Heaven Is Paved with Oreos (7 page)

Even on the map, you can see how St. Peter's Square looks like two big hugging arms. That's wild too, that way back in Prophetstown, Wisconsin, on the other side of the world, is a drawing on Z's bedroom wall that looks just like where we're about to go. I wonder if there will be any old-man dancers.

 

 

I have not seen any old-man dancers yet, but in these crowds it would be hard to tell. St. Peter's is not only the most important church in the world—it is also the most popular! I never knew so many people could be interested in the same building. We had to stand in line for a long time in the sun just to get in, and there were dozens of tour groups with guides who each had a different-colored umbrella so the people would know which guide to follow. Z kept following the guides who spoke English, but she did it in an extremely spyish way and would look in the opposite direction from where the guide was pointing so it seemed like she just happened to be standing there. Then she'd sneak a look at what the guide had been talking about as the tour group walked to the next place.

We have learned a great deal about St. Peter's but we have also been glared at.

Did you know that Michelangelo—the artist Michelangelo!—built St. Peter's Church? He was an architect too. Although he was not the only architect. Many other Italians worked on it as well, including the man who carved the elephant we saw yesterday, who by the way is named Bernini. That is amazing to me, that Bernini could be good at elephants and churches both.

Michelangelo also designed the uniforms for the guards at St. Peter's—that's what some people say, anyway. And the guards still wear them! They look more like Halloween costumes than guard suits, but still, it is quite respectful of them to continue to use the uniforms of the man Miss Hesselgrave calls Mankind's Greatest Artist.

I need to stop writing because Z has had enough cappuccino for the moment—we are in a caffè, but we are leaving again.

 

 

We are at another caffè and it is extremely pretty. Many buildings in Rome are pink. It sounds crazy, I know, and no one would ever use pink in Red Bend, but here it looks good. Other buildings are yellow and brown and orange, and not one building is white.

Okay, back to our pilgrimage . . . St. Peter's Church was huge, but Z said she could not talk to God there. I understand. He would have enormous trouble hearing her over all the other people praying and talking and pointing to art. Besides, we have six more churches to go to, and Z says they are all quieter than St. Peter's. Well, at least five of them are. We know what happened with Z and church number seven.

After going inside St. Peter's, we stood in another long line and bought tickets to go to the top of the church—all the way up inside the dome. Now I can appreciate how big St. Peter's really is! It is over three hundred steps to the top. And some of those steps are super twisty and narrow (I am not joking: an overweight person could get stuck). There are patches in the building too, where the walls cracked and the workers tried to push the cracks back together again. Even the floor has patches made out of stone!

I had not thought a building could be patched the way you patch clothes. I was wrong.

Curtis would love those patches.

Then Z wanted to visit the museums—apparently St. Peter's has famous art museums—but my feet said,
No way!
So instead we walked back to our hotel. Now I am eating Roman pizza, which is rectangular instead of round. And you do not buy it by the slice: you buy it by the kilo. All the different flavors are on display, and you point to which flavor you want and say
okay
—or
sì,
which is Italian for “yes” although everyone knows the word
okay
—and then the man cuts it and weighs it and you pay. Z has spinach, and I have cheese. The pizza is good, although not as good as Red Bend's. She is drinking fizzy wine, and I am drinking fizzy cola.

I need to write about one thing that happened that I cannot stop thinking about. At St. Peter's, none of the pictures on the walls are painted the way a normal painting is; instead they're made of little pieces of different-colored glass called mosaics. From far away the pieces really look like a picture. It is like they figured out pixels hundreds of years before the invention of computers.

Up in the dome we were close enough to see the different-colored chips and see how the artists made them into things like flowers and curtains and angels. We were so close that we could actually touch the angels' mosaic toes. Z smiled and ran her fingers across them. “I bet the guy who made this had a really amazing girlfriend.”

“A girlfriend with funny-looking toenails,” I said.

Do you know what is on the roof of St. Peter's? A post office. I am not joking. So I bought a postcard and a stamp and I mailed it. The postcard is a picture of the inside of the dome of St. Peter's. You can't see the angels (they are extremely small in proportion to the whole dome, even if their toenails are the size of eggs), but you can see the gold mosaic and the light shining through the windows and the overall enormous fanciness.

This is what the postcard said:

 

Dear D.J.:

 

This is St. Peter's, which is huge and beautiful. I am not sure it is my favorite place in Rome, because we have only been here one day. I will have to visit more places. I hope your basketball is going well.

Your passenger,
Sarah

 

I wrote to D.J. because I have been thinking about her a lot. D.J. would never be happy just being the girlfriend of someone who made angel-toenail mosaics; she would want to make angel-toenail mosaics herself. She is the kind of girl I want to be.

 

 

We are in bed now. We kept walking after supper—although slowly!—and talking about how much we would like to live in a pink building, but only in Rome. Z asked how I was doing with Curtis.

“Okay,” I said, although I am not okay. “I think about him all the time. I wish I knew what happened.” I didn't mention how afraid I am of seeing him in high school and not knowing what to do or say. Afraid of seeing him with Emily.

Z shook her finger at me. “You can't let a boy define your life. This whole world is yours, and you are so smart . . . Think about him, yes. But not all the time! Any guy who doesn't want you isn't good enough for you.”

The more I think about what Z said, however, the worse I feel. I know she was only trying to cheer me up, but my mood ≠ cheery. My brain ≠ cheery either. My brain is doing its super-rational thing where it points out cold, hard truths.

For example: there are obviously a large number of guys in the world who do not want me one little bit, who are not even one-mosaic-chip interested in me. Most guys, actually. Probably >99% of them. Maybe the fact that I don't want to be an angel-toenail-inspirer doesn't mean anything—not if <1% of guys would want my inspiration anyway. Maybe I just have to get used to the fact that I will be spending my life all by my lonesome.

