Olive Branches Don't Grow on Trees

Olive Branches Don’t

Grow On Trees

By

Grace
Mattioli

Olive
Branches Don’t Grow On Trees

By
Grace
Mattioli

 Copyright
©2012 by Grace
Mattioli

This is a work of
fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are
either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner.
Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely
coincidental.

Library of Congress
Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mattioli
,
Grace, 1965-

Olive
Branches Don’t Grow On Trees/ Grace
Mattioli
.

p.
 
cm
.

           
1. Families-Fiction
  2.New
Jersey-Fiction 
3.Italian Americans-Fiction  4.Peace-Fiction

 
I.Title
    
PS3556.R352
    
813.54

Dedication

For my mom, who told me to save everything I write

And for my brother Vincent, who told me I have a
perfect sense of humor.

CHAPTER
ONE: THE SOUND OF NOISE

Silvia
Greco knew that the silence would not last.  There was not enough silence in
her world, and there was definitely not enough of it since she had moved into
her father’s house in New Jersey.  She knew that her father, Frank, had
taken a brief break from his current project of searching for a lost frying
pan, and that he would be resuming his search any second with the clattering of
pots and pans and slamming of cabinet doors.  In the very short meantime,
she enjoyed the sound of nothing as she sat waiting for her coffee to finish
brewing as if it was all she had left in the world.

She
sat at a square wooden kitchen table that took over the entire room.  It
looked good from a distance, but upon closer inspection revealed several nicks
and scratches that had given it a memory of its own-- a bad one.  The
table was bare except for an economy sized bottle of TUMS displayed in the
middle like a centerpiece.  She sat on a chair that was almost too big for
her little body.  A big girl misplaced inside a little girl's body, she
had a big voice, a big laugh, a big stride, a big Romanesque nose that sat
proud beneath her big brown eyes.  Her big head of hair was currently
chopped in some crude style of uneven lengths, the color orange on the top and
black at the bottom.  Her hair style was not intended to be any sort of
radical statement.  It was just an expression of her current state of
apathy.  So was her attire-- a paint covered T-shirt and worn out Levi
jeans that hung on her like they were five sizes too big.  She usually
dressed in bright bold sixties styled clothing that showed her off to the world
as a happy, animated, free spirit.  Her hair was usually evenly colored
and stylized to perfection.  But even with her grungy clothes and her
chopped hair, she was pretty.  And her big nose seemed to add to her
prettiness in a way.  Angie, her older sister, urged her to get her big
nose made smaller with simple surgery, but Silvia refused to do such a thing,
as if in doing so, she would be rejecting her Grandma
Tucci
,
who had the same big nose and whom she loved fiercely. 

Her
father's nose was in perfect proportion to the rest of his face, which
resembled an aged version of the young Marlon Brando.  Despite a life time
of working too hard, sleeping too little, drinking too much and smoking for the
better half of his life, he still looked good.  He had all of his hair and
could sweep it from side to side depending on his mood. His physique looked
like he worked out at a gym on a regular basis, but he had never set foot in
one.  The slight limp he developed from being maimed in a motorcycle
accident in his teen years was barely perceptible through his gargantuan
personality.  This was also the case with his slovenly attire of
mismatched outfits and shirts buttoned unevenly with one side hanging down
further than the other.

He
had returned from the bathroom and wasted no time getting on with his project
with a renewed sense of urgency.  He gallivanted around the kitchen like
he was keeping beat to a polka song, searching for the lost pan while drinking
and cooking something that smelled like an odd mixture of garlic and garbage
left out in the rain.  Silvia got up to get her coffee, careful not to get
in her father’s way.  As she poured some milk into her coffee, the
container slid out of her hand.  It was greasy.  She imagined that
Frank had previously touched it with his olive oiled hands.

“I
knew you were going to do that,” said Frank who was suddenly standing over her
shoulder.  She wanted to say something like “Well maybe I wouldn’t have
spilled it if you didn’t get your greasy hands all over it.”  She said
nothing.  She just cleaned up the spill and sat down.  She could tell
Frank was really fishing for a fight this morning and would have fished deeper
had he not been so preoccupied with finding the lost pan.  So rather than
fishing, he just continued on his quest, moving from one side of the kitchen to
another like he was accomplishing great things.  
Banging
steel against steel, wood against wood.

