Heaven Is Paved with Oreos (2 page)

Today we spent two hours talking about which pictures to use in the science fair display and what the text blocks should say. We had our usual discussion about what is scientific versus what is gross, which both of us have a problem with. We tend not to notice the grossness. Is it gross to have a “before” photograph of poor little Boris? We are not sure.

At one point Curtis said, “What would Emily Friend think?”

I know he was only bringing up someone who is the opposite of scientific, and I tried not to mind that he used her when there are so many other people to name . . . But I will be honest and say that it hurt my feelings. Because for one thing, Emily finds everything gross, particularly everything related to me, and also she is Emily Enemy.

It did not help that after we finished and put our papers away and walked back to my house, we passed Emily Enemy herself with several other kids hanging out on the bench for the cool kids (= kids who think they're cool). Emily was sitting on one boy's lap with her legs on another boy's lap, and she said hello to Curtis but not a word to me. Actually, that is not true: she said, “You two are very cute together!” But she laughed when she said it.

We did not laugh. Curtis scowled at the ground, and I wanted to say how not every girl needs to lie across two boys just to show she's popular. I wish I could beat her at chess and make that the end of it. Is everyone in high school going to be like Emily?

Curtis and I did not say anything else for the rest of the walk.

When we got to my house, Curtis's sister's car was parked in front of our sidewalk. She wasn't in the car, though. The only person visible was my brother, who was on our front steps looking 100% miserable.

“Wow,” I said. “What's wrong?” Curtis went over to the garage and started shooting baskets. Curtis does not like “what's wrong?” conversations.

Paul looked at me with crazy wide-open eyes. “You know those guitar lessons Z set up? Mom hired
her
to drive me to Prophetstown!” He grabbed my arm. “D.J. Schwenk!”

“D.J. Schwenk is driving to Prophetstown?” Prophetstown is where Z lives.

“She's got some basketball thing there . . . Help me, Sarah. I can't sit in a car with D.J. Schwenk.”

I wanted to be sympathetic—Paul looked so upset!—but I could not help being reasonable. Reasonableness is the byproduct of a scientific mind. “Paul, Prophetstown is, like, forty-five minutes away. If Mom drives, that's an hour and a half twice a week—”

“Plus dog walking,” Paul added. “Z wants me to walk Jack Russell George.”

“Jack Russell George?” Paul doesn't even like Jack Russell George!

“Trust me, I don't want the money—”

“You're getting paid to walk Jack Russell George?” Walking Jack Russell George would be such a great job for someone who loves dogs (= me)! It's not like I have anything better to do this summer—all I'm doing is reading and baby-sitting and waiting for Boris to decay. “That is so unfair! I'm the one who should be walking him—”

Suddenly I stopped talking because a fantastic idea came into my head—and from the expression on his face I could see that the same fantastic idea came into Paul's head too. We looked at each other. “Could you—?” Paul asked, just as I said, “I could—” We went inside.

There was D.J. Schwenk in our kitchen, sitting in Dad's chair with a pop and a bowl of ice cream and talking about a basketball club she's playing in for this summer. Mom was listening while also reading the cookbook Z gave her on wheat-free desserts. Mom seemed a lot more interested in D.J. than in the cookbook.

Paul saw D.J. and stopped short. I did too. Curtis's sister is exceedingly intimidating. I mean, she is a nice person—nice to me and nice to Curtis, and last year when Paul was a freshman and some kid was picking on him, she beat that kid up with one hand. That's the thing: she is nice, but she is tough. She is so tough that she plays varsity football with boys. She was MVP at the girls' basketball state tournament this year and already has a full scholarship to play basketball at the University of Minnesota, even though she still has a year of high school left. When she walks onto a basketball court, she looks like a lion picking out which zebra to eat for dinner.

D.J. saw us and grinned. “Hi, Sarah. Hey, Paul. How are ya?”

“Hi, D.J.,” Paul said with enormous effort. “Um, Sarah, can you, um, ask them . . . ?”

“Hey, D.J. Hey, Mom. Um, what would you think—what if I walked Jack Russell George?”

“So she could ride to Prophetstown with me and”—Paul made a strangling sound—“D.J.?”