 

 

TODAY WE ARE GOING TO BE SUPERPILGRIMS! We are going to visit FOUR churches in one day!

I am having coffee juice to get ready. Z is having two cappuccinos. I am feeling much less uncheery—the sky is too sunny for me to be sad, even about my uninspirational future.

The first church we are visiting is the one I'm most excited about. Mary is the mother of Jesus and one of the most important women in the history of the world. This church is called Santa Maria Maggiore (
maggiore
=
major)
because it's the majorest church for her. You know who is buried there? Bernini, the man who carved the happy elephant! And the ceiling is made out of the first gold the Spaniards brought back from America. You always read that Columbus discovered America, but you never know what he did with it—now I do!

Perhaps instead of becoming a scientist I should be a tour guide.

 

 

Did you know that the Maggiore church is in a foreign country—a foreign country that is not Italy? Seriously. There is a fence around it with Roman police on one side and different-colored police on the other. It is part of the Vatican—like St. Peter's, which we saw yesterday, only I was so busy writing about other things that I forgot to mention it. The Vatican is a tiny country for the pope so he doesn't have to use the Italian post office. Italy has a terrible post office. That explains the post office on St. Peter's roof!

When Z and I first got to the Maggiore church, there was a tour group outside with a tour guide who was Irish. I've never heard an Irish accent in real life before. It is so pretty—it sounds like old-fashioned flowers. I could listen to it all day. Do you think if I become a tour guide that I'll sound like that? (I know I won't, but it's nice to dream!)

The inside of the Maggiore church is so beautiful—I like it much more than St. Peter's. The columns come from ancient Roman temples. I think that is tremendously wonderful. The church also has mosaics of sheep that remind me of the goats I saw from the train. There aren't any mosaics of goats. Goats would not make good Christians, I don't think; they're too stubborn.

Right now I am outside by a fountain while Z buys a rose to put on Bernini's tomb. Isn't that romantic? We must honor the great artists no matter what Miss Hesselgrave thinks of them. Z also wants to take a picture of the Oreos. Oh! I forgot to mention that earlier. The floor of Maggiore has extremely fancy decorations made out of marble. One of the patterns is black circles, and as we were walking on them I said, “Look, Z! Oreos!” And she laughed and laughed and said, “I knew we were in heaven!” So now she's taking a picture.

There is one other thing too . . . Many important people besides Bernini are buried in this church, and some of them have tombs that are really decorated. And in several spots—to illustrate that everyone is going to die and so you'd better be good—they decorate their tombs with skulls. Carved skulls, not real human skulls, but it is still vivid. And even though the skulls are carved out of marble, they still have bad teeth.

Curtis would love those skulls! He loves bad teeth. Right now I want nothing more than to show him. Besides, no one in Rome knows about the Brilliant Outflanking Strategy and the fact that we are fake boy/girlfriends. I am extremely sure that no one in Rome would even care.

 

 

I am sitting inside our number two pilgrimage church for today. It was done by a woman named St. Helena whose son was a Roman emperor, so she was rich. Miss Hesselgrave says St. Helena murdered her daughter-in-law, but even so she likes her because St. Helena was born in England. Miss Hesselgrave says St. Helena is a
mother of the church
(although not, I think, a mother-in-law of it) for all her church work and because her son was so important.

Z agrees. She says these two churches = the Great Moms tour.

I am not sure it is appropriate for me to be scribbling in my journal in such a sacred place, but I need to write this down.

Here is what happened. As Z and I were walking here just now, we passed two college students carrying backpacks with guitars strapped to them. Seeing them, Z told me a long story about how she was living in San Francisco in 1976, during the American bicentennial, which was the year the United States turned two hundred years old. She really wanted to go to the fireworks on the Fourth of July, but she couldn't find a ride so she ended up hiking across the Golden Gate Bridge with a backpack and guitar just like those two students. It was so windy, though, that she worried the guitar and backpack were going to blow off the bridge—with her attached to them!

She told it really well—Z is a great storyteller—and I laughed . . . But then I remembered a story Dad tells us about when he was a kid, when his scout troop made a gigantic float of Washington crossing the Delaware for their bicentennial Fourth of July, and Dad was supposed to be General Washington. But on July 3rd (which is the day Dad tells us the story every year) he fell off his dirt bike and broke his arm so badly that he had a fever and had to stay in bed with Grandma Ann taking care of him. So instead Uncle Tommy was Washington and Dad never got to be the father of our country.

Dad's story is funny too, especially because you can tell he doesn't feel sorry for himself at all. But until today I'd never thought about what Z was doing on that day, and about how when her son was lying in bed hurt and sad, she was on the other side of the country watching fireworks. That's not where I'd want my mom to be if I was hurt.

Would Mary have done that to her son, Jesus? I don't think so. Would St. Helena? (Actually, I have my doubts about St. Helena.)

Thinking about this has put me back to being uncheery. Uncheery and preoccupied.

 

 

We are about to go into the number three church. My feet hurt. I do not like thinking about Z as a mom. What does Curtis see in Emily? Why does he talk about her, and notice her posters? Do you think he thinks she's inspiring? That is depressing. Emily would never inspire me. She would not inspire me to do anything.

Here is what I would write Curtis if I was writing him:

 

Dear Curtis:

 

Today I've seen lots of marble skulls with bad teeth. It is strange that rich people would pay artists to carve bad teeth on purpose. What do you find inspiring?

From, Sarah.

 

PS: Say hi to your sister. But you don't have to tell her about the skulls.