The Necklace: A true story of 13 women, 1 diamond necklace and a fabulous idea. Cheryl Jarvis

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СКАЧАТЬ necklace. Patti was a talker – not a rapid talker like Jonell, but a memorable talker. More than her one-of-a-kind accessories, what distinguished Patti was her Long Island accent. She left New York in 1975, but the accent didn’t leave her. Considering it another accessory, she kept it. When she talks, her hands move constantly, her fingers snapping to make a point, her beautiful, natural nails tap-tap-tapping on the table, the steering wheel, whatever surface is handy. When she walks, she recalls the dynamism of the streets of Manhattan, ever alert, moving quickly, with a stride befitting someone who completed the famous Waikiki Roughwater Swim over almost 4 kilometres of Pacific Ocean. On the streets downtown she talks to everyone – she knows everyone. She calls them ‘doll’, ‘babe’, ‘honey’, ‘lovey’, like a waitress in a lorry drivers’ café. She tells everyone she bumps into the story of the necklace.

      People reacted to the necklace in varied ways. Some marvelled, some shrugged, some attacked. ‘What do you think you’re going to do with it?’

      Patti didn’t have an answer for that one. That comment made her think: ‘What are we going to do with it?’ Scornful comments didn’t make her doubt what she’d done; they made her wonder if there was a better way to tell the story. So she changed a detail here, an anecdote there, and she kept talking.

      ‘It surprised me how much fun it was to talk about it. I liked the story of the deal – that is, getting the necklace for the price we did – but mostly I liked the story of the sharing. I liked that it was another conversation I could have with people. I had no idea where we were going with this, no idea where the necklace was going. Hell, I had no idea where I was going. But I was looking forward to finding out.’

      

      Patti had just two more days left of her four weeks with the necklace when one of the other women – who? – asked to borrow it for a dinner dance. Patti said, ‘Sure.’ But when the necklace came back the next day Patti didn’t want it any more.

      ‘I’d enjoyed wearing it too much,’ she says. ‘I didn’t want to become reattached, then have to let it go a second time.’ It was time to pass it on.

      Later, with the women, Patti talked about the possessiveness that surprised her and made her feel guilty and embarrassed. It reminded her of Gollum in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy – the character who became mentally tortured and physically wretched from his obsessive desire for the One Ring, ‘his precious’. Patti called the necklace ‘my pretty’ and her difficulty in letting it go ‘the Gollum effect’.

      ‘In talking about it,’ says Patti, ‘I realised that what made the necklace exciting to wear wasn’t the necklace itself. If I’d wanted a diamond necklace, I would have bought one a long time ago. What made it exciting was the story behind it. Getting to tell the story was what I’d become attached to.’

      

      Before Patti’s turn with the necklace would come around again the following year, she and Gary would sell his dental practice and their lives would change in many ways. The group of women changed as well, with two members leaving, and a few tensions being aired and resolved.

      During that first year Jonell, a voracious reader, gave the group a reading list and their first assignment: a book called Affluenza by three men no one had heard of. Jonell liked context. ‘If we’re going to talk about the necklace,’ she enthused, ‘this book will give us a frame of reference, make us more knowledgeable and effective.’

      Mary O’Connor, one of the women in the group, was a former English teacher and an avid reader of literary fiction. She had no interest in self-help books. ‘If I’d wanted a reading group,’ she thought, ‘I would’ve joined one.’ But she kept quiet.

      Nancy Huff was quiet, too, while thinking the same thing.

      In fact, the group’s reaction to the reading assignment was less than enthusiastic, with almost half the group failing to read the book and the other half not even turning up to the meeting where it was to be discussed.

      Patti wasn’t in the habit of reading self-help books either. She liked escapist novels and crime fiction. But since they’d just sold the dental practice she had time on her hands, so she was one of the few who read the book.

      She read that Americans are the most voracious consumers on earth, that most of us suffer from owning too much, that everything we own ends up owning us. She read that never before has so much stuff meant so little to so many, and that the relentless pursuit of more would exact a price much steeper than the cost of the goods.

      ‘Reading that book was a turning point,’ she says. ‘Until I read it, I never saw myself as a consumer. If I saw a ten-thousand-square-foot home, the excess would not have resonated. “How much is enough?” was a whole new concept for me.

      ‘For the first time I started thinking about my possessions. When I was younger, I worked at accumulating. If the object I wanted was a “great bargain”, I’d buy two. The book got me thinking for the first time about the excess in my life. I realised that where I’ve been most excessive is with my accessories. I have enough to accessorise every woman in the group. I have at least twenty pair of sunglasses, and how many do I wear? The same pair all the time.

      ‘What I’ve concluded is that there’s nothing I need any more. I have too much already. I don’t wear what I have. Some things I shouldn’t have bought in the first place. Like a pair of multi-coloured lizardskin high heels. I don’t even wear high heels but I had to have those shoes. The urge to buy is like the urge to have a cigarette. It’s a need for instant gratification, but if you wait, the urge will go away. We do have a choice. When I was younger I never saw this day coming.

      ‘My mantra used to be “accessorise, accessorise”. Now it’s “I have enough”. Today when I look in my closet, I feel sick. Mortified.

      ‘I knew buying the necklace would lead to something unexpected, but I didn’t suspect it would change my view of buying. When I was younger I saw what I didn’t have and shopped to fill in the gaps. Today I see what I do have and go shopping just to look. Since owning the necklace and having so many conversations about it, I’ve started to give away my accessories. That’s made me feel lighter, made me feel free. If only giving up smoking were as easy!’

      CHAPTER THREE Priscilla Van Gundy, the loner

       Finding out what’s truly precious

      PRISCILLA COULDN’T GET EXCITED about anything, and that included the first e-mail from Jonell. Scheduling time to spend with a group of women was crazy. She’d always thought so. And now that she and Tom were busy overhauling the shop she was working sixty hours a week. Who had time? She was beginning to feel like the Bill Murray character in Groundhog Day: every morning, even Sundays, waking up to the same life, the same grind. Last year she’d taken off just twelve days, total. The pace had been gruelling.

      And now one of the store managers had handed in his notice, which meant adding selling to everything else she had to do. Priscilla didn’t like being on the shop floor interacting with customers; she found selling stressful and exhausting – so many women wanting to talk. Occasionally, if the customer were an older man whose wife had recently died, Tom would do the listening. But usually the customer was a woman, and Priscilla was the one to pull up a chair. The same two or three trudged in every week with their slumped shoulders, СКАЧАТЬ