(Before you read this, of course, you must read the brilliant PT cover story "Jealousy: Love's Destroyer" by Hara Estroff Marano)
Jealous?
I was born jealous; I needed no apprenticeship.
Just as some people know how to sing from the moment they open their mouths, some can play chess having witnessed only one game, and some can draw without instruction, I was able, from the first breath I took, to wonder why somebody else had it better than me.
Why was somebody else's layette set more frilly? Why did their mothers get more flowers? Why did the nurse coo more frequently over the bundle in the next crib than over me?
I'm sure I kept notes. Somewhere in my infant brain was inscribed a primitive cry for--and at-- injustice: "Ignore them; choose me!"
It's still there, that cry, indelible as a tattoo. And just about as classy. I
t was woven into my D.N.A., right there alongside of the love of opera, the distrust of government officials, and sixteen recipes for eggplant.
Why wasn't I the favorite? Maybe I was my mother's favorite, my family's favorite, maybe even my doctor's favorite, but what did they know? Only those who knew better than to appreciate me were worth courting.
Those foolish enough to prefer me did not count--that was automatic. I am certain that what I wanted was to be valued only by those who saw no particular difference between me and other one-day-olds. "Choose me!" If only they hadn't been so busy admiring those ridiculous lesser babies, I might have won.
Winning has always been important to me. Even though I hate to admit it. Even when I know better. Even when I have lost more times than I can count.
Even when I don't know what it is that drives me, blind and ruthless, to be won. This remains true even though the ferocious presence of jealousy I felt in my youth is no longer quite as visible.
For example, when I was five and my brother was eleven, I tore into confetti the valentines he received from girls in his fourth-grade class. They had, I am quite certain, no intention of provoking the fury of a grubby, chubby miniature Medea. They were just being nice.
But "nice" is not what I felt when faced with glittery hearts in pastel colors directed to my one big brother. Once he discovered what I'd done, he ran to my mother and demanded to know why I was so rotten. My poor confused and worried mother didn't know what to say in defense of her daughter's defenseless act. I remember that climactic moment, forty-three years after the fact. I made a decision to suck my thumb and not answer.
What I don't know is whether I was prompted to viciousness by a wish to have my brother all to myself, or by the wish to have the valentine's all to myself. Which was it?
No doubt a good shrink would declare it a combination of both. And when my good shrink asks in gentle, genuine curiosity "Why do you compare yourself to other people? Why aren't you content?" I bite my tongue, as I once thrust my thumb into my mouth, and am silent.
She knows I still struggle with a desire to triumph and conquer over my rivals--or my imagined rivals.
Jealousy defies sophistication.
"Choose me!" isn't what you'd call a refined request.
We torture ourselves with jealousy, true, but the world makes it easy. A girl hears "Why can't you be as sweet as Ann-Marie? She never cries." And instead of choosing to emulate Ann-Marie, you decide to tie her to railroad tracks.
Ann-Marie morphs into the enemy.
You cry "Not fair! If I always got my way, I'd be sweet too!"
You embed this in the fierce heart of an six-year old. The emotion sits there, knitting itself into the core of your emerging self, forming a web.
The web is sensitive. It clings to almost anything.
----
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 Andre Gide. “What I want is to be preferred.” Ah, yes: preference. A rival sweetens the captured heart; a vanquished foe flavors the taste of victory. What you really want is to win someone's love 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?
--------------
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're 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-- you find red string around my gold.
-----------
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 isn't governed by logic or controlled by intellect.
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.
(adapted from "Jealousy, or The Autobiography of an Italian Woman," published in Our Roots Are Deep with Passion: Creative Nonfiction. Edited by Lee Gutkind and Joanna Herman.)
