by Lee Gutkind
II
Would she and her husband have married under other circumstances, Anna, a paisano, asks me. Or would they have simply split up, leaving each other at an airport, waving good-bye with remorse but also with relief? Would they have dwindled to memories, become increasingly distant as the years passed from where they are now? Is marriage a location, my friend asks me, one that you either head toward—or away from—at any given moment?
She and her husband more or less grew up together. They met when they were twenty-one. What can you learn by twenty-one? You can barely cross the street or cut your own food. Any earlier relationships were strictly amateur. Practice.
It didn’t seem so at the time, of course. She cut her sharp, jealous teeth on his former girlfriends, one in particular who was in the same class at medical school. Being his colleague meant this girl was smart and dangerous. Plus she had access to him during the day. They could meet for lunch and tell themselves it counted as work. This girl knitted him a sweater, thereby asserting that she was feminine and domestic—a combination not particularly potent that young except when combined with brains and ambition. Commandeering the sweater within the first month of their dating, Anna’s breasts pushed out the subtle pattern knitted into the blue wool. Never saying so out loud, Anna was slit-eyed happy to be shaping it to herself, happy to distort the original version imagined by the medical student, the sweetheart, the knitter. It was like being able to rewrite somebody’s love letter, making a parody of the intention behind the original by changing it just a little bit.
Anna positioned herself as the interloper in their relationship, as the “other woman,” and relished the part. Uncovering a few details—no, all the details—of the other girl’s life, Anna proceeded to make subtle but effective fun of them and thereby undermined the other girl’s status as singular object of affection. She disdained knitting and all crafts; she made jokes about female medical students. This scattershot approach to the dismantling of the old girlfriend’s fortified hold worked better than she imagined, and soon Anna was the one waiting for the boy to knock on her door, call on her phone, slip into her sheets.
The girl went on to do her residency halfway across the country. Anna is sure that she thinks about the old girlfriend more than her husband does and she wonders why. As if in some kind of fidelity to her younger self, Anna has never wavered from the opinions she held all those years ago, afraid to admit that they were only shallow responses to a young woman who no longer mattered. It’s almost as if Anna needs to hold onto the idea of a vanquished rival as a way to prevent the same thing from happening to her. She needs to be the winner, the victor in the struggle. If she doesn’t hold onto that position, it might just happen that another woman will fill it.
III
My story is different from Anna’s. I am my husband’s second wife. He left his first wife. He divorced her and married me. That’s the simple chronology.
The story is more complicated.
And so I do what second wives do: I’ve counted the years until we will have been married longer than they were. It will take some time. I always fear I won’t quite catch up. The equation works against me; the numbers are fixed. So if that’s how marriages are judged then I lose, but I can’t believe that’s how marriages are judged. Marriage isn’t a marathon, after all. It isn’t merely about going the distance, like two fighters who can claim victory because they’re still standing, bloodied and incoherent, when the final bell rings. Surely a marriage can’t be considered successful simply because it exists over a period of time until one of the combatants, players, partners, dies.
As the second wife, I believe that I’m the real wife, not the required one but the chosen one, the one he picked as a grown-up. I am the woman who married him when his collar had grown a little too tight rather than when his thin neck wobbled inside cheaper shirts, barely touching the sides of the fabric, the version I’ve seen of him in old photographs.
I claim that young man, too, however. My flag covers old as well as new realms; previously colonized as well as newly acquired territories come under my aegis. That thin-necked boy is mine as surely as a foundation stone is part of the finished building—the original contractor doesn’t keep the cornerstone even if he was the one to put it in place. This is about territory, conquest, ownership.
It is about love.
IV
“I bought these pants the other day and they’re way too big. They say they’re a size ten but they must be a twelve. I think they might fit you. Want to try them on?”
“Thanks. I’ll try them on at home.”
“Don’t you want to try them on here to see if they work?”
“No, I’ll do it at home, and I promise I’ll return them if they don’t fit.”
Pause.
“Look, why don’t you try to lose the extra weight? A few brisk walks every week, a couple of skipped lunches, and you’d be beautiful.”
“I’m fine. I’m happy that everything on my body seems to work. My husband loves me enough to pinch me when I’m in the kitchen making dinner, and besides, I like to eat. I don’t want to skip lunch. I do lunch really well.”
“But honey, you’d be so much happier with just a few changes. You know that. People think you’re ten years older than I am. Tell me that doesn’t make you feel bad.”
“Meaning that it makes you feel good?”
“This is not about me.”
“Everything you’ve ever said is about you.”
V
My ex-husband didn’t like my extended family. He said that all anybody talked about was how much money somebody else made, what kind of deal somebody got on a house or a car or a TV, and how many times somebody had been to Italy. He was an Englishman and he simply didn’t get it. Why didn’t anybody talk about their own money, for example? He didn’t see that Italians would never, ever want somebody to know how much they personally had. It was nobody else’s business how much you had. What other people had, in contrast, now that was a rich source of conversation. You did not want to call attention to yourself in a way that might make someone envy you. It seemed like bad luck to be the Joneses with whom everyone else wanted to keep up because, after all, everyone hated the Joneses; no one would wish them well. “Rotten bastards, who do they think they are? They think they’re so much better than us? Good. Let them think that.”
