Olive Branches Don't Grow On Trees

by Grace Mattioli

  **********

  Cosmo’s apartment was situated not far from the University he had attended over six years ago. He spent two years making good grades in tough courses without much studying. Then one day, he just dropped out. He gave no reason. Just said that he was bored of going to classes. He continued working and living near the college and had managed to make something of a life. According to Silvia, it wasn’t much of one. She wasn’t exactly sure what he did for a job, but he told her that monkeys could be trained to do it. He did, however, seem to like his monkey work in that it required very little of him.

  The lobby of his apartment building was run down and dingy with lime green carpets and florescent lights. When Silvia arrived at his door on the second floor, Cosmo let her in, sat down, and continued playing some video game that she apparently had interrupted. She ignored his lack of social grace and went straight over to the window to open the curtains. The curtains were always drawn tight in his apartment, making the place dark even on the brightest of days. Cosmo didn’t seem to notice or care about the darkness or the grunginess of his apartment. The furniture looked as if it came from various dumpster diving excursions. He hid spots or cracks on his walls by taping star maps in front of such imperfections. His shelves were crammed with beaten up science fiction and astronomy books; his floors were filled with everything from tattered comic books to video games consoles. In one of his corners stood a white and aqua marine colored electric guitar that he had taught himself to play, with great ease, while still in high school. His tables were covered with dirty coffee cups and little plastic, painted Tolkienesque figurines.

  After opening the curtains, Silvia removed a smashed bug on the wall, which had been there the last time she visited him over a week ago.

  “That's disgusting Cosmo,” she said, removing the bug from the wall with a paper towel she got from the kitchen.

  “What?” he said without looking up from his game. He probably had not even noticed the bug. He was, in fact, oblivious to most everything around him, and Silvia supposed it had something to do with his brilliance. “Cosmo’s so smart that he forgets to comb his hair,” Donna would say. His hair was a wild mess of not-yet-grayed Einstein hair going in all directions like palm trees fronds. He dressed himself in whatever he could find. Today it happened to be an old pair of jeans, an orange tee shirt, and a blazer style jacket that made no sense with the rest of his getup and was too short on his tall lanky body.

  “Oh that bug,” he said grinning. “I was waiting for you to come over. I thought we might give it a proper burial.”

  “Very funny,” said Silvia.

  “You hungry?” he went into the kitchen and opened his cabinets, revealing so many cans of tuna fish stacked high on top of each other that it looked as if he might be expecting a natural catastrophe to strike at any minute.

  “I brought my own food,” said Silvia, taking out an individual sized container of rice milk and a box of organic cookies with no dairy, no sugar, no wheat, and no soy. She offered one to Cosmo, who took one bite of one of the cookies and curled his face up in disgust.

  “These taste like tree bark,” he said, swallowing his one small bite as if it was killing him.

  “Well, I like them, and that's all I care about,” said Silvia, taking Cosmo’s dislike of her cookies as a rejection. He went over to his refrigerator, walking in his usual manner with a bounce in his step and his head bopping back and forth like a song. By the looks of the ingredients he got out and put on the table, Silvia assumed that he was planning to make tuna fish and spaghetti, an old family favorite that Donna had learned from her mother.

  “You should take it easy on the tuna fish, you know. It has a lot of mercury in it,” said Silvia, sitting down at Cosmo’s small white kitchen table.

  “Yeah, I should,” replied Cosmo, completely unconvinced by Silvia’s warning. She was always warning about something: Cell phones, nitrates, trans-fats, slouching, the sun.

  “You can get mercury poisoning. Doesn’t that worry you?” said Silvia.

  “Ah,” said Cosmo. He paused to look at the ceiling as though he was really contemplating this question, and then came back with a definitive, “No!”

  “Have you talked to Vince?” asked Silvia.

  “No, how’s he doing?” said Cosmo, as he filled a big soup pot with water.

  “He’s nervous about going so far away and he’s nervous that Dad won’t help with his tuition, and he can’t get financial aid because Dad makes too much. So he’s not doing so great.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about Dad. He just likes to string people along. I bet he’ll help him after all is said and done.” He began chopping garlic and tomatoes on a cutting board.

  Frank favored Cosmo least of all his children, and Silvia was always struck by how indifferent Cosmo often seemed to the lack of favoritism shown to him by their father. Frank formulated his opinion of Cosmo before he was even born, when Donna was pregnant with him and decided to name him after her father. Her father’s name was Cosimo, and she had changed the spelling slightly, but it wasn’t enough of a change for Frank. Frank and Donna’s father disliked each other from their very first meeting. Silvia could only assume that this was because they were so similar. Like Frank, Cosimo was always ready for a fight, and like Frank, he had a very strong presence. Silvia could always tell when her Grandpa Tucci was around, even if he didn’t speak a word or make a sound. Perhaps Frank would have liked his first-born son if he had had a different name, and then perhaps Cosmo would like Frank back. Frank would have given his son all of the support and encouragement that he needed. Cosmo would have stayed in school because making his father proud would have been important to him. Frank would not have to spend years after his son dropped out of college speaking the same refrain, “He could have done something with his life!” And Cosmo would have probably been working as a researcher for NASA or doing some kind of comparable job. But Cosmo was given his cursed name, and with it, a lifetime of being resented by his own father. Silvia suspected that Frank may also have been jealous of Cosmo’s brilliance. He couldn’t, for the life of him, figure out from whom his son got that science gene, but he surely assumed it was inherited from someone on the Greco side.

