Olive Branches Don't Grow On Trees

  **********

  When Silvia and Vince returned to the house, Frank was sleeping in the den in front of a blaring television set, snoring loud and rhythmic. Even when he slept, he was loud. He snored and squirmed and tossed and rattled. He slept in the den probably more than he slept in his own bed, especially since Donna had left. The room was dark and cozy, and had a long red plaid couch that stretched from one side of the room to the other. The built-in shelves were filled with his books from college and law school, with a smattering of Plato and Dickens and legal codes. These reminded Frank of his accomplishments and of who he was.

  “He’s passed out for the count,” said Vince, as he always said when Frank was passed out.

  “I think he has court tonight,” said Silvia, semi-worried. Frank worked as a judge in a local courthouse, and despite the fact that his family life was a wreck, his professional life was quite together. He shined as a judge just as he had shined as a lawyer. Silvia had gone to court with him on occasion and was almost unable to recognize the distinguished man who sat before the courtroom.

  “Don’t worry. He’ll be up in time. He always is. He’s never late.”

  “Oh yeah,” said Silvia, as she recalled that Frank never needed an alarm clock. This wasn’t true of herself. Waking up was always difficult for Silvia, even with an alarm clock. She was inclined to push the snooze button several times after the buzz went off. She had tried moving the clock across the room from her so that she would be forced to get up out of bed to turn it off. But this never quite worked out. She would get up and go over to the clock to push the snooze button and then drag the clock closer to her bed so that she could proceed to push the snooze several more times. It was no wonder that she was perpetually late for everything.

  She and Vince went into their respective rooms and closed the doors, which was another thing that Frank hated and didn’t understand. “Why are people always closing doors in this God Damn house?” he would say. He liked open doors. He thought that there was nothing to hide. He figured that his children closed doors because they had inherited a bad gene from Donna’s side of the family that caused them to be introverted. Silvia thought that Frank often confused things, and that in this case, he confused independence with introversion. She thought that her mother and siblings enjoyed being alone for the same reason that cats like being alone-- because they were independent. She also thought that Frank was sorely mistaken in thinking that any of her mother’s family members were introverted, and Donna, herself, least of all. On occasion, she could even be gregarious.

  Frank possibly mistook his wife’s seriousness for introversion. She was a serious person, too serious to be bothered with incidental things like small talk or the conventions of conversation. And tonight, when she called Silvia, she wasted no time getting right to the point.

  “Hi Silvie, dear,” she said in a low voice. “I’m worried about Vince.” Silvia could see her mother sitting in her very tiny studio apartment that overlooked Rittenhouse Square. It was in a high rise with a neat, clean and simple, blandly colored beige and off white interior. She moved into the place, after leaving Frank, at the suggestion of a colleague who lived in the very same building. When Silvia had last seen it, she was struck by its complete lack of decorations. It looked more like a hotel room than a place where a person lived. Silvia wondered if her mother had not made any attempts to decorate because she was intent on getting back with Frank, or because the rent was too expensive for her to afford long term and that she had planned on leaving it for a cheaper apartment. Silvia assumed that the apartment was more than her mother could afford on her part-time college professor salary.

  Aside the financial stress that Silvia imagined her mother must have felt, she was also surely stressed over leaving before Vince had graduated high school and was safely out of the house. Every time she and Silvia had spoken since she left Frank, Vince had been the focal point of their conversation.

  “He sounds depressed when I talk to him on the phone. And last weekend, when I saw him, he moped around the whole time. I know he's not mad at me. I didn't do anything to make him mad, and he doesn't get mad. You know the way he is. He could be depressed. I really hope Dad isn’t being a total bastard to him.”

  Silvia was hurt by her mother’s lack of concern for how she was doing. Yet, she was relieved that she didn’t have to delve into her problems, because each time she did, they seemed to grow like a big pile of trash getting higher because of a garbage strike. Feeling hurt, while understandable, was rare for Silvia. She never seemed to need anything from anyone, including her own mother, and never felt hurt for someone’s lack of concern for how she was doing. But she was at an all-time low and so she felt hurt. Of course, she made no display of her hurt feelings but rather listened to her mother continue with her monologue of worry. She told her mother that Vince was just nervous about going so far away to college and about the possibility of Frank not paying.

  “Dad will pay. He just likes to threaten that he won’t. And as far as going so far away is concerned, you think he'd be happy to get as far away from that house as possible!” Donna said. Although Silvia couldn’t agree with her mother more about how Vince should be happy to get far away, this comment caused her to sink even further down. Fortunately, her mother caught her insensitivity.

  “I'm sorry, Silvie. I didn’t mean to put the house down. Besides, you're only staying there until you get yourself together. You could stay with me here.”

