Heaven Is Paved With Oreos

by Catherine Gilbert Murdock

  I looked at it. Which was hard, like I said, because the wall was sideways. The picture was a guy who had fallen off his horse, and another man was helping him up. “You can’t even see it,” I said.

  Z kept staring at the painting. After a while, she backed away so other people could get close, and instead she sat in a pew, staring.

  “Do you mind if I walk around?” I asked at last.

  “Sure . . .” she said. She didn’t even tell me to be safe.

  As I believe I have mentioned, my ex-not-boyfriend Curtis collects skulls, and I have taken pictures of the skulls in different churches in case he might someday be interested in me again and I might someday be interested in showing him. Santa Maria del Popolo (that is the name of this church; there are many churches in Rome that begin with “Santa Maria,” so it’s the last words you have to pay attention to) had skulls too, and skulls with wings. And a life-size skeleton mosaic in the floor. Beautiful stones of all different colors shaped into ribs and femurs and kneecaps, set right there into the floor.

  But that was nothing. Because built into the wall next to the front door was a full marble skeleton. Life size. It was wearing a marble cape—seriously, the cape was carved out of marble, but it looked like cloth—and the skeleton was arranged in a hole in the wall like it was just sitting there waiting! Or listening. Or both. It had its hands crossed on its bony caped chest, and it was smiling. Skeletons always smile, but this was extra smiley. Trust me.

  I will admit I took a picture, and I will also admit I spent many minutes watching other people’s reactions. Some people would do a double take and scream a little. Children covered their eyes and/or ran away, and one little kid started to cry. Every single person reacted. It became exceedingly predictable. Then it got boring.

  Finally I went back to see what was taking Z so long.

  She was still sitting in her pew. She wasn’t staring at the painting, though. Instead she had her head bent over her hands, with her forehead resting on the pew in front of her. She was rocking the tiniest bit. It looked like she was praying.

  This is what she was saying:

  “Fixing me breakfast, making me tea, shopping at the store. I hope you’ll still like me and won’t ever fight me when we’re sixty-four . . . ”

  I sat with her for a couple of minutes. I was doing my best to look like nothing was wrong. “Z?” I said at last. “Grandma? Um, people are staring at you . . .” I shook her a little bit.

  Z jumped and looked around. “Sarah! I was just reminiscing . . . Do you know who that painting is of? St. Paul—the same St. Paul as our church yesterday. It’s by one of the best painters in the history of the world.”

  “Mmm,” I said. The crowds were getting even thicker, and the tour guides louder. “Why’d they stick it there?”

  “They didn’t ‘stick it’—Caravaggio meant for it to be there!”

  Then she said—like I’d forgotten, although she’s never mentioned it before!—that now we had to go to the Spanish Steps.

  Luckily the Spanish Steps weren’t that far. We stopped at a minimarket on the way, and Z bought bread and cheese and a kind of bologna that tastes different from bologna in Red Bend, and a little bottle of pop for me and of wine for her, and the checkout man even opened the bottles for us . . . and she bought a pack of cigarettes!

  We’ve been sitting on the Spanish steps for a long time now. The Spanish Steps are a huge swirly outdoor staircase. Here’s what’s strange: they are not even Spanish. The French built them, but the Spanish embassy is nearby, so that’s the name that got used. If I was French, I would be irked at not getting credit, because I bet these stairs were expensive. Also today is Bastille Day!

  Hundreds of people are sitting here. We are watching the sun set and men selling things, and everyone is taking everyone else’s picture. Z and I are nibbling secretly (you’re not supposed to eat on the Spanish Steps, but people do) and drinking secretly, and I am writing. Z is looking at everyone. She is an excellent people watcher. Sometimes she shakes her head or says something to herself, but she doesn’t talk to me, which is good because then I can focus on my journal words. Once she gasped, but then she shook her head again.

  Z has smoked part of one cigarette. She borrowed a lighter from a man walking by. He didn’t speak English, but smokers don’t have to. When she took her first inhalation, her face looked like she’d been waiting for this for a long, long time.

