Olive Branches Don't Grow on Trees (9 page)

“Orders
are made every week,” he said. “They’re called into our main office in the
city.”

He showed her the
process for ordering, and then it was about time for the store to open to the
public.  He turned on the store’s fluorescent lights that made the candy
shine so brightly that Silvia’s eyes burnt for a quick second.  Children
were waiting anxiously at the doors, accompanied by their tired looking mothers
seeking to appease their little ones with candy so that they could proceed with
a day of shopping.  Silvia had not had any experience with children, so
they may as well have been really short aliens from other planets.  She
had never baby-sat, and because she and Angie had seen so little of each other
in the past couple of years, she barely had an opportunity to hold her little toddler
niece, Isabella, in her arms.

A
small Asian girl with pig tails and overalls ran towards the coke bottle candy
canister, opened the lid, and took out a piece of candy right as her mother
came over to reprimand her.  The mother then looked at Silvia and
apologized for her daughter’s misbehavior.  Silvia was not used to being
apologized to.  Usually she was the one apologizing to someone for
something.  It felt good to be on the right side of the fence.  She
then felt a little tug on her shirt and looked down to see a little boy, with
dark hair and big-rimmed glasses, who wanted to ask her something.  It
felt good to be bigger than someone for once.

“Hey
lady,” he said, his little face looking up at her, eyes like saucers, “can you
get me a lemon slice?”

“
A lemon slice
please
,”
corrected his mother, who was standing behind him.

“Oh,
yeah, please,” said the little boy.

“Sure
honey,” she said realizing that James had forgotten to show her how to open the
candy case where the fruit slices lived.  He gladly showed her how to open
the case and demonstrated how the fruit slices should be properly taken out
with tongs and placed in the tiny paper bags used for candy from the case.
 He was business-like and efficient, but also had
a
sweetness
about him.  Silvia figured he had to be sweet to work in
the candy business.

The
morning flew by, and before she knew it, it was lunch-time.  She forgot to
bring her lunch, so she went down to the food court and bought the only thing
that she could afford-- a bowl of rice at the Chinese restaurant stand.
 After lunch, she went right back to the candy store without the usual
dread she felt when returning to other jobs after a break.  She thought it
might be because she was working with a completely new group of people.
 Her lack of familiarity with children did not make her
uncomfortable.  Rather, she was interested to learn about them, and when
she saw them entering the store with fresh curious faces, her own curiosity
about them increased.  To her great surprise, she was only slightly
irritated by the whiners.  Mostly, she found the children’s spontaneity
and their lack of conformity to social customs refreshing.  They were free
in their own simple way.  Silvia attributed their ability to be free to the
fact that they were too young to care how others perceived them.  As she
peered around the store, with kids running wild and bright candy colors, she
started to feel like maybe this job would not be so bad.  Maybe she would
even eventually start to care about the difference between gummy bears and blue
whales.  

**********

Donna
walked and moved through the world like she knew exactly where she was going
and what she was doing at all times.  She walked with a busy stride of
self-importance that made her fit right into any big city, such as
Philadelphia, perfectly.  She was content in this city, and Silvia assumed
that, like Cosmo, it was because she really had nothing else to compare it to.
 She approached her daughter, who was waiting for her on a bench in the
New Market section of the city, appearing fresh and vital, dressed in a
cranberry colored cotton dress.  Her olive skin glowed like a freshly
waxed apple, and her hair was pulled back to reveal the high cheekbones that
Silvia wished she had inherited.  Donna’s usual style was blandly colored
clothing with a lopsided hairstyle.  But today, she looked sharp, bright,
and full of life.

