . . I'm in college.
But I never thought to think,
Watch out for oops!

Grandchildren, I am warning you: love will make you shockingly stupid.

Well, I snuck back to my hotel at 5:00 a.m. to find six American girls waiting for me, desperate to Hear All. I hope I satisfied them. To their credit, not one of them later said I told you so. One girl wrote me to say I'd introduced her to true love. She was terribly sweet about it, all things considered. That letter I kept for a long time.

I didn't see Paolo again. The next day was more museums . 
.
 . endless paintings of fat ladies . 
.
 . and an afternoon in the Villa Borghese gardens. The professor must have suspected something, for he and the hotel staff kept an eagle eye on me. No more sneaking out for this love-struck Wisconsin schoolgirl, no matter how deviously I plotted. And then we left. Flew back to New York—far, far from my Paul McCartney of Rome.

I spent the rest of the summer waitressing, baby-sitting, taking odd jobs—I tried to make it as a typist, but no one ever asked me back. Whenever I could, I'd go to the clubs. The folk singers, the rock singers. I never met Bob Dylan (much as I dreamt of it!) but I saw so many other brilliant stars—too many to list. It was a wild time. I'd thought I could present myself as a hip girl intellectual, but New York was teeming with those. The one thing the city didn't have, though, was a girl from Two Geese! If people knew me for anything, it was that. Isn't that funny? I couldn't wait to get away . 
.
 . and then I couldn't get away!

That fall I returned to college, but the classes didn't grip. Who cared about Greek archeology when soldiers were dying in Vietnam? My own brother was going to Vietnam! Your great-uncle Johnny was drafted into the U.S
.
Army. He didn't even attempt to avoid it. I tried to get him to flee to Canada—to become a conscientious objector—to go to prison—but to no avail. He was determined to be a patriotic American. Besides, I had my own problems. I denied it for months—months!—but by the end of that semester there was no hiding it: I was definitely oops.