Olive Branches Don't Grow on Trees (6 page)

“And
Philly is out for reasons you already stated?” said Cosmo, not expecting an
answer, and then continued with, “What about the south?  Atlanta?  It's
cheaper down there.”

Silvia
looked at him with cynical eyes, “Would you live in the south?  A bunch of
rednecks down there that say eye-
talian
.”

“So,
you'll get to Portland and decide that you don't like it there.  It won't
take you long to find something wrong with the place, and then you'll get
depressed, and you'll come back here and get some shit job, and maybe move in
with Dad again because you'll be broke.”

There
was a short silence after Cosmo's little prophecy that seemed very long and
noisy to Silvia, who had suddenly developed the kind of lump in her throat that
precedes tears, but because she was not a crier, she got angry with Cosmo and
stormed out of his apartment without saying a word.  Cosmo must have known
that any attempts to dissuade her from leaving would be in vain.  He was
inclined to make blunt, insensitive remarks, like the time that he said the
only kind of jobs Silvia could ever hang on to were those at book stores and
health food stores.  Silvia actually appreciated his sense of honesty and
could usually tolerate his remarks as long as they were not about her one and
only sensitive spot, which was her inability to stay in one place.

She
knew that Cosmo, like everyone else in her life, could never understand how
painful it was for her to be still.  She thought of the times that she had
wanted to stay put in a place for longer than a few months, but she simply
could not.  
Whenever she planned on moving to a new
place, she intended it to be her last move, but she knew somewhere in the back
of her mind, that it would not be her last.
 The very thought of
staying put in one place frightened her.  While most people were stressed
by the prospect of moving to a new place, she was stressed by having to stay in
the same one.  When she occasionally had to stay for longer than a few
months out of financial strain, she felt like a lion she had once seen that had
been ruthlessly placed in a very small cage in a
run down
zoo somewhere in Arizona. 

As
she walked down the street to her car, taking fast and angry footsteps, stewing
over Cosmo’s remarks, she came across a neon sign that said
Psychic Reader
that she must have
passed by several times before, but had not noticed until now.  She always
laughed at psychics, and the desperate people who patronized their
businesses.  But, right now she felt so lost and desperate that she was
actually considering going into the psychic shop.  She quickly knocked on
the door, before she had a chance to reconsider paying the fortuneteller a
visit, and then waited for almost an entire minute for some lady in a flowing
scarf to come to the door, but there was nothing.  So she knocked again,
and this time her knocks were hard and loud.  Still, there was no answer.
 So she peeked in to see some pudgy lady stuffed into a pair of very
unfashionable stone washed jeans, sleeping in front of a television set with an
opened phone book thrown over her face to block the light.  This was,
undoubtedly, the all-knowing psychic.     

**********

The
drive back to Jersey was short, but seemed long on this particular night.
 Silvia was especially upset by having to spend her last four dollars on
the bridge toll and by missing her exit because of her preoccupation with her
anger at Cosmo. She was beginning to think that Frank was right about her
brother.  He was a failure and would never amount to much of
anything.  Yet, she knew that her brother’s prediction about her life was
true-- that she would find something wrong with Portland, move away from there,
and probably be forced to move back in with her father for lack of money. 
He crushed the fantasy she had been living on, and in doing so, crushed her
spirit.  The combination of feeling depressed and angry made her mind like
a blank slate, but not the kind of blank slate that is cultivated from years of
practicing meditation.  Rather, it was a dirty, worn down, gray slate that
nothing good could come in or out of. 

When
she got to the house, she went straight into her room, closed the door and
collapsed on the bed face down and still fully dressed.  She had about
seven hours of light sleep filled with a series of vivid dreams that played in
her head like a reel of short horror films.  She could not remember any
coherent plot lines in her dreams, but she did recall that she was being chased
by some monster that looked to be made out of clay and had a head like a giant
turnip.  She distinctly recalled a feeling of entrapment as she ran from
the monster.  No matter which way she turned or how fast she ran, she
could not get away.  The only way out was to wake up, and so finally she
screamed herself awake.

**********

Cosmo
waited a few days to send an apology email to Silvia, and although the word
“sorry” did not appear in the letter, she knew that it was the closest thing to
an apology she would get from him.  There was a link to an article from
the
New York Times
about
Portland declaring that it was a super place to live.  Silvia wrote back
to corroborate what the article said, and to ask Cosmo if he would consider
moving there with her.  She offered many reasons that moving to Portland
would be good for him:  Anything he was doing here in Philadelphia, he
could easily do in Portland; Portland is much nicer than Philadelphia and has
nearly the same cost of living; Portland has the best public transportation
system in the country, and as Cosmo did not own a car, it would be perfect for
him; and last but not least, there are lots of cute hipster girls in Portland!
 He responded by saying that, despite her viable arguments, he still did
not see any compelling reason why he should move to Portland and added that he
hated hipsters. 

She
would have written back with more attempts at persuasion, but she knew that her
attempts would be futile.  She knew that Cosmo was born content and that
he could be content no matter where he lived, because place was not important
to him.  She admired and resented him at the same time.  He did not
need to get away.  He never even went on vacation and he would never get excited
about their one family vacation to Montreal every year in August, whereas she
had thought of nothing else but Montreal all summer. 

Even
more, he seemed to have a permanent sense of space and freedom, like he could
be on the other side of the world without leaving his apartment.  Silvia
always felt like her world was closing in on her, regardless of the distances
she traveled or the openness of the space around her.  She did have her
painting, which worked well to free her spirit, but in the absence of her art,
she was trapped in her thoughts about place.  She thought about her
current place, how she wanted to get out of there, and where she would move
next.  She wondered why her own brother had this sense of permanent
freedom and why it was so hard for her to be free.  They were two very
different people and both responded to their worlds in two entirely different
ways.  Cosmo never seemed to be too bothered by Frank’s yelling.  It
just boomeranged off of him.  But their father’s screams penetrated
Silvia’s skin and went right into the very core of her being. 