  “In your little studio Mom? Where would I sleep? In the bathtub?”

  “Well, you’re much better at dealing with Dad than I was. And you’re much better than Vince.”

  “He and Dad are getting along fine Mom,” she said.

  “I don’t believe that, Silvie.”

  “Well then I’m not sure what to tell you.”

  “Hey, didn't that weird girl he was seeing break up with him a little while ago?”

  “I don’t know. He doesn’t talk about that stuff to me. I don’t know if he discusses his love life with anyone. I just think he’s anxious about going far away.”

  Then Donna blurted out, “I bet that Dad is trying to turn Vince against me. Turn a son against his own mother. Imagine that. Do you hear Dad mentioning my name at all to Vince?”

  Silvia could very clearly picture the indignant expression on her mother’s still youthful face.

  “No, I didn’t hear him mention your name to Vince, Mom.”

  “It’s just that I always worry about Vince. Oh, I wish I could have stayed there longer, but I just couldn’t.”

  “You don’t have to explain yourself to me, Mom,” said Silvia with a hint of sarcasm.

  “Maybe he thinks I was neglectful.”

  “He doesn’t think that, Mom.”

  “Maybe I can plan some kind of party for his graduation. That would be a way to make it up to him.”

  “Make what up to him?” Despite Silvia’s frustration, she was beginning to accept the fact that her mother wasn’t listening to her, so she decided to stop talking and to let Donna rant on freely.

  “Yes, it can be something simple. We can plan for a family dinner at a nice restaurant.” She cleverly inserted the word we where the word I should have been to draft Silvia into helping her with the party she was planning.

  Of course, Silvia would help her mother. It was difficult to refuse her. For starters, she felt sorry for her for being married to Frank. And now, after being with the same person for just about all of her adult life, she would have to start over. The thought of her mother being trapped between the guilt of leaving Vince and the pain of living with Frank made Silvia want to do whatever she could do to help. Although she couldn’t refuse her, she did wish that Donna had asked someone else for help. But who would she ask? Cosmo was in his own world, and Angie kept her distance from their mother. So it was up to Silvia.

  Besides, she knew that she was the only one in her family that would be able to accomplish this great feat. All the G
reco family members had not been together for over six years, since Angie’s wedding. Cosmo couldn’t hide his life-long resentment of Angie. Donna couldn’t hide her sadness for being so distant from her bride daughter. Frank couldn’t hide his sadness for losing the only child he was close to, and this was expressed in the tear-filled drunk toast he gave before the dinner. She thought of all the past holidays that they had spent together. She could only remember two Christmases that Frank didn’t rage, which was compensated with siblings fighting each other. She could only recall one family gathering that didn’t involve fighting. During the extremely rare gatherings that didn’t involve a fight, the threat of one hung in the air like the sword of Damocles. For Silvia, this threat was worse than a fight. It made a knot in her stomach that took over her entire body.

  She imagined what a graduation party for Vince might look like. Frank would be drunk and determined to make trouble. He would show his blatant favoritism towards Angie in hopes of making his other children resent her. He would make Donna extremely tense and uncomfortable. He would remind Cosmo of what a failure he was for dropping out of University of Pennsylvania. And he would remind Vince of how he had better be on his best behavior if he wanted help with his tuition. Angie would brag about how her family lived in a three million dollar home in the same neighborhood as Bruce Springsteen. Vince didn’t like her husband Doug because he worked as an investor for Goldman Sachs. Cosmo and Angie's bad feelings towards each other, which stemmed back to their childhoods, could have an opportunity to be further nurtured. Donna and Angie could feel their distance from each other, and Silvia would dream about leaving this mess of a family once and for all.

  Yet, Silvia noticed a shining light in the darkness of imagining. Since she began thinking about the gathering, she had not been thinking about her own problems. She felt good for the first time in a long time. She was now a person with a purpose, and an altruistic purpose at that. She was looking out for her mother and her little brother. And in getting everyone together, she was attempting to make peace in a family that had never known peace.

  She then noticed the way her body lightened and her stomach opened and was crying out for food. She craved a big bowl of pastina with butter and salt. Pastina was what she ate whenever she was getting over a stomach flu. Pastina was what she ate when she couldn’t eat anything else. Pastina was one of the things that Grandma Tucci used to make for her when she was a child. Entering the kitchen, Silvia felt ecstatic to find a half full box of De Cecco stellette pasta sitting in one of the cupboards and was even more ecstatic that Frank was out of the house. Although she continued to be apprehensive about him barging in at any second while she ate her pastina, she was able to taste her food and enjoy the act of eating for the first time in a long time.