  “I can see Vince in Berkeley,” said Cosmo, stirring spaghetti into a big pot of boiling water. “He’ll fit right in with all his causes.”

  “He wants to save the world,” Silvia added.

  “The world’s too late for saving,” said Cosmo as he opened a can of tuna.

  “That’s exactly what I think,” said Silvia, enthusiastic about her and her brother’s like-mindedness. Cosmo, however, didn’t seem at all surprised that they had the same thought. He wasn’t moved or shaken by much, kind of like a big rock that sits on the shore and does not move, even when a gigantic wave sweeps over it.

  “I guess he’s got to be true to himself,” said Cosmo, with skeptical eyes and a slight grin.

  “Well, I was thinking we should have some kind of gathering for him, like a graduation party. Mom thinks it would be a good thing too. She suggested it.”

  “I’m surprised she’s not nervous about seeing Dad. I sure as hell don’t want to see him. Or Angie.”

  “Well, I’m sure she is, but her feelings for Vince might outweigh her apprehension about seeing Dad.”

  “If we have it at home, she’ll be really uneasy. We might have to have it in a restaurant, and you know Dad isn’t going to want to pay for anything out.”

  “Well maybe we can go some place cheap. I don’t know, a pizzeria or something,” said Silvia leaning forward in her chair.

  “You think Angie will come down here for a pizzeria?” he said sarcastically while stirring the spaghetti.

  “Well, all I'm saying is it would be nice to have a something for Vince where everybody is getting along, or at least pretending to get along. He's nervous about going so far away, and Dad keeps changing his mind about helping with his tuition, and Mom thinks he's really d
epressed and it would be nice to have something before he leaves for college.” She said all this without taking a gasp for air.

  “Yeah it would be nice, but I’m not sure how likely a nice, peaceful gathering of our family will be.” He placed the tuna, garlic, and tomatoes into a heated frying pan filled with olive oil.

  “Well we can try,” she said frustratingly and left the room for the bathroom. When she returned, Cosmo was situated in front of the television set with a huge bowl of spaghetti and tuna fish.

  “I’d offer you some, but I know you don’t want any,” he said through his smacking.

  “You’re right about that,” she said walking over to the TV, on top of which was a DVD of Monty Python’s The Life of Brian. She picked it up and looked back at her brother, who then recommended that they watch it. So they did. She felt relief at the idea of watching a movie and being able to forget about her problems for a little while. But at the end of the movie, when the song “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” played, she slumped down into her seat and started to think of her own life and wonder why, with all that she had to be happy about, she was unable to look on the bright side of life. She was well aware of the potential harshness of reality and knew that her own life was, relatively speaking, a great life. She read the news that was filled with nothing but war and tragedy and catastrophes. She walked plenty of city streets where she had seen homeless people freezing to death before her eyes, wearing trashcan clothes on their broken bodies. She had no real problems, except for her cursed tendency to see what was wrong with things and, in particular, places. A tendency she had cultivated like a garden of rotten flowers. A tendency that caused her to want to leave wherever she was.

  “Have you ever been to Portland?” she asked Cosmo, breaking the trend of thought in her head.

  “Portland, Maine or Portland, Oregon?” he asked.

  “Portland, Oregon, of course,” she said, as if it should have been perfectly apparent to him which one she was talking about.

  “Can’t say that I have.”

  She waited a few seconds for him to ask her why she was asking him if he had ever been there, but when he didn’t say anything, she said, “Well, I’m thinking about moving there.”

  “What else is new?” Cosmo said, sitting back in his seat.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” said Silvia, with a fighting look on her face.

  “You move all the time, Silvia.”

  “Well, so what if I do? It doesn’t hurt anyone.”

  “So, why Portland? Have you ever been there?” Cosmo asked as if he knew what her answer would be.

  “No, I haven’t. But I have a friend who just moved there, and she loves it. And I’ve never heard anything but good about it. It’s always rated highly in all those books about places to live. And it’s supposed to have great public transportation. And...”

  Cosmo cut her off probably because he knew, that if he didn’t cut her off, he would be sitting there all night while she rationalized her next relocation.

  “So, why do you want to move there?” he asked with emphasis on the word you.

  “Because it’s where everyone is moving to,” she said, trying to convince herself of her answer.

  “No, I mean what’s in it for you?” asked Cosmo.

  “What’s in any place?” asked Silvia.

