Olive Branches Don't Grow On Trees



  Olive Branches Don’t

  Grow On Trees

  By

  Grace Mattioli

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  Copyright ©2012 by Grace Mattioli, revised 2014

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. Please do not participate in or encourage the piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Mattioli, Grace, 1965-Olive Branches Don’t Grow On Trees/ Grace Mattioli. p. cm.

  1. Families-Fiction 2.New Jersey-Fiction 3.Italian Americans-Fiction 4.Peace-Fiction

  I.Title PS3556.R352 813.54

  Dedication

  For my mom, who told me to save everything I write

  And for my brother Vincent, who told me I have a perfect sense of humor.

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  CHAPTER ONE: THE SOUND OF NOISE

  Silvia Greco knew that the silence would not last. There wasn’t enough silence in her world, and there was definitely not enough of it since she had moved into her father’s house in New Jersey. She knew that her father, Frank, had taken a brief break from his current project of searching for a lost frying pan, and that he would be resuming his search any second with the clattering of pots and pans and slamming of cabinet doors. In the very short meantime, she enjoyed the sound of nothing as she sat waiting for her coffee to finish brewing as if it was all she had left in the world.

  She sat at a square wooden kitchen table that took over the entire room. It looked good from a distance, but upon closer inspection revealed several nicks and scratches that had given it a memory of its own-- a bad one. The table was bare except for an economy sized bottle of TUMS displayed in the middle like a centerpiece. She sat on a chair that was almost too big for her little body. A big girl misplaced inside a little girl's body, she had a big voice, a big laugh, a big stride, a big Romanesque nose that sat proud beneath her big brown eyes. Her big head of hair was currently chopped in some crude style of uneven lengths, the color orange on the top and black at the bottom. Her hair style wasn’t intended to be any sort of radical statement. It was just an expression of her current state of apathy. So was her attire-- a paint covered T-shirt and worn out Levi jeans that hung on her as if they were five sizes too big. She usually dressed in bright bold sixties styled clothing that showed her off to the world as a happy, animated, free spirit. Her hair was usually evenly colored and stylized to perfection. But even with her grungy clothes and her chopped hair, she was pretty. And her big nose seemed to add to her prettiness in a way. Angie, her older sister, urged her to get her big nose made smaller with simple surgery, but Silvia refused to do such a thing, as if in doing so, she would be rejecting her Grandma Tucci, who had the same big nose and whom she loved fiercely.

  Her father's nose was in perfect proportion to the rest of his face, which resembled that of an aged Marlon Brando. Despite a life time of working too hard, sleeping too little, drinking too much and smoking for the better half of his life, he still looked good. He had all of his hair and could sweep it from side to side depending on his mood. His physique looked as if he worked out at a gym on a regular basis, but he had never set foot in one. The slight limp he developed from being maimed in a motorcycle accident in his teen years was barely perceptible through his gargantuan personality. This was also the case with his slovenly attire of mismatched outfits and shirts buttoned unevenly with one side hanging down further than the other.

  He had returned from the bathroom and wasted no time getting on with his project with a renewed sense of urgency. He gallivanted around the kitchen as if he was keeping beat to a polka song, searching for the lost pan while drinking and cooking something that smelled like an odd mixture of garlic and garbage left out in the rain. Silvia got up to get her coffee, careful not to get in her father’s way. As she poured some milk into her coffee, the container slid out of her hand. It was greasy. She imagined that Frank had previously touched it with his olive oiled hands.

  “I knew you were going to do that,” said Frank who was suddenly standing over her shoulder. She wanted to say something like “Well maybe I wouldn’t have spilled it if you didn’t get your greasy hands all over it.” She said nothing. She just cleaned up the spill and sat down. She could tell Frank was really fishing for a fight this morning and would have fished deeper had he not been so preoccupied with finding the lost pan. So rather than fishing, he just continued on his quest, moving from one side of the kitchen to another as if he was accomplishing great things. Banging steel against steel, wood against wood.

  The noise, however abrasive and awful it was to Silvia, did serve the purpose of blocking her thoughts of yesterday, when she was fired from her job waiting tables in a Turkish cafe in downtown Philadelphia. She had overheard her boss say to the cook, “I’m going to have to close the place down if she works here another day!” And at hearing this, she marched into the kitchen and said, “I heard what you said Usef.” She spoke to him as though he was wrong for being concerned for the survival of his business. Although he was, like most people, much bigger than her, he hunched over and shrunk like a frightened monkey at her confrontation. “I’m sorry Silvia,” he said in his broken English, while looking down at the floor. And he really was sorry. Somewhere in the back of her head, she knew he was right. She was a coffee-spilling, plate-dropping wreck of a waitress who surprised herself the few times she got an order right.

  “Why were you still working there anyway after you moved in with Dad?” said her older brother, Cosmo, in an effort to console her when she called him up right after she had been fired. As usual, he was right. It had made some sense to continue her career as a bad waitress when she still lived in the city and the cafe was one block away from her place. But after she moved to Frank’s house, it made no sense at all. She remained at the cafe, however, because jobs were hard to come by. When she told this to Cosmo, he said that she would find another “dead-end” job before she knew it. His attempt at consolation, while sincere, made her feel worse. Much worse. She needed no reminder of the fact that she had worked exclusively at dead end jobs since graduating from college two years ago.