“Huh,” Mom said. She frowned in a not-a-bad-idea kind of way. “D.J., you okay taking Sarah, too? Oh, cripes, I don't have oat flour.”

D.J. smiled. You can tell she likes Paul. “Car's going to the same place . . . But you're not going to talk about that calf, are you?”

I shook my head. Curtis and I have learned that hardly any people share our thirst for knowledge when it comes to dead things.

Now I get to go to Prophetstown and walk Jack Russell George!

Prophetstown is hugely different from Red Bend. It has art galleries and yoga and a cool hippie restaurant called Harmony Coffee where you can sit for hours without ordering anything and a street named after Laura Ingalls Wilder, who was born nearby. I know all this because Z works at the Sun & Moon Art Gallery and at Little House Yoga and at Harmony Coffee on Laura Ingalls Wilder Avenue. Prophetstown is as different from Red Bend as a town can get and still be in Wisconsin.

The other thing Prophetstown has is music. All year long it has concerts and performances and festivals. Z loves this because she is a lifelong lover of anything musical, especially anything from the 1960s and 1970s, when all the best songs in the world were created, according to her. Other music-loving people live in Prophetstown too, including a man with a long gray ponytail who used to play with famous musicians in California. He and Z are friends, and so he has offered Paul music lessons.
For free.
Which is an enormously large deal because lessons are expensive and money does not grow in cans (that is a family joke). Paul is also into music, and all day long he is either practicing or listening. When he is doing his music, he is so focused that he cannot even hear people calling his name. We say he is on Planet Paul.

I have to go set the table because
Z is coming!
I cannot wait to show her this journal and tell her our plan. This summer could not get any better!

 

 

OMG. OMG. OMG. OMG. OMG. OMG. And I normally do not say those letters, even though when I say OMG, I mean “oh my gosh” and not “oh my the-other-one.”

Remember how Z sent me this journal to write about my marvelous adventures and experiences-to-come? Well, now I know what she was talking about.

OMG.

Okay, I will
slow down a little
as Dad says sometimes when I am talking, and I will try to explain what happened.

Z came to supper tonight. Z coming to supper is an adventure in and of itself because she calls everyone darling and brings crazy not-at-all-like-a-grandmother gifts like a dead branch she thinks is beautiful or a book of nude portraits (!) or earrings she made herself that she said she'd pierce my ears with in a special ceremony. Z is always on a special diet such as eating only one color food each day of the week. Or only eating food that is raw. She has been every kind of vegetarian, including the kind that doesn't even eat honey. Sometimes she brings us organic potato chips or organic chocolate-covered peanuts. You'd think “organic” would mean “healthy,” but that's not necessarily true in Z's case.

Lately Z does not eat anything made with wheat. She says the hardest part was giving up Oreos, but they are made with wheat flour, so even though they are absolutely delicious and perfect, they're out. If I ever stopped eating wheat, I would make a rule that I could only be 99% wheatless. The last 1% I would leave for Oreos.

Mom reads all the labels extra closely but she still usually gets something wrong. She has a glass of wine ready whenever Z comes, just in case. Wine for herself.

“Hello, darlings!” Z said when she arrived tonight. She gave us hugs that she says fill the universe with good karma and told Dad again that he is saving the world. Dad is an engineer in a factory that cans beans and corn and potatoes. During summer harvest, he works every day, seven days a week, because that's how fast the crops come in. Right now he's making sure the machines work, because beans start soon and then all canning heck will break loose.

Z picked up the wheat-free cookbook. “Oh, aren't you wonderful! . . . Did I forget to tell you that I'm back with wheat?”

There was a bit of a silence. Mom smiled brightly and reached for her wine.

Now Z can eat Oreos again!

At dinner, Z told her favorite story about dancing in St. Peter's Square in Rome. I've heard the story one hundred times (almost literally), but I still love it.

When Z was in college, she went to Italy on an art-studying trip, and while she was in Rome she visited a famous church called St. Peter's that has an open space in front with huge rows of columns like two arms. They built the columns on purpose to make the church look like it was hugging the whole world. Z has a drawing of St. Peter's Square hanging in her bedroom, and trust me, the hug feeling is extremely clear. It is called a square even though it is hug shaped.

