Olive Branches Don't Grow On Trees

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  Not surprisingly, the image of Frank lying face down on the kitchen floor stayed with her all through the next day. She was glad that it was a short day at work and that her relief would be coming in early. As soon as she got out of the mall parking lot, she gassed up her car, got on the Garden State Parkway, and drove south. She knew she was heading to one of the shore towns on the coast, but not sure which one. She could have stopped at Ventnor, but it was too close to Atlantic City, and she wanted to be nowhere near that frenzied casino energy. She could have stopped in Ocean City, one of the last dry towns left in the country. It was clean and easy, with a boardwalk that stretched for miles. Or Sea Isle City. But none were far enough. Not only did she want to be far away from Frank’s house and the image of him lying on the kitchen floor; there was something else.

  She felt hungry for the road. She felt that she wanted to drive and drive and drive. She wanted to remember, in her bones, that same feeling she had during all of her road trips. During all of these long distance driving adventures, she felt strong, especially because she had done most of them alone. She could change a tire on the side of the highway alone. She could set up a campsite alone. When it was raining or too cold to sleep outside, she could check into a motel alone. When she remembered her times on the road, she felt that strength within herself and really loved being who she was.

  So she drove until she couldn’t drive any further within the state of New Jersey. She went until she reached Cape May, the most southern point of the state and the only place in New Jersey where she could see an unobstructed view of the sunset. As she approached the town, she caught sight of a white heron with its little beak pointed up to the sky, its skinny legs dangling in the air, and its delicate angel wings spread free.

  She drove over a bridge, entered into the town harbor, and followed the signs to the beach. It was a weekday before the busy summer season, so the quaint little Victorian house-filled city wasn’t terribly crowded. She parked only a couple of blocks from the beach, and stopped by a pizza stand to grab a slice that she took with her to the boardwalk. She sat on a bench and ate, as seagulls gathered around her waiting for her to throw them a crumb. One brazen gull came and stood on the bench right beside her as if threatening to take her food away. It caused her to eat so quickly that she got indigestion. She walked the length of the boardwalk, which was short and quiet, relative to other boardwalks on the South Jersey coast. There were few shops, one of which sold chocolate covered strawberries that Silvia couldn’t resist.

  The shore brought back memories of being with Grandma Tucci. These memories were vague and beautiful and looked like an Impressionistic painting in her mind’s eye. She remembered sitting on the beach with her in late summer with wet, salty breezes blowing gently while they ate lemon water ice. They didn’t speak or need words. They were bound together like fingers crossed or shoe strings tied. Just listening to the music of the waves-- rhythmic, constant, and forever. Silvia came to know peace through her grandma and their times together at the beach. If she had not experienced this sacred space, she might not crave it so much. But she did experience peace. She knew what it felt like in her bones, in her stomach, and in her head.

  Because she knew peace, she knew war. She could sense when a fight was in the air, feel the aftermath of a fight, and surely knew when a fight was happening. She knew the looks and sounds of a fight only too well. She knew the hateful words thoughtlessly thrown into the air, as if they could be taken back one day, as if they could go backwards. She recalled all of the times that Frank called Cosmo a failure, until the word failure eventually became a part of Cosmo’s skin. There was also pain over the absence of words, like the time that Frank told Vince that he loved him and Vince said nothing back. The one word that was never heard in the Greco household was the word sorry, because to say sorry would be to admit to being wrong. Grandma Tucci was only too willing to admit to being wrong because she knew that admitting to being wrong was how she could become a better person.

  She knew that all of their family fights had some point of origin, with most continuing for so long that the origin was lost. Whatever the origin, Frank was either in the center of all of the family fights, or sometimes on the sidelines, cheering the players on. Silvia knew that he couldn’t help himself. Fighting was what he knew. It was what he was raised on. According to Donna, there was never a second of peace in the household where he was raised by a drunk father and a drama queen mother. His childhood memories were filled with frequent visits from the town police, who were on a first name basis with his father. When his father wasn’t busy raising hell, his mother was busy turning her children against each other and threatening to kill herself because she “couldn’t take it anymore!”