  She exhaled. She looked at the cigarette. “I can’t believe I ever liked these things,” she said, and she put it out. She dropped the rest of the cigarettes into our bologna-wrapper trash bag.

  I am so relieved! That cigarette smelled horrible! Don’t get lung cancer, Z!

  Now she is laughing to herself—

  Monday, July 15

  I am at breakfast. Alone. Z is still in bed, but I was awake and hungry, so I came down. The waiter asked if my grandmother had a good birthday. I did not know how to answer. “We walked a lot,” I said at last.

  “Ah, good! Then you must eat the breakfast to finish the hunger!” He even offered me a cappuccino “because it makes the hairs grow.”

  “No, grazie,” I said, because I didn’t want a cappuccino and I don’t care about my hair. I am not a hair-caring kind of girl.

  Today we are going to church number seven. Then our pilgrimage will be complete. Although after what Z told me last night I understand a little better why she didn’t make it there last time.

  According to Miss Hesselgrave, church number seven is built on top of catacombs, which are tunnels where they used to bury people. It was quite a common thing in the olden days to dig miles and miles of underground cemeteries. Lots of important people were buried there, like the early popes and a soldier named Sebastiano, who became a Christian and the pagans got so mad that they killed him and then lots of people visited his body and that’s why the church is called San Sebastiano Fuori le Mura (there’s that “Outside the Walls” again. Although now I’m thinking that fuori le mura actually means “there’s a lot of walking in store for you!”).

  I really want to see the catacombs. Rome has lots of catacombs, but the Sebastiano ones are the most famous. People have been visiting them for thousands of years. Literally. So there aren’t any bones left, because people thought the bones in these catacombs were so holy that they took them away to make other places holy too. For example: at one point they decided to turn the Pantheon—that building we visited the first day with huge columns and a big dome—from a Roman temple into a Catholic church, and one of the ways they did this was by taking twenty-seven wagonloads of catacomb bones and putting them under the Pantheon’s floor.

  I am sorry I did not know this when Z and I were at the Pantheon. But at least now you can understand why I want to see San Sebastiano so much.

  Dear Curtis:

  The Pantheon has twenty-seven wagons of human bones under its floor. Today we are visiting where the bones came from. Last night was strange and confusing and scary. I am trying not to think about it.

  From Sarah

  It’s good that I’m not actually sending the postcards I pretend-write to Curtis, because then he would worry. I would worry if I got a postcard like that.

  Monday, July 15—LATER

  We have not left our hotel! It is lunchtime and Z is still in bed! I know we also have tomorrow to get to Sebastiano + catacombs. But thousands of pilgrims over hundreds of years have visited this church because they hoped it would help them with heaven, and Z needs to go!

  She keeps saying she’ll get out of bed soon, but I don’t think she means it.

  I even went down and talked to the woman at the front desk. She speaks extremely good English but with an Italian accent—I wish I could speak like that, actually—and she showed me how to take a bus right to the entrance of the catacombe (guess what that means in Italian). It looks easy, even for a fourteen-year-old girl from Red Bend who has only ridden on school buses.

  I went back to our room and to
ld Z about the easy catacombe bus.

  I said getting fresh air and exercise would do us a world of good (yes, I know that sounded 110% like Mom) and that we really needed to finish this pilgrimage because then we would be official pilgrimage-finishers and Miss Hesselgrave would be proud of us. I said I was sorry that Z felt so sad and I wished I could help more.

  Z said that everything I said sounded marvelous, but she still didn’t move. I think she’d been crying.

  I would call home, but what do I say? That my grandmother has been crying and I feel really bad and I don’t know how to make her feel better and I don’t want to talk about the things that happened last night that’s making her sad? What would Mom say to that? Curtis would not be helpful in a situation like this. Also if you recall I am not speaking to Curtis, no matter how much I pretend-postcard him. Dad is in corn season, and besides, anything I tell him goes straight to Mom. No secrets between those two.

