Olive Branches Don't Grow on Trees (20 page)

“Whenever
it does, you can rest assure that another one is right around the corner,” said
Cosmo. 

“Yeah,”
said Silvia, her eyes transfixed on the television set.

“But
why?” cried Vince. “Why does it have to be that way?”

“Because
it is,” said Silvia, who was suddenly talking like a realist.

“As
long as people have been around, they’ve been fighting with each other,” said
Cosmo. “I mean, think of the cavemen.  They fought with each other over
buffalo and women.”

“As
long as I can remember, our family’s been fighting too,” said Silvia.

“Well
that doesn’t mean we all have to go on fighting for the rest of our lives,”
said Vince, surprising Silvia with his sudden concern for the well-being of
their family.

           
“I tried Vince,” said Silvia. “I tried to fix things in our family.  Look
where it got me.”

           
“Where?” said Vince.

           
“Nowhere,” said Silvia. “No. I’m worse than nowhere.  I’m defeated.”

“Trying
to make peace in our family?” said Cosmo. “You’d have better luck in the Middle
East.”

“Well,
I think it’s great that you tried,” said Vince to Silvia.

“I
do too,” said Cosmo. “Just a tad idealistic though.”

“I
wish I wasn’t so idealistic sometimes,” said Silvia.

“Why
is that?” asked Cosmo.

“Because
if I wasn’t idealistic, I wouldn’t search for things that didn’t exist.
 I wouldn’t try to fix people or to change things.  My life would be
a lot easier.” 

“You
can’t fight your nature,” said Cosmo, “I mean
,
you are
who you are.  I am who I am.  I wouldn’t try to be a dreamer, and you
shouldn’t try to be a realist.”

“That’s
right,” said Vince. “And the world needs more people like you.  Maybe you
didn’t make peace in our family, but at least you tried. If you weren’t such an
idealist, I’m sure you wouldn’t have even tried.”

Silvia
could feel the look of disgust and anger melting from her face as Vince’s words
settled inside of her, and she lifted slightly from her bad mood to thank
him.  He was so right.  Only a dreamer like herself would attempt to
make peace in a family that had never known peace, and even though she was
feeling like a bit of a failure at the moment, she could still recognize the
fact that she did, in fact, make some worthy progress.  She did get Frank
to an AA meeting.  She did get through to Cosmo about how he should not
blame other people for his problems.  She taught Vince about the
importance of peace starting at home.  She got everyone to agree to go to
the reunion.  Truly, she had accomplished some important things.  She
wished that she could have enjoyed her feeling of accomplishment a little
longer, but Cosmo brought her back to reality when he said, “So, I guess you
won’t be living with Dad much longer, huh?”

“No,
I guess not,” she said, her face filling with gloom once more.

“What
about you, Vince?” said Cosmo, causing Silvia to turn away from Cosmo and
towards Vince.  Then a thought came to her.  Maybe he would consider
moving out to Portland with her.  Together they could make a new, clean
start away from the contaminated, stale, old part of their family.  He
could go back to school there and be completely comfortable amongst the other
like-minded students, and she could have her younger brother by her side. 
In a matter of seconds, she had both her and Vince’s life planned as the
dynamic brother-sister duo living in Portland-- the ones that got away, the
ones that made it.  And just as the sadness was beginning to float out of
her body, Vince said that he would probably move up to New Brunswick and go to
Rutgers in the spring semester.  She felt a drop inside of her stomach,
which hollowed and got cold and damp like a cave.  When she saw Cosmo nodding
his head in agreement with Vince’s alternative plan, her head became light and
distant from her body.  She was alone once again. 
Completely
alone.
 And it was probably this severe aloneness that caused her
to make a spiteful remark to Vince.

“That’ll
be great, Vince.  You’ll be right near Angie and Doug.”  She knew it
was the wrong thing to say, but she could not help herself.

“Why
did you have to say that, Silvia?” said Cosmo. “You know he can’t stand
Doug.  You’re trying to start trouble.”

She
stopped herself from saying anything back because she knew that Cosmo was right
once again.  Instead, she just looked away from both of them and towards
the ceiling with an indignant face.

“What’s
wrong, Silvia?  Why are you upset at me for going to Rutgers?” asked Vince.

“I’m
not.  I’m sorry,” she said, turning towards him and attempting to wipe the
disturbed expression from her face. “I just thought we could move to Portland
together.  That’s all.  Before what happened tonight, I was planning
on living with that maniac.  I guess I was fooling myself into thinking he
was changing and would not be so bad to live with.” 

“Why
do you want to stay in this area, anyway?” asked Cosmo. “I thought you hated it
here.”

“You’re
right about that.  But I was thinking of going back to school and getting
certified to teach art, and I thought that if I went to school in New Jersey, I
could get in- state tuition.  I thought of staying at Dad’s because it
would be free.”

“But
would it really be free?” said Cosmo, repeating the same words that Donna had
previously spoken to her.  They were both right.  The price of living
with Frank was much more costly than rent would be in a penthouse apartment in
New York City.

The
feeling of being lost had taken her over, once more.  How she hated this
feeling.  She needed a plan she could depend on, a plan that kept her from
falling down, and from having her world collapse on top of her.  The
feeling got bigger and bigger until it began to feel like an entity on to
itself, a little ugly monster sitting next to her that looked somewhat like a
grinning gargoyle.  She needed to do or say something quickly to shake
this feeling, or the monster would take her over.

“Cosmo,
I really think you would love Portland.  You need to get out of this
fucking dump once and for all.”  It was true.  His life here was no
good, and she was now seeing the dreariness of his reality all over again.

