Olive Branches Don't Grow On Trees
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Frank insisted on driving home and stopping off at a local diner that was inconveniently positioned on a traffic circle. It was a big, shiny, chrome-covered rectangle filled with red vinyl booths and a counter that stretched almost the entire length of the place. They ordered garlic fries and milkshakes. When the waitress asked if Frank wanted anything to drink, Silvia just glared at him, forcing him to tell the waitress that he would just have water. Silvia went to use the restroom. By the time she got back, the waitress had brought their milkshakes, and Frank had nearly finished his.
“I hate it when it's over,” said Frank, taking the final sip of his malted shake.
On extremely rare occasions, Silvia felt connected to Frank, and this was one of those rare occasions. He was like a big, overgrown boy saddened by the ending of a milkshake. She even offered him some of hers because she knew that, despite his intense craving for more, he was too cheap to buy another. He was simple and innocent at that moment, and his eyes turned young. She had trouble comprehending how this harmless, youthful creature could coexist in the same body with the scary, old man that was Frank. It seemed as if whenever any good tried to glimmer through, the stronger more powerful side of his being would crush it.
She remembered back to the time that she got the scholarship to art school, and how proud he was of her achievement. “You're going to be the next Botticelli!” he told her with a smile so big that it looked almost painful. At first she thought his elation was due to his being off the hook of having to pay her tuition. But it was more than just his sense of frugality. He really was proud, and Silvia felt his approval shining down on her for the first and only time in her life. It was, however, a very short-lived period of time, as she suspected it would be, and soon Frank was back to his typical way of being in the world. Silvia came home one day to find her belongings out on the front porch, and upon going inside, she saw a note on the table that said that she had to leave the house immediately. Donna was away at a conference for work, so she couldn’t intercede, as she usually did on her children’s behalf. Silvia wondered what she could have done to upset Frank, but she also knew that her wondering was useless because it was almost impossible to know such a thing. What might upset him was anybody’s guess. Maybe he was upset that she, like all of his other children, wasn’t following in his footsteps and studying law or studying something like philosophy that would prepare her for law school. He was as unpredictable and volatile as a volcano. She also knew that, whatever eruption was happening inside of him, would soon settle down, and so she gathered her belongings on the front porch and went to a friend’s house for the night.
“So what did you think of the meeting?” she asked him. His face turned from remorse, for finishing both his and her shakes, to suspicion.
“Why are you so interested in getting me to an AA meeting all of a sudden? Did Mom put you up to this?” he said.
“Oh what the fuck Dad! Can’t a daughter take some interest in her father’s well-being?” she said as she gathered bits of garlic and placed them on a fry.
“Watch your language.”
“What about you? You curse all the time.”
“That’s different. I’m old. It doesn’t matter that I curse.” He looked down sadly again at his remaining couple drops of milkshake.
“So, you still haven’t answered my question,” she said, disregarding his warning about the use of profanities.
“It was pretty much what I expected.” His face looked jaded. And then, in an effort to take himself out of the discussion, he said, “Boy, that speaker had some story, huh?”
“Well, how did you feel about being there?” she said, with an emphasis on the word you.
“Alright, I guess,” he said as if her question made no sense.
“Did you get anything out of it?”
“What do you mean by that?” He squished up his face like a prune.
“Could you relate to any of the other little stories or the big story?”
“Not really.”
“So, what’s the chance of us going back next Wednesday?” She said this mustering up as much hopefulness as she could in her face.
“I don’t really see the need for it. Look at that one woman with all the problems. The one with the dark lipstick. She goes to meetings all the time, and they don’t seem to be doing her any good. In fact, they could be making her worse.” Then he said he had to go to the bathroom and left without giving his daughter a chance to respond. As soon as he came back, she said, “I doubt the meetings are making her worse,” as if there had been no break in the conversation.
“Making who worse?”
“Dark Lipstick,” she said, making her father laugh at the nickname she had suddenly adopted for the woman from the meeting. His laughter was loud and mighty, like the rest of him. It made Silvia remember that he wasn’t always miserable; that he liked to laugh; and that he had a good sense of humor when he wasn’t busy being angry.
“Well, do you think you might go back, Dad?” she asked again, taking advantage of his current lighthearted state.
“Yeah, why not?”
Silvia accepted this reply and thought of her venture on this night as a great achievement. She was getting through to him when no one else could. She had a very quick miniature fantasy about him being a sober man, a good father, winning Donna back, and them all living peacefully ever after. She was quite proficient at fantasizing. Within twenty seconds, she was able to have a complete vision of what her family would become thanks to her amazing self. She saw Frank and her sitting in the living room with Vince and Cosmo and Angie. He was talking about how grateful he was to Silvia for saving him. He was calm and still and not his usual jumpy self, and he sat all the way back in his chair instead of on the edge. He was apologetic for not being a better father and was soliciting his children for ideas on how to get Donna back. Angie may have felt some slight jealousy towards Silvia for not being Frank’s favorite for the first time in her life, but Silvia was, after all, the savior.
She would be the one to save Frank, and he was someone worth saving. He was, in fact, a great person in terms of his abilities and past achievements, and to have his greatness lost in a bottle of scotch was a terrible thing that affected not only himself and his family, but the world at large, as he was the type of person that had the potential to make a difference in the world. He wasn’t the type of attorney that was just out to make a quick buck. He was the kind that was always on the side of the underdog-- the old, the poor, the disabled-- the most unfortunate people who had been wronged by the system and, therefore, by life. Even for clients not wrongly accused, he could look well beyond their rightful accusations and into the real cause of their wrongdoings.