VI
A call before eight from my best friend from junior high school never means happy news. She’s another Italian woman, one whose life is different from mine but whom I love as a sister. She leaves a message on my machine while I am in the shower: “Call me.”
The edge in her voice is sharp enough to cut bone.
When she picks up the phone, I hear running water and the metallic sound of cutlery being thrown into the sink. “Am I interrupting you?” I ask for form’s sake, trying to sound apologetic.
“You’re not interrupting anything that shouldn’t be interrupted,” she mutters. I hear her moving dishes into the sink and I know she is cradling the phone in the hollow of her shoulder, doing other things—stacking the dishwasher, filling the washing machine, drying the silverware.
“I shouldn’t be thinking what I’m thinking this morning.”
“You want to tell me?” I pull on pantyhose while trying not to miss a word. I put the phone down on the bed so I can use two hands to pull the tights up all the way. I still hear her.
She doesn’t want to get to the big subject right away, so instead I ask her about school. She went back to college to finish her degree—this, after raising three kids and being married for twenty-six years to the same man. A man I don’t like, have never really liked, have never really trusted. He’s like a hyphen between us, her husband, connecting and distancing us from each other at the same time. She usually calls when things are going badly between them. I’m her oldest friend and she doesn’t have to give me a history lesson; we’re closer when she’s furthest away from him. It’s not something I encour
age, but it is something I acknowledge.
But finally I say, “Look, I really want to hear about all this, but I’ve got to go to work and the meter’s running. Tell me the real stuff.”
Silence. And then she starts. “We had his new clerk over for dinner last night and it’s just that now I want to murder everybody. I’d wipe everybody out, except the kids. They weren’t even home.”
“So?”
“Peter asked me to give him the benefit of the doubt, but I don’t have those kind of benefits around anymore.” She waits, catches her breath. “I know too fucking well that I can make everything harmless by just letting it go but I can’t. I hate them all.”
I risk interrupting, “Hate who, honey?”
“Him, her, me, everybody.” She’s banging pots and pans around again, as if providing orchestral accompaniment. “I hate how stupid and useless I feel but mostly I hate that Peter stayed inside the dining room last night after dinner and talked to that woman with big cow eyes while I did every stupid dish, in the manner of all wives everywhere. I was the wife … and it wasn’t pretty.”
“But you’ve always been the wife, you usually like being the wife. ‘I’m the judge’s wife’ is what you say about yourself when people ask who you are.”
“Well, I don’t like it anymore.” I hear something fall with a crash behind her, but she just keeps going. “I’ve had two thousand years of being married to this man but just exactly one year of learning to make my own way in the world and you know that I had to carve that path out of my family with a machete. So, from the kitchen, with me out of the room, I hear him making fun of my going back to get my degree—making fun of me to this twenty-eight-year-old lawyer who sat on her ass while I scraped off her plate. Jesus. I thought it was only old women in our neighborhood who felt like I felt last night, at the sink with my hands in hot water, wanting to kill my husband. My hair suddenly felt too short and my feet felt too big and my tits felt too flat and my teeth looked yellow in the downstairs mirror. I kept sneaking looks at myself, can you believe it? I felt like a wife—and like ‘wife’ was a dirty word, something nobody should be called—because Peter was in there talking to a woman who wasn’t a ‘wife’ and suddenly wifedom seems defined by women who aren’t married instead of by the ones who are.”
There is silence for a minute. It doesn’t matter. I sit at the table and wait. “So?”
“So I’m standing there at the sink and all I kept thinking was my life has been filled with fucking jealousy,” she laughs bitterly. “It’s all I am. It’s what I’ve become. I’m jealous of the kids who sit next to me in my classes. Their lives will be entirely different from mine because they’re actually getting started on making themselves into people before they start having children and need to make them into people. I’m jealous of you, of my other friends, of my own daughter, for chrissake. And I am really jealous, seriously jealous, of this ridiculous girl of Peter’s.”
I stop putting on my earrings, moving the phone from one ear to the other without missing a syllable. I hear what she says about being jealous of me and my heart freezes; I don’t want her to think of me that way, it kills me to believe she thinks of me that way. I’m not somebody in that category; I’m not somebody she measures herself against, how can I be, we’re from the same place, we’re versions of the same person, we’re best friends. I want anything but to be a yardstick, a stick she would use to beat herself. What I say is, “Tell me about the girl.”
“Let’s just say she should be judged by weight, not by volume. I was pissed off when he hired her. I was pissed off when she called at home during dinner for the last month to ask questions about his assignments. Sure, as his clerk she has every right to call, but not during my dinner. She never chews her cuticles. She’s younger, sweeter, smarter than I could ever be. Or ever was. I was never that young,” she practically yells, and then says, “And neither were you, Gina. Neither of us was ever that young.”
My Italian friend, who never cries, starts to cry.