Silvia
was used to seeing her mother downtrodden, tired eyes, strained smile, and half
broken stance, but she knew her mother had not always been so.  Only in
recent years had Donna become worn down as a piece of old newspaper. She saw
pictures of her mother as a young woman, shimmering bright and pretty with a
full effortless smile and wide open eyes.  Today she looked almost as good
as she did in the old photos, and Silvia could only assume that her mother’s
renewal was due to the fact that Frank was not dragging her down.  And
although Silvia was glad to see her mother shining with vitality, that could
only be attributed to her being away from Frank, she was sad that Donna
appeared to be moving away from her father and the prospect of them getting
back together seemed bleak.  She knew that they were both better off
separated, but she still hoped that they might reunite, and that Frank would
quit being a mean, crazy drunk, and that Donna would forgive him for his
faults.

Silvia
was dressed in her favorite style of sixties vintage clothing, with an orange
mini skirt, a bright yellow top, and knee-high length, white boots.  She
looked like a 1968 sunflower. It was the first day in a long time that she felt
like dressing in a happy outfit and the cheerful attire marked a symbolic end
to her recent depression.

Donna
suggested they go to dinner at a new restaurant conveniently located around the
corner.  It was called Charlotte’s Place and was filled with dark brown
wood, green leather chairs, and had warm dim lighting coming out of imitation
Tiffany lampshades.  The waiter came straight to the table with menus and
a basket of bread and proceeded to mechanically pour water in their goblet
shaped glasses.  Silvia was astonished when her mother said that she was
ready to order, without a several-minute study of the menu followed by
questioning the waiter.  In the past, Donna was plagued by various
ailments that prevented her from eating just about everything.  When
Silvia was a child, Donna had chronic fatigue syndrome, which somehow led to
her lactose intolerance.  In more recent years, she decided that it was
not chronic fatigue syndrome that had caused her constant state of exhaustion
and lethargy, but something called Mediterranean anemia.  It was no longer
milk from which she needed to abstain.  It was gluten. 

“I’ll
have the turkey dinner and a glass of Chardonnay,” she said with perfect
clarity and decisiveness in her voice.

           
Fortunately, there was only one option for Silvia on this meaty menu, and so
she was able to order pretty quickly as well.  “I’ll have the Portobello
mushroom sandwich and a Perrier,” she said without looking up from the menu.

As
soon as the waiter left the table, Donna said, “So how are things going at
home?”

“I
got Dad to an AA meeting last week,” said Silvia. Donna pursed her lips and
opened her eyes wide as if astonished by her daughter’s update.

“How
did you do that?  I tried many times and had no luck, so I just gave up on
trying.”

“I
talked to Uncle Nick about it,” said Silvia buttering a piece of bread.

“Why
didn’t I ever think of that?”  Donna looked into the air like the answer
to her question would appear on the ceiling.

“It
wasn’t easy, though.  I had to remind him every night before we went, and
then on the night of the meeting, he acted like he forgot, and tried to get out
of it.  But I was persistent.”

“That’s
wonderful,
Silvie
.  How did Dad do?”

“Mostly
he acted like he didn’t belong there, like he was just going to please Uncle
Nick.  But at least he went.  And when I asked him if he’d go again,
he said he’d consider it.  Of course, I’m sure I’ll have to persist again
and I’m sure I’ll have to go with him again.”

“What
made you think of getting him to a meeting, anyway?” said Donna while eating a
piece of bread as if she had not, only a few months ago, proclaimed to the
world that she would never again eat wheat.  Silvia was reluctant to tell
her mother her belief that Frank’s drinking was the thing that fueled the
continual feuding that existed within their family, and that she was going
after this problem in hopes that they might be able to have a pleasant family gathering
for Vince’s graduation.  So instead, she told Donna that it was just
something that she thought would be worth a try.  She was not sure exactly
why she was reluctant to tell her mother her theory of Frank’s drinking as the
root cause of all of their family fighting.  Donna surely knew the truth
of this theory.  But, for some reason, she did not want to remind her
mother.  She supposed that her reluctance had something to do with her
secret hope that they would get back together, and this
could
happen if Frank was to transform in the way that Silvia
imagined.  She did not have experience with anyone who had undergone such
a radical transformation as the one that she was imagining for her father.
 She only knew of the fictional character, Ebenezer Scrooge, who had
changed in this fashion.  And that change took three ghosts, which was
much more than Alcoholics Anonymous.  Maybe she should try to get him to a
therapist.  But she knew that her father would never agree to anything
like that, especially because it would cost money.  

