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, their sad eyes. They’d talk and talk, sometimes for as long as an hour and a half. Then they’d cry. Their husbands had died or left them. Their children 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: JonellRMcL@aol.com

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 those curvaceous and lush bodies that lots of men desire. Despite knowing that real women have curves, Priscilla viewed her body type critically, the result of years of conditioning.

She chose her best suit and designer high heels. Her jewellery she didn’t worry about: on her right hand, a Hearts on Fire diamond ring; on her wrist, a Philip Stein oval dual-time-zone watch, one of Oprah Winfrey’s Christmas selections two years in a row, the one the talk-show host herself wore. Priscilla had been attracted to the watch because it contained two copper chips, which were supposed to help induce sleep. Since she’d been waking at two every morning and staring at the ceiling, she needed all the help she could get. Priscilla sported the two-thousand-dollar version with a diamond border. One of the perks of owning a jewellery shop was that she could borrow whatever she wanted. The downside was that nothing was really hers. If a customer admired her jewellery and wanted to buy it, she took it off that day and never wore it again. It was better to make the money, so she tried not to get attached.

She found a place to park outside the venue for the meeting – Ventura’s historic Pierpont Inn, turned off the engine and braced herself. Her nerves were frayed. The jittery feeling reminded her of the time back in 1994 when she’d decided to return to college and get a degree. For twenty years she’d been raising three kids, juggling temp jobs, part-time jobs, all varieties of jobs from locking up criminals in the county jail to selling cosmetics. She’d driven to the admissions office, parked the car, turned off the engine, panicked, restarted the engine, driven around the campus, returned to the parking lot, turned off the engine, panicked, restarted the engine, and driven around the campus. She circled eight times – yes, she’d counted – before she’d finally mustered the courage to go inside to talk to the admissions counsellor. Thank goodness she was past that now. No need to circle the grounds eight times today.

By the time Priscilla finished her ruminations and walked into the room, the single chair at the long, rectangular table loudly indicated she was the last to arrive. This wasn’t anything new. She was always late to social gatherings. Still, she castigated herself; being late doesn’t make for a good first impression.

Tiny gold lights interspersed in pine greenery gave the elegant, private room at the inn a festive atmosphere. Holly and poinsettias on the mantelpiece brightened the dark, panelled walls. But Priscilla didn’t notice the room. She saw only the women all laughing and talking at once. She saw exuberance, camaraderie – the e-mail chatter come alive.

In less than a minute she saw what was missing from her life.

‘I’m sorry I’m late,’ said Priscilla, rushing the words. ‘I had work to take care of.’

Before the words sputtered from her mouth, Jonell had jumped out of her seat with a huge smile. She walked quickly over to the newcomer, wrapped an arm around her, and introduced her to the others. Everyone broke into huge smiles, each woman thinking, ‘So this is the woman whose generous husband made it all possible.’

Priscilla sat down. She knew it wasn’t polite but she couldn’t help staring at the woman across from her. It was Maggie Hood, her straight blonde hair with long wispy layers framing her green eyes, a leopard-print jersey wrapped snugly and suggestively around her muscular body. Priscilla didn’t know that women in their fifties could look that good.

Had they had an in-depth conversation, Priscilla would have discovered that the surfaces of their lives were as different as their bodies. Maggie had had three husbands and many boyfriends over the years. But deep down Priscilla had more in common with Maggie than she could ever have imagined just looking at her. Two thousand miles from Ventura, in the inner city of Chicago, Maggie had also grown up in a tough neighbourhood.

Maggie smiled warmly at Priscilla, but actually she felt just as much an outsider. So many women in the group had long-term husbands, while her marriage was disintegrating. So many came from the area, while she had moved there. Although most of the women in the group were mothers, she was the only one whose children still lived at home.

Priscilla smiled back at Maggie, then found her eyes drawn to another woman in the group, the woman at the head of the table with cascading blonde hair, a red sweater and the diamond necklace. Priscilla had seen the necklace in the shop for over a year but she’d never seen it look the way it looked today. The midday sun, streaming rays of light through the inn’s tall windows, magnified the brilliance of the diamonds and cast an aura around the Woman in Red. It wasn’t just her face that was suffused with light – it was her whole being. Was it that the necklace needed to be worn to look this beautiful, Priscilla wondered, or was it this time, this place, these women?

Priscilla believed in signs. The first time she’d laid eyes on Tom Van Gundy she saw a light surrounding him, knew in that moment he was the man she was going to marry. The feeling was powerful, spiritual even. She felt something momentous happening here, too. Not as potent as when she’d been a teenager, this feeling registered more as a tremor, but still, she felt something shift in the ground beneath her and she knew she wanted to belong.

Meanwhile, the women were thinking their own thoughts about Priscilla. Every one of them admired her courage in joining a group where she knew no one. A few wondered how this quiet woman would fare with the loud and bawdy characters among them.

When the women were finished with their salads, Jonell passed out an agenda for the meeting.

Number 1: Who’s been naughty and/or nice? Hopefully both.

Number 2: The cost of the insurance on the necklace: $88.46 per woman.

Number 3: How does everyone feel about donating towels for a community project to help the homeless?

The women wrote cheques to cover their share of the insurance, they chatted about what had happened to the necklace in the last month, it was handed over to the next woman and then at last they got up to leave. They warmly said their good-byes to Priscilla, one by one effusing over how delighted they were to have her in the group. Priscilla, herself, couldn’t stop smiling.

That evening at dinner Tom saw Priscilla smile for the first time in a long while, her smile revealing teeth as white as the whites around her warm, brown eyes, now crinkling. He’d fallen in love with that smile when they were both at school, when he was a starting quarterback in the football team and she was a cheerleader.

‘It’s a great group of women,’ Priscilla said. ‘Thank you for making me part of it.’

‘I didn’t do anything.’

‘Of course you did.’

‘I just saw those women having so much fun together and I wanted that for you.’

‘I didn’t realise how much I wasn’t like that.’

‘You used to be.’

‘I don’t know what happened.’

‘I don’t know either.’

Can any of us pinpoint the moment when we’ve lost our younger selves, lost joy in the simple things, stopped celebrating life? For years – decades – we work, raise a family, plant begonias. Then one day we wake up to chemotherapy and eulogies and nursing home visits and the realisation that we haven’t had a real holiday in years. And all we can do is ask: how did life get so hard?

When Jonell e-mailed the group with the date and place for the next meeting, Priscilla responded immediately: ‘I’ll be there. Looking forward to it.’ This time she really meant it.

But once at the meeting, Priscilla was her reticent, quiet self. She wondered if she’d ever have the confidence to speak as easily and assuredly as so many of the others. In the neighbourhood where she grew up she’d learned survival skills, but not the fine art of small talk. She noticed the women expressed differing opinions, but without raising their voices like the male pundits on the TV news. The women didn’t call one another ‘wrong’ or ‘stupid’. Priscilla had never encountered such civility in dissension. She wondered if the women would be as gracious when she spoke. She felt the same acceptance at the second meeting that she’d felt at the Pierpont Inn – more than acceptance, a sense she was valued, someone special. Her enjoyment in being with the women was beginning to outweigh her fear of not measuring up.

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

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