He eventually became disillusioned with the system, after seeing one too many good people wronged by it. His disillusionment edged its way in through his spirit, little by little, until he turned into a broken man. The final culprit was an elderly client evicted from her apartment so that the new landlord could convert the building into condominiums. She was ruthlessly kicked out, and when Frank tried to fight for her rights, he was smashed by a system that was too big to fight. When he was asked to be a judge in his town’s local courthouse, he accepted this honor with indifference. The part of him with hopes and dreams, the part that Vince had so strongly inherited, had faded out of him. Silvia could almost understand how something, like a lost dream, could drive a person drink.
But Donna claimed that it wasn’t just a series of bad events that led to his alcoholism, but that he had been a drunk for most of this life. She thought that if he had had a different mother, he may have never been an alcoholic. But if he had a different mother, Silvia thought, he would not be who he was and, therefore, neither would she. Frank’s mother was an angry woman with tremendous breasts and an intensely stern stare. She was calculating and clandestine and she spent her time spreading false rumors about her children in an effort to turn them against each other. S
he told Paul that Frank thought he was cheap, and told Frank the same thing about Paul. She told Nick that Frank didn’t think much of him because he and his wife were childless, and told Frank that Nick thought his kids were spoiled brats.
By the time Silvia was old enough to have any recognition of anything, most of the damage in her father’s family had already been done, and she only experienced the aftermath of the many wars that had taken place. For a short while, Paul lived in the same town as Frank, and when any member of one family would encounter a member of the other, they would just pretend that they didn’t see each other. Frank’s children were forbidden to speak with any of their Uncle Paul’s children, so she had no opinion of her cousins because she didn’t know them.
Silvia’s memories of her Grandma Greco were mostly of her talking about dying, which, according to Frank, she had been doing since he was a small boy. She talked about it like it was a formal occasion, like a prom, a ball, or a wedding. She talked about her death as if it would be the end of everybody’s world. She talked about it as if it was something she was looking forward to. But when her body actually got old, she held onto life like a vine clings to an old brick building, seeping her crinkled hands into the cracks of humanity.
She stayed in her house and saturated every nook and cranny with her crusty old smell. Silvia hated her house, which was dark and stale smelling and cluttered with useless, tasteless crap, like cheap ceramic figurines that looked as if they were purchased at the local dollar store. Silvia remembered being very disappointed when she found out that she and her family had to go to her house for Easter one year. Grandma Greco insisted on having the occasion at her house with her three sons and their children. Easter was her favorite holiday. Donna figured that this was because Easter had something to do with the long and painful suffering of Jesus. She relished her own suffering, as if she got the greatest joy from it. Grandma Tucci would call this “bella miseria,” which meant beautiful misery.
Grandma Greco had palms hanging on the walls in her kitchen and her dining room. She made stuffed shells and a ham with pineapple. She bought Perogina chocolate eggs that were to be given out to the grandchildren. Unfortunately, there were not enough eggs for all of them.
“I didn’t expect your family to come,” she said to Frank in her shriveled up voice. “You didn’t come last year or the year before.” Frank could have responded back that they were not invited to her house for the past two years, but he didn’t say anything. He respected her simply because she was his mother. Not only did he say nothing in his defense, but he also told his mother that she didn’t need to give any chocolate to his children, and there they sat for the remainder of the feast, sad and chocolateless, gazing resentfully at their cousins. Uncle Nick went out after dinner and bought some Easter candy for Frank’s kids as a form of compensation, but the old woman had nothing for them. Nor did she have any remorse or regret for buying less. Donna assumed it was intentional.
Silvia didn’t hate anything short of the really evil stuff like Nazis and terrorists, but she came pretty close to hating her Grandma Greco. It wasn’t so much for the way she had treated her and her siblings. It was how diligently and perseveringly she had damaged her father. According to Donna, she downright disliked Frank and disliked him even more after his motorcycle accident. What use could he be to her around the yard with that pathetic limp he developed as a result of the accident? Donna felt that Grandma Greco’s feelings for her son may have come from the fact that he strongly resembled her own mother, who had chosen her as the least favorite of her four daughters.
Her husband, Silvia’s grandfather, was a tall lanky man who looked like a tree that had grown crookedly. In the pictures that Silvia had seen, his hunched back and his forward leaning head made him look like he was always carrying a load of stuff on his shoulders. He died of a heart attack before Silvia was born. According to Donna, he smoked and drank heavily. “And with a wife like his, who wouldn’t?” Donna would add. Silvia was relieved when her sinister grandma died, as she couldn’t contaminate any more family gatherings, including Vince’s graduation dinner. She thought that she would ask her father about this occasion tonight as he was in a decent mood.
“I think that we should do something to commemorate Vince’s graduation,” Silvia said in a nervous voice. “We can all go out to the Central Cafe or something.”
“Are you serious? You know I’m going to end up paying for the whole thing if we do have something. You know I’m paying for his tuition and, for Christ sake, taxes are due in a couple of months!”
Silvia could have persisted, but she didn’t. In fact, she didn’t say another word on the subject. She had so few good times with her father, and she didn’t want to spoil the good time that she was having with him now. So she kept her mouth shut and decided that she would re-approach the subject the very next time that he was in a bearable mood. She only hoped that that time would be soon, as Vince’s graduation was around the corner.