Surely
there was hope for Frank.  Donna would not have married him if he were
nothing more than an ill-tempered, unstable person when they met.  Or
would she have?  Her own father, after all, was like an older version of
Frank.  He was charismatic, fun, and charming, like Frank, and used these
parts of his personality to mask his monster side, also like Frank.
 Silvia could see how it was easy for her father, like her grandfather, to
hide behind himself.  To be dashing.  To be the kind of man that
women could fall for.  He was a charmer, a dancer, and a giver of
words.  He always told Donna that she was beautiful.  He showed up at
least once a month with a bunch of flowers.  He made a point of bringing
her out to dinner every Friday night.  Sure, the flowers, partially
wilted, always appeared to be discounted, and the dinners out were sometimes at
Wendy’s or a local pizzeria.  But it was the thought that counted. 

In
the many photographs of the couple when they first got together, Donna’s face
glimmered with the shine of being in love.  “They made music together,”
Grandma
Tucci
told Silvia once.  Silvia imagined
them to be one of those electric, in-love couples that other couples looked at
with a combination of envy and admiration, and that together, they were
free.  She thought that if only they could have stayed in love that they
would have not broken
apart,
and then maybe all of the
Greco’s would coexist peacefully with each other, and planning a family
gathering would be fun instead of difficult.

There
were photographs of the couple dating back to the early eighties before any of
the kids were born, before they were even married.  There was a photo of
them when they met in the summer of 1980 with the two of them on South Street in
Philadelphia.  Frank had his ‘I Shot J.R.’ T-shirt and Donna wore her hair
permed and fluorescent pink lipstick.  There was one of them at The Who
concert in 1982 at JFK Stadium in Philadelphia, and one taken during the summer
of 1981, when Frank won a stuffed bear at a shooting gallery on the Atlantic
City Steel Pier.  There was one of Frank’s graduation from law school in
1983 and one of their long awaited
wedding
in 1984.
 Donna wore a blue velvet dress and Frank wore something that looked like
it came from the Merry Go Round or one of those other mall shops so popular in
the eighties.

She
tried to remember when Frank changed from the guy in the photographs, looking
happy, fun, and in love, to the miserable, angry person he was now.  She tried
to remember when her mother’s face stopped shining and became dulled down to a
matte finish, and her eyes lost their brightness and started peering out into
the world as if there was nothing to see.  She tried to remember when they
came apart and stopped being free.  But she could not remember when any of
these changes occurred.  They may have been before she was born, and they
may have been after.  They probably happened so slowly that they were not
really detectable.         

Donna
broke into Silvia’s thoughts by asking if she had found a new job.

“I
did find one, and at the mall of all places,” said Silvia with slight
embarrassment about working at the mall, as she had complained about it since
she was a child.

“The
mall, huh?” said Donna reservedly. “What kind of store?”

“A
candy store.
 One of those bulk candy stores
where customers fill up their own bags.”

Donna
gave her daughter a sympathetic smile, and Silvia, who hated sympathy, jumped
back at her mother and said, “I feel lucky to find anything, Mom.”

“You
know it will only be temporary, honey.  One day you’ll find a career that
will be truly rewarding.  You’re so smart and talented,
Silvie
.”  Despite Donna’s attempts at bolstering her
daughter’s self-esteem, her compliments did little to restore Silvia’s
confidence.  In addition, Silvia was caught off-guard, as she was not used
to her mother being so supportive.  Donna was not the most maternal
mother.  Cosmo thought it had something to do with her being sandwiched
between two sisters, one a bitch and the other a lunatic.  Donna
gravitated towards her four brothers, and in doing so, may have stripped away
her more feminine qualities, including the maternal instinct that her children,
especially Silvia, had so badly wanted in their mother.