Olive Branches Don't Grow on Trees (5 page)

“That's
disgusting Cosmo,” she said, removing the bug from the wall with a paper towel
she got from the kitchen.

“What?”
he said without looking up from his game.  He probably had not even
noticed the bug.  He was, in fact, oblivious to most everything around
him, and Silvia supposed it had something to do with his brilliance. “Cosmo’s
so smart that he forgets to comb his hair,” Donna would say.  His hair was
a wild mess of not-yet-grayed Einstein hair going in all directions like palm
trees branches.  He dressed himself in whatever he could find.  Today
it happened to be an old pair of jeans, an orange tee shirt, and a blazer style
jacket that made no sense with the rest of his getup and was too short on his
tall lanky body.   

“Oh
that bug,” he said grinning. “I was waiting for you to come over. I thought we
might give it a proper burial.”

“Very
funny,” said Silvia. 

“You
hungry?” he went into the kitchen and opened his cabinets, revealing so many
cans of tuna fish stacked high on top of each other that it looked as if he
might be expecting a natural catastrophe to strike at any minute.

“I
brought my own food,” said Silvia, taking out an individual sized container of
rice milk and a box of organic cookies with no dairy, no sugar, no wheat, and
no soy.  She offered one to Cosmo, who took one bite of one of the cookies
and curled his face up in disgust.

“These
taste like tree bark,” he said, swallowing his one small bite like it was
killing him.

“Well,
I like them, and that's all I care about,” said Silvia taking Cosmo’s dislike
of her cookies as a rejection.  He went over to his refrigerator, walking
in his usual manner with a bounce in his step and his head bopping back and
forth like a song.  By the looks of the ingredients he got out and put on
the table, Silvia assumed that he was planning to make tuna fish and spaghetti,
an old family favorite that Donna had learned from her mother.

“You
should take it easy on the tuna fish, you know.  It has a lot of mercury
in it,” said Silvia, sitting down at Cosmo’s small white kitchen table.

“Yeah,
I should,” replied Cosmo, completely unconvinced by Silvia’s warning.  She
was always warning about something: Cell phones, nitrates, trans-fats,
slouching, the sun.

“You
can get mercury poisoning.  Doesn’t that worry you?” said Silvia.

“Ah,”
said Cosmo.  He paused to look at the ceiling as though he was really
contemplating this question, and then came back with a definitive, “No!”

“Have
you talked to Vince?” asked Silvia.

“No,
how’s he doing?” said Cosmo, as he filled a big soup pot with water.

“He’s
nervous about going so far away and he’s nervous that Dad won’t help with his
tuition, and he can’t get financial aid because Dad makes too much.  So
he’s not doing so great.”

“Oh,
don’t worry about Dad.  He just likes to string people along.  I bet
he’ll help him after all is said and done.”  He began chopping garlic and
tomatoes on a cutting board.

Frank
favored Cosmo least of all his children, and Silvia was always struck by how
indifferent Cosmo often seemed to the lack of favoritism shown to him by their
father.  Frank formulated his opinion of Cosmo before he was even born,
when Donna was pregnant with him and decided to name him after her father.
 Her father’s name was
Cosimo
, and she had
changed the spelling slightly, but it was not enough of a change for
Frank.  Frank and Donna’s father disliked each other from their very first
meeting.  Silvia could only assume that this was because they were so
similar.  Like Frank,
Cosimo
was always ready
for a fight, and like Frank, he had a very strong presence.  Silvia could
always tell when her Grandpa
Tucci
was around, even
if he did not speak a word or make a sound.  Perhaps Frank would have
liked his first-born son if he had had a different name, and then perhaps Cosmo
would like Frank back.  Frank would have given his son all of the support
and encouragement that he needed.  Cosmo would have stayed in school
because making his father proud would have been important to him.  Frank
would not have to spend years after his son dropped out of college speaking the
same refrain, “He could have done something with his life!”  And Cosmo
would have probably been working as a researcher for NASA or doing some kind of
comparable job.  But Cosmo was given his cursed name, and with it, a
lifetime of being resented by his own father.  Silvia suspected that Frank
may also have been jealous of Cosmo’s brilliance.  He could not, for the
life of him, figure out from whom his son got that “science gene,” but he
surely assumed it was inherited from someone on the Greco side.

“I
can see Vince in Berkeley,” said Cosmo, stirring spaghetti into a big pot of
boiling water. “He’ll fit right in with all his causes.”

“He
wants to save the world,” Silvia added.

“The
world’s too late for saving,” said Cosmo as he opened a can of tuna.

“That’s
exactly what I think,” said Silvia, enthusiastic about her and her brother’s
like-mindedness.  Cosmo, however, was not at all surprised that they had
the same thought.  He was not moved or shaken by much, kind of like a big
rock that sits on the shore and does not move, even when a gigantic wave sweeps
over it.

“I
guess he’s got to be true to himself,” said Cosmo, with skeptical eyes and a
slight grin.

“Well,
I was thinking we should have some kind of gathering for him, like a graduation
party.  Mom thinks it would be a good thing too.  She suggested it.”

“I’m
surprised she’s not nervous about seeing Dad.  I sure as hell don’t want
to see him. 
Or Angie.”
 

“Well,
I’m sure she is, but her feelings for Vince might outweigh her apprehension
about seeing Dad.”

“If
we have it at home, she’ll be really uneasy.  We might have to have it in
a restaurant, and you know Dad isn’t going to want to pay for anything out.”

“Well
maybe we can go
some place
cheap. I don’t know, a
pizzeria or something,” said Silvia leaning forward in her chair.

“You
think Angie will come down here for a pizzeria?” he said sarcastically while
stirring the spaghetti.

