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

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СКАЧАТЬ were out of town or out of touch. These women were so lost, their loneliness so palpable. Priscilla knew they were shopping just to fill their days. They didn’t want a watch or a ring. They wanted a friend. Priscilla listened and nodded and soothed. Then one day in early December, Priscilla handed one of them a box of tissues to wipe her tears, and in that moment saw the woman as a character out of Dickens – the Ghost of Christmas Future. Would Priscilla be this woman in ten or twenty years? She had a job, a husband and three children who lived nearby, but who knew what lay ahead?

      Just months before, Priscilla’s sister Doreen had died. After her diagnosis with a rare form of cancer, she’d valiantly battled a slow and agonising death as the disease spread from one vital organ to another.

      ‘Doreen was the life of our family, the actress, the jokester, ’ says Priscilla. ‘With her death I shut down completely. Every day I got up and did what I had to do, but I was just going through the motions. After work each night I’d go straight to the bedroom, put on my pyjamas, and climb into bed to watch American Idol or Seinfeld repeats. I cut myself off from everyone, even my husband.

      ‘One thing I was good at was isolating myself. I’d done it my whole life. It was easier to click on the remote control than to reach out to people. But there comes a time when you realise you’ve spent so much time alone that you’ve built your entire life around it. And that’s not good.’

      After the tearful customer left that day, Priscilla retreated to the back room, feeling that she had to make some kind of change to avoid becoming just like that woman. She checked her e-mails and, lo and behold, there was a message from Jonell.

      From: [email protected]

      To: Women of Jewelia

       Well, I thought it was really fun, how about you? Mary and Priscilla, we definitely missed you. I think we got a lot done. (Consider this the minutes.)

      1. The name Jewelia…

      2. The schedule…to follow from Mary K.

      3. The considerations, i.e. sharing and not sharing and the promise never to do either without careful thought.

      4. Maybe we could do some possibility thinking. Where do you want to take Jewelia? What else could we share? What should everyone share?

       I don’t know why I took my shirt off. Whose suggestion was that? Someone is supposed to be giving me better advice than that.

       We look forward to being together again before Christmas. Further information to follow. You are all fabulous!

       Have fun.

       Jonell

      Priscilla stared at her computer. Could she be missing out on something?

      

      Priscilla de los Santos (‘of the Saints’) had grown up in east Ventura, in a predominantly Hispanic farm community. Her Mexican grandparents had settled in Ventura after working as itinerant farmers during the Depression. Her parents started off farming too, but over time they’d moved on to other work: her mother, packing lemons, cleaning houses, then running a diner; her dad, pouring cement and working on building sites. The oldest of six, Priscilla spent most of her time at home taking care of her younger siblings. Their family of eight – nine for the five years a cousin lived with them – had to share one bathroom. ‘So many people were living in that little house,’ she says. ‘It was probably one of the reasons I married young – to have my own place.’

      Her extended family included gang members – too many of them. Her mother was determined her children would not go the way of so many of their cousins. She sacrificed to send them to a really good school, a Catholic school called Saint Sebastian, and they were the only kids in the district who were waiting at the bus stop at seven a.m. each morning.

      Priscilla grew up surrounded by family, including her grandparents and uncles living across the street, but isolated from her peers. Her remote neighbourhood was surrounded by orange groves and mustard fields, the plants tall enough for Priscilla to hide in. ‘I liked being alone,’ she says. ‘But in a way that stopped me from having friends.’

      She grew up tough. That’s what happens when you’re surrounded by gangs – and she’d hung around her share of gang types. When she was sixteen, a group of girl hoodlums jumped her and beat her up, leaving red gashes down her arms. ‘They thought I was a weak little thing from a Catholic school, but I held my own. I’ve always felt pretty strong. It’s probably the reason I gravitated to correctional work after I left school.’

      And Priscilla grew up feeling different. When her grandmother descended into dementia, her mother took care of her, which meant Priscilla and her brother had to help run their mum’s restaurant. Priscilla was only thirteen.

      ‘I was a really good softball player, but I couldn’t participate in sports because I had to work every afternoon and every weekend. I remember a conversation with classmates when we were talking about what we wanted for Christmas. I said I needed a coat. One of the girls said scornfully,’ Why don’t you ask for something you want? Why ask for something you need?’ But I was lucky to get what I needed. They couldn’t understand my world, and I couldn’t understand theirs. I thought it’d be the same thing with the Jewelia women.

      ‘I don’t think anyone who grows up like I did ever outgrows the feeling that they’re not good enough. I don’t think others thought that about me, but I thought it. Intellectually, I knew that friendship wasn’t about the way you grew up or the schools you attended, but I didn’t feel it. That thinking kept me from reaching out.

      ‘I assumed these women would be upper-crust. I didn’t think I was in their league. I felt as though I was back in school. Just thinking about going to a meeting was nerve-racking. Would I fit in? Would I be accepted? What if they didn’t like me?’

      Priscilla realised she was still staring at the e-mail. She wasn’t an e-mail person, hated coming into the office every day to face eighty new messages. All her replies were short. ‘I’ll be there,’ she typed. ‘Looking forward to it.’

      She wasn’t looking forward to it. She was just being polite. Being with a crowd of people made her physically uncomfortable. Sometimes she wondered if she had a phobia. Growing up, she always sat at the back of the classroom, anything not to call attention to herself. The extent of her contact with school friends, the few she had, was ten minutes a day.

      For most of her life Priscilla had only one close friend – and she lived in Houston, Texas. And ‘close’ was a relative term, given that sometimes Priscilla went a year without talking to her. Having one friend 2,500 kilometres away seemed like enough, however, when you worked all the time. And when hadn’t Priscilla worked all the time? Ever since she’d greeted, served and washed dishes in her mum’s diner, she’d worked. She’d borne three children by the time she was twenty-seven and never stopped working.

      Even her sister’s illness and death hadn’t changed that work-work-work pattern. But it caused her to withdraw even more deeply into herself than before.

      Priscilla decided that if she was going to this meeting, she should try to make a good impression. On the day of the meeting, she looked into her wardrobe. Everything in there was black, the best colour for slimming the extra weight she felt she was carrying. Priscilla had one of СКАЧАТЬ