  The best person I could talk to, I think, is D.J. Schwenk. If I called her, she would tell me . . . (I am pondering) . . . she would say that it’s tough but my grandmother needs me. I need to take care of my grandmother.

  I can picture D.J. saying those exact words.

  I’m hungry. And Z must be hungry—she didn’t even have breakfast. I asked Z if she was hungry, and all she said was, “I’m a terrible person.” I’m going to guess she is hungry, because hunger always makes a bad mood worse.

  The problem is that the breakfast room is closed and they don’t have any other food at this hotel. Only breakfast. Which isn’t until tomorrow morning.

  If we’re going to eat, we need to leave this building. But Z is not going to get out of bed no matter how much she needs breakfast and I need lunch.

  I’ve seen kids a lot younger than me walking around Rome all by themselves. I have some European money (called euros—as in European!), and there are more euros in Z’s bag—I don’t think she’d notice if I took some. There are lots of places to eat around here for someone who knows five words of Italian. I’ll tell the lady at the front desk what I’m doing, just to be safe—but I won’t tell her that anything is wrong with Z.

  Be brave, Sarah. Be D.J.

  By the way, I would write down what happened last night on the Spanish Steps, but it’s not something I want to remember.

  Monday, July 15—LATER

  I did it! I am a WORLD TRAVELER!

  I walked to a pizza place, and I pointed to a plain pizza and a mushroom pizza, and they gave me pretty much the sizes I wanted, and they wrapped it up and I said grazie and they said prego, which means “you’re welcome”—and I absolutely looked like a world traveler. I did not look fourteen. I did not even feel fourteen.

  I did it!

  I was extremely successful except that afterward I got lost.

  Luckily the area I got lost in is full of tourists, so no one notices if you’re looking at a map or looking lost, and the area also has many interesting stores—so it wasn’t that I was lost so much as I was wandering. That’s how Z puts it when she gets lost.

  That’s when I found THE STORE.

  It is a store just for paper and paper supplies, which sounds boring but it is not. Romans have the most beautiful paper and pens! And notebooks and journals and art supplies (whoever knew there were so many colors!), and they even have paper plates and napkins that are so much nicer than anything you can buy in Red Bend. If Mom threw a party using these paper plates, everyone would wash their plates and take them home and hang them over their mantles.

  I did not buy anything, but I looked at everything, which was hard because I was still holding the pizza, which was now cold and greasy and smelly. But I couldn’t stop.

  I have almost filled this journal, and I will admit that I looked at all the blank notebooks and journals—there were walls of them, with pictures and pages and sizes that I loved—thinking that any one of them would be fantastic. But I don’t think there’s much more that I want to say about this trip. Certainly not enough to spend as much as I am sure those books cost.

  It’s fun to dream, though. Someday I will graduate from high school and be grownup, and I’ll travel to places like Rome and I’ll write about it in books like that.

  Now I am back in the hotel room and it is evening and we have eaten all the pizza, and Z has taken a long bath and she looks better. A little better. She says she had a little too much wine last night. I agree with that. She thanked me for the pizza, and I said prego. She is extremely proud of me for being so adventurous and independent. She said, “You remind me of me.”

  There was a bit of an awkward pause while we both thought about how much I was not like her at all—not in the ways that might hurt people and hurt their lives.

  That is a depressing thing to think about. I will not think about that. Instead I will think that, except for the depressing parts and the Z-is-so-sad parts, today has actually not been bad. I will never forget the first time I bought foreign pizza all by myself. No one else in Red Bend High School has ever done that, I bet. And I will never forget that store. Plus tomorrow we complete our pilgrimage! Z completes it after forty-six years, and I complete it after five days. I will be a successful pilgrim + catacomber. So what if we are not official dressed-in-brown or singing-in-St.-Paul’s pilgrims—I am sure that going to all seven churches gives you a boost into heaven no matter what.