He
just looked back at her cynically and said, “How many times have we talked
about this?  Sure, I’ll quit my job, so I can move with you to
hipsterville
.  Maybe you enjoy poverty, but I don’t.”

She
shrugged and said nothing.  She wanted to say that she did not enjoy being
poor either.  She wanted to say that she did not enjoy taking dead end
jobs so that she could earn enough money to move to the next place.  She
wanted to say that she did not enjoy sleeping on a worn down futon on the
floor, dressing in second hand clothes that she kept in orange crates, and
eating pizza slices and bagels because that was all she could afford.  She
wanted to say all of this; instead, she said nothing.

She
wished, in fact, that she could make a life for herself like Cosmo had made for
himself.  She wished that she had not inherited the Greco gene for being
malcontented.  They were all malcontents, except for Cosmo, which may have
been the reason for her hanging around him so much.  He was a sturdy, old
tree in her life, and one that would not fall over or even bend with the
strongest of winds.  Maybe she was hoping that his contentedness could
somehow rub off on her.  But it had not.  Instead, she remained
stubbornly malcontented, like a typical Greco. 

“Why
do you want to move there anyway, Silvia?” asked Vince. “I mean, what can you
do there that you can’t do here?”

“It
has nothing to do with
what I can do
in
one place versus
what I can do
in another,” she said like the answer should be apparent to him.

“Well,
then, why do you want to move there?” said Vince, like he was really trying
hard to understand his sister’s rational for moving.

“It’s
because this place sucks,” said Cosmo answering for Silvia. “In fact, the whole
North East sucks as far as Silvia is concerned.”

Silvia
did not bother defending herself out of lack of energy more than anything else.
 So Vince turned to her and asked, “Is this true?”  She said it was
not completely true.  She said it was not all bad and that places like
Burlington, Vermont might be all right if she was an old, retired hippie who
did not mind the cold weather.  She said that she felt stale, tired, and
depressed here.  But she did not say her feeling stale, tired, and
depressed had anything to do with being Silvia.  Nor did she say that if
she lived in
any
place longer
than a few months, she would get this same tired, old, stale feeling.  She
did not say that she was apt to finding something wrong with wherever she lived
and that, given the opportunity, she could find something wrong with any place.
 She did know, however, in the back of her head, that all this was
completely true.  She also knew that
place
was not the real issue at hand.  Instead, it had always been
her own
sadness that could make the most beautiful of
tropical islands look ugly, the most exciting of all cosmopolitan centers seem
boring, and the most inviting of small towns to be unfriendly.  But what
she knew in her mind and what she felt in her body had not yet come
together.  She hoped that one day they would. 

**********

Vince
slept on the floor, while Silvia slept on the couch.  It was hard and creaky,
and the gray blanket that Cosmo gave her, which looked like it might have been
white at one time, was about as warm as a towel.  Even if she had been
sleeping on a luxury mattress with clean sheets and cozy blankets, she would
still not have slept well.  Her mind was too crammed full of stuff, like
whether she should stay in the area and look for an apartment and start school,
or move to Portland and put school off for another year or two and hope for the
best in terms of finding a job there.  Periodically, her mind would switch
to plans for the reunion.  As a result of the continual stream of thoughts
racing about her head, she spent the night in one of those light sleeps, more
awake than asleep, almost like she was watching herself sleeping. She could
hear Vince sleeping soundly on the cold, hard floor beside her.  She
wished that she could feel happy for him for sleeping after their very
stressful day, but in truth, she was jealous for his ability to sleep through
the night while she lay awake with rambling thoughts racing about in her head.

She
wanted to be angry with Frank for coming home like such a raging bull.
 
She wanted to be angry with having to grow up
in a house where things always went wrong, like all the Sunday dinners that
ended in a fight between Frank and Cosmo, or like the summer road trip
vacations with Frank turning the car around and driving back home just as they
were nearing their destination. But as much as she wanted to be angry with him,
she knew that he could only be who he was, and she really understood, now more
than ever, that he could just not help himself.

She
wanted to be angry with Donna for not leaving her father long ago and taking
all of them with her.  Why did she stay as long as she did and, in her own
way, help to make him into who he was?  But she is who she is and she
probably just did the best that she could do.  And besides, Silvia knew
that blame was a wasteful thing.  That is what she told Cosmo and Vince.
 So why was she letting her mind go wayward now?  The simplest and
most truthful answer was that she was tired.  So she got up and made
herself a cup of chamomile tea with a bag she happened to have stashed in her
backpack.  Finding a clean cup in Cosmo’s anarchic kitchen was not as
difficult as she had expected, and shortly after making and drinking the tea,
she nodded off.

**********

The
sun poured into the room like it was angry with Silvia for sleeping in at a
time like this.  She noticed that, for once, Cosmo had left his curtains
open and thought that he might have been trying to brighten the place up.
 This time, she wished he had not.  The black she saw through her
closed eyes turned into a reddish black, making her pull the blanket over her
eyes, which did allow her to doze back off into a state of restless
sleep.  Unfortunately, she did not sleep very long before she was awakened
again, this time by the ring of Vince’s phone.  She could no longer fool
herself that going back to sleep was even a remote possibility.

She
could hear Vince talking on the phone to one of his friends, telling him about
last night’s events and refreshing the whole scene in her memory.  She
opened her eyes, and Cosmo popped in the room to tell her about the breakfast
options.

“There’s
Cheerios or Cornflakes.  Help
yourself
,” said
Cosmo, putting his jacket on and continuing with, “
Gotta
run.  Just make sure to lock the door behind you.”