Olive Branches Don't Grow On Trees

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  Cosmo waited a few days to send an apology email to Silvia, and although the word “sorry” didn’t 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 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 didn’t 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 didn’t 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 wasn’t important to him. She admired and resented him at the same time. He didn’t 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, as if he could be on the other side of the world without leaving his apartment. Silvia always felt as if 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 didn’t stop to consider the great magnitude of such a challenge, or that such a thing may not be possible. The only trick for her was to figure out how sobering Frank up would be possible. She knew she had to get him to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting and she called Angie in an attempt to persuade him.

  “Dad’s not going to go for that Silv. You know that,” Angie told Silvia over the phone. Silvia could hear Angie’s little daughter, Isabella, crying in the background so she said goodbye to her sister, who seemed as if she was not able to help anyway.

  After hanging up with Angie, she considered calling her Uncle Nick who 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 wasn’t 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 didn’t 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 hid behind the façade of a nice guy. 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 didn’t want to quit. He didn’t 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, he pretended that their plans slipped his mind, and when she came home at 6:30 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 didn’t expect her to take him up on the offer to go to the meeting after having a drink, so he seemed surprised 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.