  She crumbled into a hunched over position and sipped her coffee that tasted markedly bitter. Just as she was slipping into a comfortable state of misery, Frank said, “Don't you have to be at work? It's eleven o'clock. What happened? Did you get canned again?” She was about to speak, when he swiftly picked up a broom and began chasing a centipede that was speeding across the floor.

  “Those God damn bugs run around here like they own the place!” he shouted as it disappeared under a cabinet. He then threw the broom back in its corner as if he was angry at it. He picked up his half full drink, looked down as if he was studying it, and in a quick second, he finished it off. His insensitive remark seemed to have been wiped clean from his mind. She would have normally laughed his comment off, knowing well that it was only his way of attempting to instigate a fight. But a number of factors, including fatigue and getting fired from
her job yesterday, conspired together to cause her to react.

  “Why don’t you have another drink?” she said facetiously.

  He came alive like Frankenstein’s monster, eyes bulging, face reddening and screamed back, “Why don’t you get your stuff and get the fuck out of my house?!”

  Her sarcastic response, “Because I know how much you’d miss me,” heightened her father’s anger, and his eyes bulged out so far they looked as if they might pop out of his head. He looked as if he was about to start screaming in the scariest of all his angry voices. His screams could make the house’s walls vibrate. His voice was deep, guttural, heavy and carried long and far. So far, in fact, that she could still hear it no matter how far away she moved: Philadelphia, Brooklyn, Chicago, Tucson. Even when she took a summer backpacking trip through Europe, she could still hear his voice. She could tell by the look on his face that he was about to scream one of those vibrating-wall screams when his cell phone rang. He forcibly decompressed all that he could and walked quickly towards his phone, all the while still staring at Silvia, as if to say that that their little spat wasn’t over yet. He answered the phone before the first ring ended and asked the caller if he had any information about the missing frying pan.

  “How the hell should I know?” the voice on the phone said. “I don't even live with you!” The person on the other end spoke almost as loud as Frank, and Silvia could hear every word very clearly, as if he was standing right there in the kitchen.

  Frank didn’t bother apologizing for asking such an inappropriate question, nor did he ask his friend how he was doing. Rather, he just went right into his problems. He went through his usual list of complaints about his children: Vince spoke two words a year to him; Cosmo was a failure; and Angie broke his heart by moving to North Jersey. Silvia could tell that he was about to start in on her. But he glanced over and probably decided not to talk about her while she was sitting right there. So instead, he spoke about how all of his children’s shortcomings were the fault of Donna, his wife, for being from a family with “bad genes.”

  When the voice on the phone asked about Donna, Frank walked into the other room so he could speak about his wife in private in his not-so-quiet, quiet voice. She had left him a little over one month ago. She had surprised herself and everyone around her by lasting as long as she did. Silvia suspected her mother would have left sooner, but had waited until her youngest child, Vince, was either out of the house or at least almost out of the house. She could hear Frank lying to the voice on the phone like he lied to everyone. She could hear him telling the voice that he and Donna just needed a little separation from each other, as if they had made some sort of mutual decision about how to proceed in their marriage. He walked back into the kitchen to freshen his drink and complained about the property taxes that would be due very soon. He ended his monologue of complaints with an expression he used frequently, “I can't complain.”

  Silvia thought that if Frank spent less time complaining and searching for lost kitchen utensils, he might notice the dilapidated condition of his house. The kitchen sink always leaked. The bathroom door handle fell off every time someone tried to open or close it. The floor creaked. The doors squeaked and hung on loose hinges from being slammed one too many times. The cracked paint struggled to cover the walls. The broken chandelier could fall at any second. While the house was falling apart, Frank’s yard, in which he took great pride, was perfect. Not a bush out of place. Not one uneven blade of grass. All of the flowers and plants were lined up straight and were distanced apart from each other as if someone used a ruler to get them that way. His nice-looking red brick ranch style house sat on a pleasant tree lined street with other nice-looking houses with well-kept yards, though none were as well-kept as his own.

  The house was on a street not far from the center of town and the town wasn’t too far from Philadelphia, but not quite close enough to be considered a suburb. Frank would not set foot in the city even if it were five minutes away. To him, cities were nothing more than an added expense with their parking lots that cost ten dollars an hour and their expensive restaurants and shops full of useless, overpriced merchandise. He preferred the smallness of his own town with its practical shops and ample free parking. It was a real town too, the way towns used to be, with everything a person needed. It had a street that could have been named Main Street, with the same dress shop that had been there for over forty years; the same hardware shop for fifty years; the same grocery store for over sixty years; and the same bank that had been there for almost one hundred years.

  Silvia loved the town in her own way. It was where she learned to ride a bike, where she had her first kiss from a boy, and where she spent long summer days with her grandma eating snow cones and playing hide-and-seek. She loved the town because it had an old-fashioned quality, as if it had been slightly stuck in time. But the town began to feel too small and intimate after she had moved away for college. After she had lived and traveled in so many exciting, international cities, it felt boring and provincial. By then, the town was nothing more than a place where she didn’t belong, and she grew to resent it for making her into a misfit, a displaced person, and a girl without a hometown. It was around this same time that her home stopped being her home and started being her father’s house.