“Well,
all I'm saying is it would be nice to have a something for Vince where
everybody is getting
along,
or at least pretending to
get along.  He's nervous about going so far away, and Dad keeps changing
his mind about helping with his tuition, and Mom thinks he's really depressed
and it would be nice to have something before he leaves for college.”  She
said all this without taking a gasp for air.

“Yeah
it would be nice, but I’m not sure how likely a nice, peaceful gathering of our
family will be.”  He placed the tuna, garlic, and tomatoes into a heated
frying pan filled with olive oil.

“Well
we can try,” she said frustratingly and left the room for the bathroom.
 When she returned, Cosmo was situated in front of the television set with
a huge bowl of spaghetti and tuna fish.

“I’d
offer you some, but I know you don’t want any,” he said through his smacking.

“You’re
right about that,” she said walking over to the TV, on top of which was a DVD
of Monty Python’s
The Life of Brian
.
 She picked it up and looked back at her brother, who then recommended
that they watch it.  So they did.  She felt relief at the idea of
watching a movie and being able to forget about her problems for a little
while.  But at the end of the movie, when the song “Always Look on the
Bright Side of Life” played, she slumped down into her seat and started to
think of her own life and wonder why, with all that she had to be happy about,
she was unable to look on the bright side of life.  She was well aware of
the potential harshness of reality and knew that her own life was, relatively
speaking, a great life.  She read the news that was filled with nothing
but war and tragedy and catastrophes.  She walked plenty of city streets
where she had seen homeless people freezing to death before her eyes, wearing
trashcan clothes on their broken bodies.  She had no real problems, except
for her cursed tendency to see what was wrong with things and, in particular,
places.  A tendency she had cultivated like a garden of rotten flowers.
 A tendency that caused her to want to leave wherever she was.

“Have
you ever been to Portland?” she asked Cosmo, breaking the trend of thought in
her head.

“Portland,
Maine or Portland, Oregon?” he asked.

“Portland,
Oregon, of course,” she said, like it should have been perfectly apparent to
him which one she was talking about.

“Can’t
say that I have.”

She
waited a few seconds for him to ask her why she was asking him if he had ever
been there, but when he did not say anything, she said, “Well, I’m thinking
about moving there.”

“What
else is new?” Cosmo said, sitting back in his seat.

“What’s
that supposed to mean?” said Silvia, with a fighting look on her face.

“You
move all the time, Silvia.”

“Well,
so what if I do?  It doesn’t hurt anyone.”

“So,
why Portland?
 Have you ever been there?” 
Cosmo asked like he knew what her answer would be.

“No,
I haven’t.  But I have a friend who just moved there, and she loves it.
 And I’ve never heard anything but good about it.  It’s always rated
highly in all those books about places to live.  And it’s supposed to have
great public transportation.  And...”

Cosmo
cut her off probably because he
knew,
that if he did
not cut her off, he would be sitting there all night while she rationalized her
next relocation.

“So,
why do you want to move there?” he asked with emphasis on the word
you
.

“Because
it’s where everyone is moving to,” she said, trying to convince herself of her
answer.

“No,
I mean what’s in it for you?” asked Cosmo.

“What’s
in any place?” asked Silvia.

“Exactly,”
said Cosmo.

“I
don’t get it,” said Silvia, who was beginning to get very frustrated with the
way the conversation was going.

“What’s
wrong with here?” said Cosmo.

“By
here, I assume you mean Philadelphia?” said Silvia, and then continued on with
her answer to the question before giving Cosmo an opportunity to clarify what
he meant. “I’m not even sure where to begin.  For one thing, it’s fucking
filthy.  It smells like piss and garbage everywhere.  It’s
provincial.  And has a high crime rate.  And well, it’s just
gross.” 

She
was preparing to continue with her rant, when Cosmo interrupted and said,
“Maybe if you were doing something you liked to do, you wouldn’t care so much
about where you are.”

Silvia was about to be
vindictive and degrade Cosmo’s entire existence by saying something to the
effect of him being one to talk about doing something he liked.  As far as
she could see, he was wasting his life away by working a routine job that was
beneath him intellectually, by spending his spare time playing video games, and
by going out with women he did not really seem to care for.  But she stopped
herself as she
knew,
deep down inside that he was only
trying to help.  Besides, she had already done a pretty good job bashing
the city in which he lived.  Without being willing to put her brother
down, she felt deprived of a rebuttal to his silly belief that if she was doing
something she liked, this area would suddenly and magically transform into a
great place.  But then she thought of something to say in her defense.

“I
love to paint and I do it almost every day. What about that?”

“I
mean a job you like,” said Cosmo.

“Well,
maybe I will pursue that path
some day
, but I’m not
doing it here,” said Silvia, folding her arms and looking up at the ceiling.

“So,
you have to be in Portland to do that?” said Cosmo with a jaded expression on
his face, like this was not, by any means, the first time that they had had
this discussion.

“No,
I don’t have to be there necessarily.  But I can’t be here!  I won’t
be here!  I’m not staying in this fucking city or anywhere in the area for
that matter!”

“You
talk about it like
it’s
Baghdad,” said Cosmo.

“I
know it’s not that bad.  It’s just that I don’t feel inspired here.”

“Then
why did you leave Tucson and come back here?” said Cosmo.

“Those
summers there were killers,” she said immediately, like she had her response all
prepared for some time now.

“What
about New York?”

“It
was too expensive.  It's no place for an artist anymore.  All the
rich people drove the artists out.  Same in any big, overrated, overpriced
city,” she said like she had rehearsed this excuse several times as well.

“And
Chicago?”

“Have
you ever experienced a Chicago winter?  They’re absolutely brutal.”