Heaven Is Paved With Oreos

by Catherine Gilbert Murdock

  Miss Hesselgrave made it clear in Two Lady Pilgrims in Rome that she was not that kind of pilgrim. She liked the walking part and she was a fan of God, but she stayed in hotels and never once relied on strangers’ kindnesses. Miss Hesselgrave had a low opinion of strangers, especially Roman strangers. She also took several days to visit the seven churches, and she spent more time describing the artwork and the history than she did the religious part. I think she felt religion was too personal to put in a book. History and art she could talk about forever. Trust me.

  Rome doesn’t have any pilgrims now, though, at least not pilgrims who dress in brown and beg for food and look like they’ve walked for months. Well, it has some people who look like that, but I think they’re homeless people. They don’t look church oriented if you know what I mean.

  I do not see anyone else carrying a copy of Two Lady Pilgrims in Rome. I do see lots of people carrying guidebooks and maps.

  Right now it is late afternoon. We are sitting in another caffè, which is how I can write; I could not walk and write at the same time! I am eating my first gelato, which means “ice cream” although it doesn’t taste like ice cream. I asked Z for vanilla, but she made a mistake and got something else. It is good, but it does not taste like home.

  I do not miss Curtis at all. Not one little bit.

  We have walked so far—our hotel was only the beginning. The first thing we visited was an old building called the Pantheon. It is an old Roman temple with columns in front that are huge—bigger than any columns I have ever seen, even in Chicago and Canada and Minneapolis—and each column is made out of a single piece of stone! They each must weigh tons and tons and tons. The columns weren’t lifted in place by machinery, either: they were put there by people. Roman as in two thousand years ago. It is amazing that the columns haven’t fallen down yet. An important person is buried inside, because two soldiers stand in front of his tomb. The soldiers don’t move, but they are real. You can tell. The ceiling has a hole in the middle for sunlight to come in, and pigeons fly through it.

  Then Z took me to see an elephant. I was extremely disappointed at first, because I thought she meant a live elephant, which this was not. It is a statue. But it is possibly the cutest statue I have ever seen in my life, of a little baby elephant who is waving his trunk and smiling, and on his back he has an obelisk. An obelisk, if you don’t know, is a stone thing that looks like the Washington monument, only smaller. They are all over Rome. Miss Hesselgrave says obelisks are an eternal expression of the Roman character. She does not sound approving when she says this.

  There are postcard stands everywhere, but I will not write a postcard to Curtis. You do not write to someone you’ve broken up with, no matter how much you think about him, which I am not. But if I did write him, this is what the postcard would say:

  Dear Curtis:

  We are here in Rome. It is hot. How is Boris? I have not seen any cows, though I did see goats. I hope baseball is going well. I wish I could show you the elephant.

  Ciao, Sarah.

  Now Z says we have to walk more. I wish I could dunk my feet in gelato.

  Thursday, July 11—LATER

  I cannot believe Miss Hesselgrave does not complain about her feet—she is tougher than I realized, no matter how much she criticizes Roman air and Roman drivers.

  After the Pantheon, Z and I walked to the really old part of Rome—the Forum—which is a bunch of rocks and tourists and (you can smell) cats. We watched a couple of people digging under a tent—we think they were archeologists. It didn’t look like they were getting much done.

  Now we are sitting under an umbrella in another caffè, and Z is having a glass of wine that has bubbles but isn’t champagne, and I am having a pop, which here they call cola, and we are eating sandwiches made out of squishy white bread. Z is reading aloud how Miss Hesselgrave chipped bricks out of the Coliseum to take home as souvenirs.

  We are shocked. Miss Hesselgrave, you are a looter!

  Thursday, July 11—LATER

  I have never in my life been so happy to see a bed! I get to rest my poor little feet! I will never think of shoes the same way again.

  Tonight we saw the biggest fountain in Rome. It is stuck to the side of a building. The building looks normal (= normal for Rome) until you notice one side has a big pool of water in front and carved naked statues and splashing. Hundreds (I am not exaggerating) of people were there when we got there. All looking at a fountain. Strange, right?

  So of course Z wanted to sit and look too, though for her (and for other people too, I think) looking at the fountain really means looking at other people looking at the fountain. Apparently it’s a tradition that if you throw a coin into this fountain, you will return to Rome. I guess all the tourists tonight want to come back, because every one of them threw a coin in! Whoever gets the coins must be rich.

  I threw in a quarter, which is not the money they use in Rome, but Z says it doesn’t matter. She says it worked for her, and do you know when she threw her coin in? 1967!

  Z says Rome is different from how it was in the 1960s but not as much as you’d think. Back then, women had to wear a veil to walk into the churches, even if they were only there for the art and not the religious part. Even women who weren’t Catholic had to wear veils. Now they don’t. Z says this is a good thing because she was always losing her veil so she and her friends would have to take turns going in to see whatever famous painting was inside.

  “There was a lot of that, too,” Z said, pointing to two people near us at the fountain who were kissing so hard that their bodies looked pasted to each other.

  To be honest, I found the kissing uncomfortable. But I don’t think Z noticed my uncomfortableness. In fact, I am sure she didn’t, because I had to say her name three times before she answered, and even then it was clear she was not paying attention. Her mind was somewhere else. I thought about asking what she was thinking, but she looked so preoccupied and serious that I’m not sure I wanted to know.

  Friday, July 12

  Our pilgrimage begins!

  Today we are going to walk all the way to St. Peter’s, which is the most important church of our seven pilgrimage churches, which means it is the most important church in all of Rome, which means it is the most important church in the world.

  We are at breakfast now in the hotel because breakfast comes free with our room. Roman breakfasts are intensely different from American breakfasts. All the food is spread on a long table—many different kinds of food because many nationalities of people stay here and they all have their own kinds of breakfasts. So there is cereal and ham and cheese and rolls and toast and fruit and a thing that looks like pie made out of scrambled eggs and other things I don’t even know. And juice. Z is having cappuccino and looking exceedingly satisfied. She is figuring out how we are going to get to St. Peter’s, because the streets between here and there look like a plate of spaghetti. I am having ham and two kinds of cheese for breakfast, which I have never done before. The people at the next table are arguing the way people would in a restaurant in Red Bend. You know: quietly, so no one notices. But they’re doing it in a foreign language. Isn’t that wild?

  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.

  Friday, July 12—LATER

  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.

  Friday, July 12—LATER

  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.

  Friday, July 12—LATER

  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.

  Saturday, July 13

  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.

  Saturday, July 13—LATER

  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 h
as 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.