When Z saw St. Peter's Square in real life, back when she was in college, she got so excited that she held out her arms to match the shape of the column hugs, and without warning an old Italian man came up and started dancing with her. Z's friends were totally shocked. Z just laughed, though, and went along with the old man, twirling around the square. The only words she could understand him saying were
bellissima
and
amore.
Bellissima
means “very beautiful” and
amore
means “love.” Then they finished and he bowed to her and that was it. The whole thing took less than a minute. That's why Z bought the drawing of St. Peter's Square—so she can always remember.

When I was little, I'd imagine Z as one of the little figures in the drawing, even though the drawing is from hundreds of years ago. Z would tell me the story, and then she'd hold out her arms and have me dance with her. The only problem was that I was terrible at dancing. We'd always fall down laughing on her bed. Maybe that's why I like the story so much, because it always reminds me of giggling with Z.

Anyway, Z told the story again tonight and we all laughed, and then Z laid down her fork. “I . . . I need to do it again.”

Mom and Dad shared a glance.

“Dance with an old man?” Paul asked.

“That trip to Rome . . . it was a pilgrimage, you know.”

Mom made a little sound under her breath.

“It was!” Z said. “It was not—I admit—a religious pilgrimage, but I was following in the footsteps of thousands of years of pilgrims. I intended to visit all seven pilgrimage churches, and I failed.”

Z has told me this story too. Rome has seven churches that are particularly important, and when Z was my age she read a book about pilgrims visiting those seven churches, so when she was in Rome, she tried to do it too. But she ran out of time. She only made it to six of them. This isn't like the dancing-in-St.-Peter's-Square story. This story makes Z sad. She doesn't tell it much.

“I'm going to do it right this time,” Z said. “I'm turning sixty-four this summer. I would like to reconnect with God.”

Mom cleared her throat. “You know, Z, I'm pretty sure God is everywhere. You could probably connect with God in our living room.”

Dad chuckled, but Z waved this away. “God has been in Rome for two thousand years. We'll have a better conversation there, God and me. I need to apologize.”

“For the pilgrimage?” I asked. I've always felt bad about how Z never made it to that seventh church. It feels like a jigsaw puzzle with one piece missing. A corner piece.

Z nodded, kind of.

“Well,” Dad said at last. “It sounds like a great trip—”

“There's one other thing,” Z said. “I'd like to take Sarah with me.”

BOOM. (That is the sound of all heck breaking loose. Although it broke quietly at first.)

Everyone stared at Z.

Then they stared at me.

Then we stared at Mom and Dad.

We even looked at Paul.

Mom cleared her throat again. “Now just a second. Your trip—that's fine. Do what you want. But this is a foreign country we're talking about. Sarah's only fourteen. I'm not sure you're the best . . . chaperone . . .” Mom shot Dad a look.

So Dad asked what Z was thinking timewise, and Z said we'd be leaving July 10 and returning July 17.

“You've already bought the tickets?” Mom asked in a coolish voice.

“The price was right. And—just so you know—they're nonrefundable. Not that it matters . . .”

BOOM.

Mom stared at her plate. I don't know what Dad and Z were doing because I was so busy watching Mom. I do know that Paul was gone, though. I hadn't even noticed him leaving.

Finally Dad said this sure was interesting and we all needed some time and he knew it'd work out in the end. Mom, on the other hand, said for me to go to my room.

So here I am.

Rome.

ROME!

Rome is such a famous and important city—it's the capital of Italy and head of the Catholic Church of the world. I would get to see those seven churches and St. Peter's Square (although I do not want anyone dancing with me!). I would get to be a
pilgrim
—not the Thanksgiving kind but the super-old-fashioned kind like the ones in Z's drawing. I would be part of history.

So those are pluses. But Mom is right too. Rome is in a foreign country on the other side of the globe. They don't speak English, and who knows what we would eat. I know the Italians invented pizza, but that doesn't mean that Italian pizza is any good; a lot of pizza isn't. Z says Italian ice cream is deliciously wonderful, but I am suspicious. I do not like most American ice cream flavors. And what if the plane crashes? Rome is thousands and thousands of miles away. That's a lot of miles to crash in. And what if someone tries to dance with me? I do not know how to say,
I'm a terrible dancer
in Italian. I do not know how to say,
But you could dance with my grandmother because she loves adventures.
I'm not sure people even say that in Italian.