For
a long time, Silvia just accepted Frank’s rage as something that would take too
much energy and strength to change or alter in any way.  But now she
thought, if he sobered up, he might be less raging.  He might even be less
inclined to ruin the upcoming family gathering, as he had ruined so many in the
past.  Although she knew that he would probably not be able to get sober
by the date of the gathering, she did think that, at least, he could get started
on the path to sobriety.  She did not stop to consider the great magnitude
of such a challenge.  She was young and idealistic enough to think that
such a thing would be possible.  The only trick for her was to figure out
how
something would be possible.
 She thought that an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting would be a great
start.  She also knew that the best way to convince her father of anything
was to resort to a source that he respected, and there was no better source for
this than his brother.  Uncle Nick had several years of sobriety under his
belt and had been attending meetings for many years.  Silvia knew all
about his struggles with alcohol, as he was not at all shy about talking about
his plight from a falling apart drunk to a sturdy, sober man. 

Uncle
Nick was Frank’s older brother; shorter and stouter than Frank, with a big head
of hair in a black pompadour and a slight widow’s peak in the center of his
forehead.  When Cosmo was young, he nicknamed him Eddie Munster because of
his hair, and the Greco children would secretly laugh behind his back. But they
all loved him.  He was a lovable sort of guy that came to their house
every Christmas dressed up as Santa Claus, with lots of hugs and toys for all
of them. 

 Frank
liked Nick.  Even more, he respected him, which was much more than he
could say for his other brother, Paul, of whom he did not think very
much.  Paul was so obviously favored by Frank’s mother, and because of
this favoritism, the two other brothers resented him bitterly.  They also
resented his success as a partner in one of Philadelphia’s premiere law firms
and his seemingly functional family.  Most of all, they resented his
ability to sip a martini at a formal dinner party with friends in his
antique-filled Main Line house, without needing to indulge in a second, third,
fourth, fifth, and so on.  But there was something else that made Frank
and Nick dislike Paul so strongly.  He was not who he was.  He had a
cheerful, bright disposition and appeared to be a great, easy going and genuine
person, but he was a fraud.  Even though Silvia had often wished for a
different father, she was grateful for not getting her Uncle Paul for
one.  Her father was crass and crazy and scary and mean, but at least he
was honest.  With Frank, you knew what you were getting.   
 

Because
Frank and Nick had this mutual enemy and no other siblings, they were closely
bonded and influenced each other.  So when Silvia called her uncle to tell
him that she was sure that her father was an alcoholic, and sure that Donna
left him because of it, Nick wasted no time in calling his brother and
convincing him that going to a meeting was the only way he was ever going to be
able to quit drinking.  But both Silvia and her uncle failed to recognize
one very crucial nugget of information:  Frank did not want to quit.
 He did not have a problem with his drinking.  Everyone else did.
 But he went along with the whole meeting thing to appease his brother and
quite possibly to make his persistent daughter relent a little.

Silvia
got the day and time of the meeting and told Frank various times throughout the
week that they would be going to the Wednesday night meeting at seven o’clock.
 She also left a note on the kitchen table on the morning of the
meeting.  Even though she knew that there was no way he could have
forgotten their plans to attend the meeting, he pretended that it slipped his
mind, and when she came home at a half passed six in the evening, she found him
sitting in the kitchen having a drink.

“Dad!”
she snapped as he was taking a sip from his glass. “You know we’re going to
that meeting tonight!”

“Oh,
I forgot,” he said with a smirk that made it obvious to Silvia that he was
lying.  “Well, just wait until I finish this drink, and we’ll go.”

Silvia
knew that he did not expect her to take him up on the offer to go to the
meeting after having a drink, so it was a total surprise to him when she came
back from her room in a change of clothes and told him that she was all ready
to go.  She drove, while Frank switched the radio.  When he decided
that there was nothing on the radio that he wanted to hear, he began
whistling.  He whistled loud and clear, making occasional trills.  He
was an excellent whistler, and Silvia always thought that if he had ever
entered some sort of whistling contest, he would easily win.  Whistling
seemed like a happy-person thing to do, so she wondered why he whistled.
 Maybe there was a part of him that wanted to be happy, that wanted to
break free from his shell of misery, and whistling was how he tried to do it.

**********

The
meeting was held in a room in the back of a local church, with dim lighting and
a bunch of rat colored folding chairs formed in a circle.  It was the same
room where old people played bingo on Friday nights, where the young kids had
their catechism classes on Sunday mornings, and where the drunks came to get
sober on various nights throughout the week.  With a group of well over
fifty people, Silvia assumed that she picked a popular meeting.  There
were a few formalities in the beginning, including an opportunity for any
newcomers to announce to the group that he or she had never before attended a
meeting, at which time, Frank elected to stay silent.

Silvia
had no expectations of him speaking up.  She knew that, as far as he was
concerned, he should not even be at this meeting.  He was not an
alcoholic.  He was just someone who liked to have a good time.  He
would not have come to the meeting had it not been for his desire to please his
good
brother.  Frank
claimed to be an extrovert, needing to have people constantly around him, which
went along with his
choice
to
drink.  He was a highly sociable person who liked to have fun, and Silvia
was an introverted weirdo who could stay by herself painting happily for
hours.  Her diagnosis of him as an alcoholic was also due to her own
abnormality, which was undoubtedly the fault of Donna’s bad genes.  She
could sense that Frank was sitting there next to her as an observer, not a
participant of this group of defective people to which he did not belong.
 But at least he was there.