The
noise, however abrasive and awful it was to Silvia, did serve the purpose of
blocking her thoughts of yesterday, when she was fired from her job waiting
tables in a Turkish cafe in downtown Philadelphia.  She had overheard her
boss say to the cook, “I’m going to have to close the place down if she works
here another day!”  And at hearing this, she marched into the kitchen and
said, “I heard what you said
Usef
.”  She spoke
to him as though he was wrong for being concerned for the survival of his
business.  Although he was, like most people, much bigger than her, he
hunched over and shrunk like a frightened monkey at her confrontation.
 “I’m sorry Silvia,” he said in his broken English, while looking down at
the floor.  And he really was sorry.  Somewhere in the back of her
head, she knew he was right.  She was a coffee-spilling, plate-dropping
wreck of a waitress who surprised herself the few times she got an order right.

“Why
were you still working there anyway after you moved in with Dad?” said her
older brother, Cosmo, in an effort to console her when she called him up right
after she had been fired.  As usual, he was right.  It had made some
sense to continue her career as a bad waitress when she still lived in the city
and the cafe was one block away from her place.  But after she moved to
Frank’s house, it made no sense at all.  She remained at the cafe,
however, because jobs were hard to come by.  When she told this to Cosmo,
he said that she would find another “dead-end” job before she knew it.
 His attempt at consolation, while sincere, made her feel worse.  
Much worse.
 She needed no reminder of the fact that
she had worked exclusively at dead end jobs since graduating from the Art
Institute of Philadelphia two years ago.

She
crumbled into a hunched over position and sipped her coffee that tasted
markedly bitter.  Just as she was slipping into a comfortable state of
misery, Frank said, “Don't you have to be at work?  It's eleven o'clock.
 What happened?  Did you get canned again?”  She was about to
speak, when he swiftly picked up a broom and began chasing a centipede that was
speeding across the floor.

“Those
god damn bugs run around here like they own the place!” he shouted as it
disappeared under a cabinet.  He then threw the broom back in its corner
like he was angry at it.  He picked up his half full drink, looked down
like he was studying it, and in a quick second, he finished it off.  His
insensitive remark seemed to have been wiped clean from his mind.  She
would have normally laughed his comment off, knowing well that it was only his
way of attempting to instigate a fight.  But a number of factors,
including fatigue and getting fired from her job yesterday, conspired together
to cause her to react.

“Why
don’t you have another drink?” she said facetiously.

           
He came alive like Frankenstein’s monster, eyes bulging, face reddening and
screamed back, “Why don’t you get your stuff and get the fuck out of my
house?!”

Her
sarcastic response, “Because I know how much you’d miss me,” heightened her
father’s anger, and his eyes bulged out so far they looked as if they might pop
out of his head.  He looked like he was about to start screaming in the
scariest of all his angry voices.  His screams could make the house’s
walls vibrate. His voice was deep, guttural,
heavy
and
carried long and far.  So far, in fact, that she could still hear it no
matter how far away she moved:  Philadelphia, Brooklyn, Chicago,
Tucson
.  Even when she took a summer backpacking trip
through Europe, she could still hear his voice
. 
She could tell by the look on his face that he was about
to scream one of those vibrating-wall screams when his cell phone rang.
 He forcibly decompressed all that he could and walked quickly towards his
phone, all the while still staring at Silvia, as if to say that that their
little spat was not over yet.  He answered the phone before the first ring
ended and asked the caller if he had any information about the missing frying
pan.

“How
the hell should I know?” the voice on the phone said. “I don't even live with
you!” The person on the other end spoke almost as loud as Frank, and Silvia
could hear every word very clearly, as if he was standing right there in the
kitchen.

Frank
did not bother apologizing for asking such an inappropriate question, nor did
he ask his friend how he was doing.  Rather, he just went right into his
problems.  He went through his usual list of complaints about his
children:
 
Vince spoke two words a year
to him; Cosmo was a failure; and Angie broke his heart by moving to north
Jersey. Silvia could tell that he was about to start in on her.  But he glanced
over and probably decided not to talk about her while she was sitting right
there.  So instead, he spoke about how all of his children’s shortcomings
were the fault of Donna, his wife, for being from a family with “bad genes.”

