Heaven Is Paved with Oreos (15 page)

“Why not?” Amber asked, looking at me suspiciously.

“Because she was bossy and mean!”

The three of them started laughing. Dale laughed so hard that she stuck herself in the forehead with her ice cream. That made them laugh even harder.

D.J. leaned toward me. “Lesbians are always mean,” she whispered loudly.

“Hey!” Amber said, punching D.J. in the arm.

“See?” D.J. looked at me knowingly.

My face by now was as red as Christmas wrapping paper. “It's just that Miss Hesselgrave is always so critical of other people and she's always listing how they're being improper, and someone, you know, that way is—was—would have been improper . . .”

Dale smiled. “Lillian never got the ‘Judge not lest you be judged' thing.”

“I think I really need to read this book,” D.J. said. “I didn't even know there were gay people back then. I always thought they were like TV.”

“What?” Dale stared at her, laughing.

“You know: modern.” D.J. grinned at me. I guess she could tell that I had been sort of thinking that too—not the television part, but definitely the not-in-the-olden-days part. Miss Hesselgrave! Now I was going to have to think about everything she said in a whole new light.

Amber studied the cover, then studied me. “Was Rome like she described?”

“No . . . There's a lot more going on in Rome than she ever talked about.”

“You can say that again,” Dale said with a look that made the three of them laugh more.

I did not laugh. I had too much on my mind to laugh, even if I knew what they were laughing about. (Okay, I have a suspicion what they were laughing about.) They chatted a few more minutes and then said they had to go and offered to buy me ice cream but I said no thank you, because my cranium was now so full that I could not on top of everything else pick out a flavor.

As they left, D.J. told me that Curtis is coming home Sunday, and she gave me a significant stare. I said I knew and that I would see her tomorrow on the ride to Prophetstown, and now I am sitting here alone once again trying to figure out Curtis but I can't because I am too busy thinking about Miss Lillian Hesselgrave.

Why didn't Miss Hesselgrave ever mention that instead of being a girl + boy kind of person, she was a girl + girl? Or in her case lady + lady. Which as a math problem could also be written as lady x 2 or simply lady(2). Miss Hesselgrave spent all those pages explaining how Italians can't make tea and how Roman drivers always cheat you and how Bernini makes a good elephant but a bad church, yet she never mentioned an important part of her trip and her personality and her life.

Why didn't Z ever tell me either?

I need to think about this a lot more.

 

 

I gave up. I got a cone. Rocky Road. I figured it couldn't be any weirder than anything else that's happened today.

But it turns out I was wrong—again. Rocky Road is disgusting. Whoever invented Rocky Road should see a psychological counselor.

I have been pondering Miss Lillian Hesselgrave a great deal—at the picnic table and all through dinner, and now I am in my room.

For the first couple of hours I was irked with her because she is such a liar. Never once in her book does she mention that she is a lady(2), and that is an extremely important thing to know about someone, especially someone who spends so much time criticizing other people's behavior and being so intolerant of them. (As Dad would say, don't throw cans when you live in a glass house.)

But the more that I've thought about it, the more I think that Miss Hesselgrave—even though she is judgmental and intolerant and a Bernini-disliker—is not a liar. She admits all the time that she has a lady companion who she travels everywhere with. She even calls her book
Two Lady Pilgrims in Rome,
which is an enormous clue. She is just not as blunt about lady(2)ness as she is about bad-tasting tea.

I have also been pondering why Z didn't tell me about Miss Hesselgrave's lady(2)ness. Maybe Z thought I knew (clearly I did not), or she didn't know herself (impossible; now that I know, it is
so obvious
), or she wanted to protect me from inappropriate adult behavior (ha). But I don't think it's any of those explanations. I think the real reason is that to Z, the lady(2)ness didn't matter. It's not the part of Miss Hesselgrave that she wanted to focus on. She only wanted to remember the bossy pilgrim part.