  Tuesday, July 16

  We are at breakfast. Our waiter asked Z if she was sick and needed the aspirin. We said, “No, grazie.” I am writing in my journal right now—you should see the bump on my finger! Z says I am an inspiration to her. Those were her exact words. I am writing a lot, but I am not writing everything.

  Tuesday, July 16—LATER

  We have not gone to San Sebastiano yet. Miss Hesselgrave would be deeply disappointed. So am I—but at least we are going this afternoon! Instead we did something that was a lot more fun, even if it won’t get us into heaven: we went back to that Roman paper store.

  Z told me to pick out a new blank journal for myself “for future adventures”—I will store it away until I’m grownup, as a promise to me—and I got gifts for everyone, and Z is also getting a journal—in Italian it’s called a giornale, which means “journal” because Italians don’t use j—and a fountain pen.

  Here are the gifts I have bought:

  A little blank book with graph paper instead of lines. The pages are long and skinny and it definitely ≠ a Red Bend school notebook

  A pencil case

  Fancy paper napkins

  Colored pencils in a real tin box

  Another blank notebook with an amazing cover

  Pushpins that look extremely un-Wisconsin

  An eraser: ditto

  I have not figured out who’s getting what—I will be honest and say that at least one of these things I want to give to Curtis. I just can’t figure out which one yet, because I can’t figure out which thing I like the most.

  Now I am waiting for Z.

  Tuesday, July 16—LATER

  We are not going to Sebastiano after all! I will not get to be an official seven-church pilgrim! I will not get to see the catacombs!

  Darn it!

  This morning, as I said, we went to the paper store, and Z took forever to pick out a pen. But she did, finally, and by that point it was lunchtime, so we got some of those squishy white sandwiches again. As we ate, Z kept looking at the pages of her journal . . . which were blank. That was weird. Then she said that she “wasn’t up for” going to the last church! I kept asking why, and finally she came out and said, with a sad expression, that she wasn’t going to make it to the Oreos. Those were her exact words: “I’m not going to make it to the Oreos.”

  In other words, she doesn’t think she’s going to go to heaven, because obviously she can “make it to the Oreos” if you mean Oreos literally. I bet there are even Oreos in Rome if you know where to shop. Real Oreos, not pavement stones.

  I know Z has been through an enormous amount in the las
t two days—which I am not writing down why because I do not want to think about it, but I know she has been suffering severely. I feel extremely bad for her because she is my grandmother and I love her and it is not a good feeling when someone has been crying and you don’t know how to cheer her up.

  So I did not say that I was irked that we are missing the catacombs, because Z knows already that I am irked. But I also did not say, “Oh, come, come, of course you’ll make it to heaven!” because at the moment I do not 100% believe it.

  Dear Curtis . . .

  Never mind.

  Tuesday, July 16—LATER

  So, we did not go to Sebastiano/number seven, and we did not go to the catacombs, but at least we went to the church with that St.-Paul-falling-off-his-horse painting so I could look at it some more.

  I know: why would a non–art lover (= me) want to do that? But the church was nearby for one thing (no buses! no fuori le mura!) and also I decided that if I’m ever going to understand Z, and a lot of things and people around Z, I need to understand that picture. So I asked if we could go back and look at it again, and Z said yes.

  She didn’t go into the church with me, though. We both understood she couldn’t face it. She stayed outside by a fountain, watching people. I walked through the church by myself, doing my best not to step on half-rubbed-out tombstones. Then I looked at the painting for a long time—looked and not-listened to the English-speaking tour guides.

  I have seen a lot of paintings in the past week. Roman churches are bursting with paintings. But this Caravaggio painting is completely different from any of them. For one thing, most of the painting is pitch-black, which is a strange thing to do in a painting. And even though it’s huge, it only has two people in it—two people and a horse. No angels or puffy clouds or halos. In fact, the biggest thing in the picture is the horse’s butt (!). And the people in the painting look the way that two people and a horse would actually look in real life. St. Paul is lying on the ground, and the other man is looking extremely concerned, and the horse is looking just as confused but doing its best (good horse!) not to step on anyone.