VII
Jealousy makes detectives, clairvoyants, and thieves of us all. We track down private papers; we imagine encounters in gruesome detail and construct passionate conversations; we purloin letters, phone bills, and e-mails; we decode their passwords, the retrieval code for their answering machines, their journal entries. When their phones are busy, we call the other numbers to see if indeed we can make the connection—are they talking to the one we fear? We drive by to see if lights are on, if cars are in driveways; we walk by offices to see if doors are open or shut; we go through trash; we go through credit card statements. We go through hell.
“To be loved is nothing,” wrote André Gide. “What I want is to be preferred.” Ah, yes: preference. A rival sweetens the captured heart; a vanquished foe flavors the victory. What you really want is to win someone’s favor, not to settle for what is offered to all.
Doesn’t being first in line depend on the concept of the second, third, and tenth, impatient behind you? To be alone in the queue is comic. Pathetic.
A rival at school, in love, at work, in the family; what would we do without our trusted double?
VIII
Before I went on my first book tour, an Italian friend of mine who grew up in Philadelphia said that I must—no question about it—sew some red thread onto the gold necklace I always wear in order to stave off the evil eye. “People are going to be jealous of you because you did something they haven’t done. A lot of people think of success not as something you earn, but something bestowed randomly. Why you and not them, they’ll think, and even if they don’t mean to, they’ll give you the evil eye. Red thread will offer you protection. You don’t believe it, do it as a favor to me.”
And so, with humble gratitude for the generosity I was offered—generosity being the antidote to jealousy—I find red string around my gold.
IX
Jealousy captures the imagination. It creeps up on us when we least expect it and involves people we love deeply. Of course it does. We long to bite the hand that feeds us, the hand with the ring we are meant to kiss. Jealousy emerges from the most buried part of ourselves; we carry it with us from the oldest of old neighborhoods, the oldest of old countries.
GINA BARRECA is a professor of English at the University of Connecticut. She is the author of Babes in Boyland, They Used to Call Me Snow White but I Drifted, and Too Much of a Good Thing Is Wonderful, as well as the editor of Don’t Tell Mama: The Penguin Book of Italian American Writing.
Il Pasto Che Parla
. . . . . . . . . . . .
VALERIE K. WALDROP
“You’re squashing the snake,” she says. “Stop. Watch me.” Beneath her hands the dough lengthens and smoothes, an obedient potato snake. “Roll it firm but easy,” she says. We both watch her square hands, pale with flour, move on the counter. “Go stir the sauce,” she says without looking up, and cuddles this snake along the last one she rolled. My mother’s kitchen is no laboratory; experiments are not encouraged. If I’m likely to wreck the recipe or make a mess, she will snatch the food away and make it right. She is a small woman, but her way is large, so I, an obedient daughter, step away from the counter and move to the stove.
We are making gnocchi alla sorrentina, the Italian dumpling. Sprinkle flour over cold mashed potatoes, add an egg and mix by hand, then knead the dough until it’s as soft as an earlobe. The dough is shaped and cut and curled. And once cooked, the potato pasta is piled in a bowl and covered with a simple red sauce and grated parmigiano cheese. If made correctly, if the snake is spared the squashing, if the dumpling hollows, gnocchi is delicious. Each gnoccho is a delicate dumpling curl that, once cooked, will slightly resist the tooth and melt on the tongue. “Help me cut the dough,” she says, and I do, sure of this part. Holding the snake down on the table with one hand, I slice with the other. I cut off half inch pieces and swipe them to the side. My mother’s quick hand keeps the counter dusted with flour, and still her slicing speed is twice mine. Our
pezzetti, the sweet little dough pieces, slide gracefully to their pile. When all the snakes have been cut, my mother hands me a fork. Here is the art, I think: with my left hand I hold the fork, handle resting between my thumb and first finger, at a forty-five degree angle, concave side facing up with the tips of the tines poised against the counter. With my right hand, I place a lightly floured pezzo at the base of the tines. I pet the dough against the tines while rolling it down the fork: too hard and my finger will break through, too soft and the gnoccho will not hollow and will remain heavy. The dough wraps perfectly over my finger as it rolls down the fork; the finished gnoccho is a ridged curl around my deep finger indentation. My mother and I work quietly, grab a pezzo, roll it, slip it aside, and then again. Her occasional closed-lipped hmmmm tells me not to press so hard. Together we cover the counter in gnocchi.
My mother, Fulvia Maria Rosaria Sanniti, was born in Naples in 1934, to Vicenzo and Rovena Sanniti. Her father was a nobleman; the Sanniti family held the title of “Count” for three centuries, until all titles were stripped after the Second World War. He married Rovena against his family’s wishes. My grandmother was a Tuscan farm girl who left the hills to make a living in the city. My mother is a lovely blend of her parents: noble grace and agrarian strength. She has aged easily. Her skin is fair and smooth like the heart of a potato. She draws on her eyebrows each morning, perfect arcs, and matches their angle on her round lips with dark rose lipstick. She has been light blonde all my life, but in photos from her twenties her hair is darker. She likes to show me these photos: “My waist was twenty-three inches,” she says, “and that was after two babies.” Forty years and two more children later, her perfectly petite Italian frame is fuller, voluptuously sturdy.