It's funny, but figuring this out about Z and Miss Hesselgrave has made me feel like I understand Z in a bunch of other ways too. If Z was a bacterium and I was a scientist looking at her on a slide, I would say that I now can see her at 50x rather than 10x. That is how much clearer she is to me. Like Dad said, Z has a way of forgetting stuff she doesn't want to remember. Or, as in Miss Hesselgrave's case, ignoring stuff that doesn't matter to her. But she also has a way of focusing on stuff she doesn't want to forget. She's never forgotten walking around Rome in 1967 with her college friends, visiting Miss Hesselgrave's pilgrim churches. She's never forgotten dancing in St. Peter's Square. She sure hasn't forgotten her night with Paolo. She remembers every single detail.

Maybe Z never told anyone about Paolo because she wanted to keep that night in her mind. She didn't want to risk having that beautiful memory attached to other memories that were worse. She wanted that one perfect moment . . . the tingly moment, just like the tingly moment that Caravaggio paints.

Wow, Sarah, that is actually an extremely beautiful thought.

 

 

Tonight Mom and Dad and Paul and I had a big talk. Mom and Dad wanted to know what happened in Rome. What really happened. Not the egg on the pizza and Bernini's elephant. They wanted Paul to hear it too, because it's his grandmother and grandfather and family.

So I told them. Mom did really well—she was working hard, you could tell. Even though she got that face a couple of times, she never said anything. Even when I told about Z spending the day in bed while I went out and bought us food.

Dad didn't say much. But he did a better job of listening without twitching. I showed him the journal that Z wrote to Paul and me. Dad flipped through the pages and set it down.

“Don't you want to read it?” I mean, I hadn't wanted to read it, but that was different, I think. This is Dad's father. I'd want to know about my father.

“It's not mine to read,” he said. “Besides, I've got all the family I need. Too much, sometimes.”

“Hey!” Mom said. But it was a nice hey.

Paul didn't even pick Z's journal up; he just listened to us all talking. “Is that it?” he asked finally—after hearing for the first time about his grandfather—his crazy-universe Paolo-Paul name! “Because I've got to go practice now . . .” And he left.

I stared after him with my mouth hanging open (my mouth has been hanging open a lot recently).

Dad patted my leg. “Give it time, sprout. Give it time . . . You know, you handled yourself really well over there. Really well.”

“You were very mature,” Mom added.

Now I felt awkward. They were making it sound like the trip had been terrible—but it hadn't. It had been hard and it had been sad, but that's not bad. Right? If everything in life was easy and happy, how would you grow up?

Then Dad had to call work about a replacement part, and Mom and I were alone.

“Mom?” I asked. This was something I've been thinking about a lot lately. “Why don't you like Z?”

“What? Of course I like Z!”

“It always seems like you disapprove of her. You know, her food things and her talk about karma and how she tells stories that might not be extremely realistic . . . Is it because she never got married?”

“No! I like Z . . .”

I did not say anything. I will confess that it was a great feeling to be the one waiting for an answer instead of being the one who was expected to talk.

“She's pretty loopy,” Mom said finally. It was like she was figuring out her words as she said them. “She's charming, but she's loopy. When she turns on the charm, though . . . It's not something I can do. I think that's what bothers me. Here I am working so hard, and maybe I'm doing it all wrong. You know?”

Wow. Mom was jealous of Z? Jeepers. Jeepers
²
. “You're not doing anything wrong.”

“Thanks, Sarah. Thank you.” She gave me a hug. It was an extremely nice mother-daughter moment . . .

And then she had to ruin it. Good old Mom.

“You know, Sarah, there's a real lesson in what happened to Z.”

“Really?” I asked. Of course there's a lesson in what happened to Z! A floor lamp could see the lesson in what happened to Z. “What, Mom?”

She glared at me. “You know what I'm talking about. Z . . . and boys . . . and fooling around and . . . babies . . .”

I could feel my ears going pink. I tried to pretend they didn't, though. I tried to act like a worldly world traveler. “Mom, Curtis and I broke up. Remember?”

“Yeah.” She didn't sound that convinced, though. “Good. I mean—I'm sorry. But . . . oh, you know . . .”

“I understand,” I said. But what I thought was,
I don't want to make a baby with Curtis—I want to make a calf.
Is there a lesson in that, too?