When
the voice on the phone asked about Donna, Frank walked into the other room so
he could speak about his wife in private in his not-so-quiet, quiet voice.
 She had left him a little over one month ago.  She had surprised
herself and everyone around her by lasting as long as she did.  Silvia
suspected her mother would have left sooner, but had waited until her youngest
child, Vince, was either out of the house or at least almost out of the house.
 She could hear Frank lying to the voice on the phone like he lied to
everyone.  She could hear him telling the voice that he and Donna just
needed a little separation from each other, as if they had made some sort of
mutual decision about how to proceed in their marriage.  He walked back
into the kitchen to freshen his drink and complained about the property taxes
that would be due very soon.  He ended his monologue of complaints with an
expression he used frequently, “I can't complain.”

 
Silvia thought that if Frank spent less time complaining and searching for lost
kitchen utensils, he might notice the dilapidated condition of his house. 
The kitchen sink always leaked. The bathroom door handle fell off every time
someone tried to open or close it.  The floor creaked. The doors squeaked
and hung on loose hinges from being slammed one too many times. The cracked
paint struggled to cover the walls.  The broken chandelier could fall at
any second.  While the house was falling apart, Frank’s yard, in which he
took great pride, was perfect.  Not a bush out of place.  Not one
uneven blade of grass.  All of the flowers and plants were lined up
straight and were distanced apart from each other as if someone used a ruler to
get them that way.  His nice-looking red brick ranch style house sat on a
pleasant tree lined street with other nice-looking houses with well-kept yards,
though none were as well-kept
as his own
.

The
house was on a street not far from the center of town and the
town was not too far from Philadelphia, but not quite close
enough to be considered a suburb.  Frank would not set foot in the city
even if it were five minutes away.  To him, cities were nothing more than
an added expense with their parking lots that cost ten dollars an hour and
their expensive restaurants and shops full of useless, overpriced merchandise.  He
preferred the smallness of his own town with its practical shops and ample free
parking.  It was a real town too, the way towns used to be, with
everything a person needed.  It had a street that could have been named
Main Street, with the same dress shop that had been there for over forty years;
the same hardware shop for fifty years; the same grocery store for over sixty
years; and the same bank that had been there for almost one hundred years.
 

Silvia
loved the town in her own way.  It was where she learned to ride a bike,
where she had her first kiss from a boy, and where she spent long summer days
with her grandma eating snow cones and playing hide-and-seek.  She loved
the town because it had an old-fashioned quality, like it had been slightly
stuck in time.  But the town began to feel too small and intimate after
she had moved away for college.  After she had lived and traveled in so
many exciting, international cities, it felt boring and provincial.  By
then, the town was nothing more than a place where she did not
belong,
and she grew to resent it for making her into a
misfit, a displaced person, and a girl without a hometown.  It was around
this same time that her home stopped being her home and started being her
father’s house. 

**********

She
went into her bedroom, sat upon her bed, and stared into the blank space of
hopelessness.  She thought she would be protected from the racket in the
kitchen, but the noise traveled fast and furiously down the long hallway to the
twin-bedded room as if fueled by Frank’s anxiety.  She thought her room
would offer some sanctuary.  But despite that fact it was the first room
that she had known and where she grew up, she felt nothing for it. 
Perhaps because it was nothing more than a room inside of her father’s
house. 

At
one time, she and Angie had shared the room. Now all traces of Angie were gone,
but evidence of Silvia remained in every corner of the room.  Her
childhood relics, like old picture books and My Little Ponies, were piled
messily on her shelves.  The radical junior prom dress, which she had made
herself out of vintage floral curtains bought at an antique store, was still in
her closet.  Old concert tickets were tucked into her mirror frame, along
with pictures of her with high school friends whose names she had
forgotten.  A collection of vinyl albums she inherited from her mother
lived in one of the room’s dusty corners, and some belongings from her present
life, including art supplies and clothing, were shoved into another dusty
corner.  Her clothes were thrown in orange crates she obtained from a
supermarket while at college.  She refused to move her clothing into her
old dresser so as to remind herself that the stay was very temporary. 
Besides, she had kept her clothes in these plastic containers for so long that
they had grown familiar to her, and she had grown to like their
familiarity.  They fit in well with the rest of her disposable lifestyle
of used futons, cheap clothing, and plastic kitchenware.