  Although Donna wasn’t a fighter, she had grown up in a family of fighters, and so she gravitated towards what was familiar. Hence, her marriage to Frank made perfect sense. Silvia reflected on how Donna’s family feuding escalated when her father died. Her well-off sister hired an attorney to contest their father’s will, and in doing so, divided the family into two factions. The money that her sister would have gotten from their father’s estate wasn’t worth the legal fees, but she had to get that which she felt she was entitled. With the law involved, there was no hope of ever salvaging what they had as a family. “There are fights about money, and fights about everything else,” Silvia once heard her Grandma Tucci tell Donna, as if she was prophesying what would happen to her family after her own husband’s death. She went on to say that fights about money are dirtier, uglier and messier than other fights.

  Silvia suspected that her siblings were going in the same direction as her parents’ families, and she wondered what they might potentially devolve into given further complications that were bound to come. Frank had enough money for his children to fight over once he was dead, and perhaps one of her siblings would get the law involved. Although Silvia couldn’t imagine that happening, she was sure that Donna also had not foreseen what happened in her family. She then moved to thinking about other potential conflicts. Surely, Doug would not be the last spouse that wasn’t liked by one or more of the other siblings. She could imagine whatever militant hippie chick Vince would one day marry, and how Angie would condescend upon her. The godfather fight between Angie and Cosmo couldn’t be the last of this sort of thing to occur within their family. As Frank and Donna moved further away from each other, a divide in their family was bound to evolve, with Angie by Frank’s side, and Vince by Donna’s side, and Cosmo and Silvia left floating somewhere in between.

  For the first time in her life, Silvia felt the bigness of her family’s feuding. It had a life of its own, with roots going back to the early nineteen hundreds, when one of Frank’s great aunts caught her sister sleeping with her husband in their Naples apartment, or when one of Donna’s great grandfathers ran through the streets of Milan chasing his brother for stealing his money. Would this continue into the future? She couldn’t see a beginning or an end. It was way beyond some Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, or a family get-together. There was too much that couldn’t be undone.

  Many fighting scenes of her childhood passed before Silvia’s eyes. She remembered, too, how, she would retreat to the cellar steps and dream about going somewhere far away. She had never been to a far-away place but had seen pictures of such places on the television and on the computer. One of those places was Paris. She imagined that she lived in a charming, bright, colorful studio apartment with a black and white cat. She also lived in a white cottage with red trim that was surrounded by chickens and sheep and situated in the pristine English countryside. Sometimes she lived in a weathered beach house on the California coast. As she got older and realized that living at any of these wonderful residencies depended on her having money, she imagined a career for herself. When she lived in the country or at the beach side, she made a living as a painter. When she lived in Paris, she managed an art gallery. She was famous in all of these communities, an
d everyone loved her and wanted to know her. And so it went. She could still hear her Grandma Tucci saying to her, “Sometimes dreams can hurt you.” The wise old woman must have known that her granddaughter had an overly active dream life. But Silvia couldn’t help herself. She was born a dreamer.

  When old enough to move on her own, she traded moving in her head for moving in the real world. She looked down upon her father’s restlessness and inability to stop searching for a lost frying pan. But how was she so different? She searched for happiness in places the way that Frank searched for it in a bottle of gin.

  As she sat eating her chocolate covered strawberries, looking out onto the sea, and listening to the waves on this perfect late spring early evening, she wondered how she could feel such a strong and urgent need to move, to start over. She heard the words of the man at the AA meeting, who called himself a geographic, talking about how many times he had started over. She heard Cosmo saying, “What’s wrong with here?” Indeed, what was wrong with here? She was hard pressed to find anything wrong with her surroundings or anything wrong with this day, short of the mooching seagull. Why was the next place always better than the present one?

  As the sun was setting, she kept her eyes on it, not wanting to miss any of its very quick show. Once the sun touched the ocean, it would sink fast into the horizon. The ramble in her brain quieted down, as the big yellow ball slid down behind the ocean. At that moment, she realized that making peace in her family wasn’t only for her parents and siblings. It was for her sake, as well. As the sun made its final decent into the ocean, she felt a new energy for her cause to reunite her family come alive. She now felt more determined than ever to make the family gathering happen. She firmly believed, if all of her family members could be in the same room and see into each other’s eyes, they would remember that they loved each other. Then there would be an unprecedented peace in her family. She understood now why she was putting so much effort into planning the gathering and was so easily willing to prey upon her family members’ weaknesses. This was underhanded and manipulative, but it was for the good of all. If there was some peace in her family, maybe there would be some peace in herself, and she could stop running.