  “Exactly,” said Cosmo.

  “I don’t get it,” said Silvia, who was beginning to get very frustrated with the way the conversation was going.

  “What’s wrong with here?” said Cosmo.

  “By here, I assume you mean Philadelphia?” said Silvia, and then continued on with her answer to the question before giving Cosmo an opportunity to clarify what he meant. “I’m not even sure where to begin. For one thing, it’s fucking filthy. It smells like piss and garbage everywhere. It’s provincial. And has a high crime rate. And well, it’s just gross.”

  She was preparing to continue with her rant, when Cosmo interrupted and said, “Maybe if you were doing something you liked to do, you wouldn’t care so much about where you are.”

  Silvia was about to be vindictive and degrade Cosmo’s entire existence by saying something to the effect of him being one to talk about doing something he liked. As far as she could see, he was wasting his life away by working a routine job that was beneath him intellectually, by spending his spare time playing video games, and by going out with women who he didn’t really seem to like. But she stopped herself as she knew deep down inside that he was only trying to help. Besides, she had already done a pretty good job bashing the city in which he lived. Without being willing to put her brother down, she felt deprived of a rebuttal to his silly belief that if she was doing something she liked, this area would suddenly and magically transform into a great place. But then she thought of something to say in her defense.

  “I love to paint and I do it almost every day. What about that?”

  “I mean a job you like,” said Cosmo.

  “Well, maybe I will pursue that path someday, but I’m not doing it here,” said Silvia, folding her arms and looking up at the ceiling.

  “So, you have to be in Portland to do that?” said Cosmo with a jaded expression on his face, as if this wasn’t, by any means, the first time that they had had this discussion.

  “No, I don’t have to be there necessarily. But I can’t be here! I won’t be here! I’m not staying in this fucking city or anywhere in the area for that matter!”

  “You talk about it like it’s Baghdad,” said Cosmo.

  “I know it’s not that bad. It’s just that I don’t feel inspired here.”

  “Then why did you leave Tucson and come back here?” said Cosmo.

  “Those summers there were killers,” she said immediately, as if she had her response all prepared for some time now.

  “What about New York?”

  “It was too expensive. It's no place for an artist anymore. All the rich people drove the artists out. Same in any big, overrated, overpriced city,” she said as if she had rehearsed this excuse several times as well.

  “And Chicago?”

  “Have you ever experienced a Chicago winter? They’re absolutely brutal.”

  “And Philly is out for reasons you already stated?” said Cosmo, not expecting an answer, and then continued with, “What about the south? Atlanta? It's cheaper down there.”

  Silvia looked at him with cynical eyes, “Would you live in the south? A bunch of rednecks down there that say eye-talian.”

  “So, you'll get to Portland and decide that you don't like it there. It won't take you long to find something wrong with the place, and then you'll get depressed, and you'll come back here and get some shit job, and maybe move in with Dad again because you'll be broke.”

  There was a short silence after Cosmo's little prophecy that seemed very long and noisy to Silvia, who had suddenly developed the kind of lump in her throat that precedes tears, but because she wasn’t a crier, she got angry with Cosmo and stormed out of his apartment without saying a word. Cosmo must have known that any attempts to dissuade her from leaving would be in vain. He was inclined to make blunt, insensitive remarks, like the time that he said the only kind of jobs Silvia could ever hang on to were those at book stores and health food stores. Silvia actually appreciated his sense of honesty and could usually tolerate his remarks as long as they were not about her one and only sensitive spot, which was her inability to stay in one place.

  She knew that Cosmo, like everyone else in her life, could never understand how painful it was for her to be still. She thought of the times that she had wanted to stay put in a place for longer than a few months, but she simply couldn’t. Whenever she planned on moving to a new place, she intended it to be her last move, but she knew somewhere in the back of her mind, that it would not be her last. The very thought of staying put in one place frightened her. While most people were stressed by the prospect of moving to a new place, she was stressed by having to stay in the same
one. When she occasionally had to stay for longer than a few months out of financial strain, she felt like a lion she had once seen that had been ruthlessly placed in a very small cage in a rundown zoo somewhere in Arizona.

  As she walked down the street to her car, taking fast and angry footsteps, stewing over Cosmo’s remarks, she came across a neon sign that said Psychic Reader that she must have passed by several times before, but had not noticed until now. She always laughed at psychics, and the desperate people who patronized their businesses. But, right now she felt so lost and desperate that she was actually considering going into the psychic shop. She quickly knocked on the door, before she had a chance to reconsider paying the fortuneteller a visit, and then waited for almost an entire minute for some lady in a flowing scarf to come to the door, but there was nothing. So she knocked again, and this time her knocks were hard and loud. Still, there was no answer. So she peeked in to see some pudgy lady stuffed into a pair of very unfashionable stone washed jeans, sleeping in front of a television set with an opened phone book thrown over her face to block the light. This was, undoubtedly, the all-knowing psychic.