 

 

Curtis is coming home in two days.

Is it boy-liking for me to write that? Or is it simply a statement of fact?

I am so untalented at this boy business that it is almost funny.

I did not mention Curtis on the ride today to Prophetstown, and neither did D.J. I think that if she asked me about the truth and Curtis, I would probably start to cry. Or I would talk enough to fill a ride all the way across the country to the Pacific Ocean. And after all that talking, I still would not know what the truth is.

D.J. did ask about Miss Hesselgrave, and I told her as much as I could. I gave her the copy of
Two Lady Pilgrims
that was still in my backpack. I said Miss Hesselgrave would probably disapprove of her.

“What part?” she asked.

“Everything. When you play basketball, you show your ankles.”

D.J. laughed. “I knew I should be wearing knee socks.”

“Hey!” Paul called out from the back seat. “Are you coming to my show? You know, at the Dog Days of Prophetstown? My band is playing. I'm in a band. It's really awesome. Didn't I give you a poster?”

“Yeah, I think you did.”

“I'll get you another one. You should tell your friends. I'll get posters for them, too. They can come too. It's going to be really awesome.”

D.J. said that she might actually come, and Paul repeated that it was going to be awesome. Planet Paul definitely likes the word
awesome
.

I walked Jack Russell George to the park, but I was not an extremely good dog trainer. A dog trainer should focus all of his or her attention on the dog, but my dog-focus attention was <5%.

On the way back from the park we stopped by Harmony Coffee. This made Jack Russell George extraordinarily happy because he knows that the customers will give him food. He was quivering with anticipation.

Z saw us and smiled a too-big smile. “Sarah! What a treat! No, not you, George.” Jack Russell George was having a myocardial infarction at the word “treat.” “Oh, okay . . .” She slipped him a broken cookie, which he inhaled, and then he sat perfectly still in good behaviorness. “Why, Sarah, I haven't seen you since Rome—”

“I told them.”

Z's face went from smiling to sad to disappointed to thoughtful to sad again. “Oh. I'm glad . . . Oh, Sarah, could I have screwed this up any worse?”

Right then a lady came in for cappuccino, so Z had to go do that. The lady gave Jack Russell George ¼ of her ham sandwich. If Jack Russell George came to Harmony Coffee every day, he would be the diameter of a Shetland pony.

I was glad for the cappuccino-lady interruption, though, because I didn't know what to say. Did Z screw up? Well, yeah, but . . .

Z came back. “Your dad called this morning, you know.”

“Really? What did he say?”

“He just left a message. How's he doing?”

“He's doing okay . . . You didn't screw up, Z. I'm glad about the trip. I'm glad to know about my grandfather. I'm glad I got to buy pizza by myself. I'm glad we didn't get to that last church, because now I have an excuse to go back. I'm glad I grew up a lot.”

Z dropped her head. It took a minute for me to figure out she was crying. “I'm sorry,” she whispered.

“Why?”

“Because I know how much growing up hurts.”

“Yeah. But if you don't grow up, you can't be a boy-liker.”

Z's head came up. “What? Oh . . . I get it.” She smiled at me—a real smile this time. A real, big grandmother smile.

Now Jack Russell George and I are back at Z's. He's in his basket dreaming of ham sandwiches. I am sitting at the kitchen table with a package of Oreos that I bought Z as a peace offering. If I do not stop eating them, they will be an extremely small peace offering. I am trying not to drip milk on my
giornale
.

 

 

I have read many, many books in which the main character has an enemy who is the popular girl and the two of them don't get along at all, but then by the end of the book they find out they have a lot in common and that the popular girl is secretly insecure and they end up best friends.

I find this kind of story unrealistic. There is a 0.00% chance that it will happen with me and Emily Enemy. For one thing, if Emily is insecure, she keeps that insecurity CIA-level top-secret. Emily hides her insecurity better than Miss Hesselgrave hides her intolerance for Romans—far better than Miss Hesselgrave does. And if Emily did decide to share her CIA-level top-secret insecurity, she would do it with one of her also-popular friends. Or with a boy like Brett Ortlieb, but only to make him like her. She would never share it with me.