As was their custom, the women arrived in groups, everyone talking and laughing as they strode through the door. Serenely welcoming them: Priscilla in the doorway and behind her, a five-foot statue of the Virgin Mary, tucked into an entryway alcove, the sky painted in trompe l’oeil.
The women smiled and hugged with exclamations of “Love your hair,” “How was your trip?” “Oh wow, look at the food.” After the outpouring of goodwill, everyone gravitated to the dining room table. Several headed straight for the champagne. Brows lifted or jaws dropped when the women alighted on the Dom Perignon.
“Do you have any idea what this is?” Dale Muegenburg asked Priscilla.
“I’m not familiar with it, but I think it’s expensive.”
“It’s about five hundred dollars a bottle.”
“I had no idea.”
“Now that you know, you sure you want to open it?”
“I’m sure. This is a celebration.”
Before the meeting got under way, the champagne lovers agreed: best bubbly they’d ever tasted.
“BEFORE MEETING THESE WOMEN,” says Priscilla, “I was always fending things off, always saying no. In the store Tom would ask me for a lower price, like he did with the diamond necklace, and I’d say no. He’s ask me if I wanted to go on a trip to Hawaii, I’d say, ‘We can’t afford it.’ When my daughter went on trips with her girlfriends I’d give her a hard time. She works in the store and I thought she shouldn’t be doing something frivolous. I sucked the life out of everyone around me.
“My life was family and work for a very long time. And everything revolved around work. I knew it wasn’t the most important thing but I acted as if it were. Work became a habit, and it was enough.
“But I wasn’t prepared for how much life would change. Since the death of my sister and this year, my father, my family isn’t the same. My kids are adults now with their own families. That’s not the same, either. When they were growing up I was the disciplinarian. Now that they’re on their own I don’t want to say anything that will upset them. I’m close to my kids, but there’s always a sense of needing to be careful, not overstep my bounds, especially with my daughters-in-law. You have to know when to speak up, when to retreat. Mostly retreat. It doesn’t matter how good your ideas, how careful your words, adult children hear suggestions as criticism. So I won’t even make suggestions anymore—it’s my most difficult task. And then as a businessperson, you have to make sure you say the right thing to the right people. There’s a consciousness and a cautiousness to every conversation.
“With these women I can let all that go. The day I know I’m going to a meeting that night, the work goes faster, easier. I move with a lighter step. Now I’m always asking, ‘When’s the next meeting?’ I had so much fun the night I hosted the group. That was the first time I’d entertained in years, and the first time in my life I wasn’t nervous about having guests. I didn’t want the women to leave. Sharing myself and my home with them made me feel peaceful, made me feel complete.
“Going to the meetings was the beginning of my saying ‘yes.’ ‘Yes’ to showing up. ‘Yes’ to reaching out.
“Negotiating my being in the group was the greatest gift my husband ever gave me. He gave me my life back. He gave me a future.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Dale Muegenburg, the traditionalist
. . .
Rekindling the marital spark
. . .
DALE MUEGENBURG WOULDN’T GET TO WEAR THE necklace for eleven months. She hated to wait that long. Wouldn’t it be fun to wear it to her dance club’s annual “away” dance in San Diego? She called Roz McGrath.
“Sure, you can borrow it,” Roz said when Dale called her, “but I won’t be home. I’ll leave it for you on the front porch.” Imagining a typical neighborhood house, Dale shuddered. Outside where anyone could see it? Unguarded? What was this woman thinking? The necklace wasn’t insured yet. What if someone took it? Would Dale have to come up with the money to replace it?
Dale tensed as she packed the last few items in her overnight bag, and she stayed tense during the drive to Camarillo, fifteen miles south of Ventura. She urged her husband, Ted, to drive quickly. She didn’t relax until after Ted had maneuvered a long, winding gravel road, atop which sat Roz’s isolated farmhouse.
Dale raced to the front door to grab the silver jewelry case, then clutched it on her lap for the three-hour drive to San Diego.
Now a new kind of uneasiness crept into her thoughts. Would people think the necklace was a fake? With jewelry, Dale subscribed to the “less is more” philosophy. As a real piece of jewelry the necklace was elegant, but as costume jewelry it’d be garish. On the other hand, a real diamond necklace oozed status. And status symbols made Dale squirm. Like many women, she was susceptible to their allure—a Rolex watch was the only gift from her first husband that she’d kept. Yet she felt shallow when she succumbed. She loathed showing off. How embarrassing if people thought she’d bought a status symbol. Now guilt agitated the emotions swirling through her like images in a kaleidoscope.
Why did putting on this necklace feel like such a momentous act?
At the Rancho Bernardo Inn, Dale shed her sandals for heels and her denims for a sleeveless, black crepe cocktail dress. She carefully took the necklace from the case to clasp it around the nape of her neck. As she looked in the mirror, emotions swelled and swirled again. At first, she felt elegant, regal, like Princess Grace. A moment later, her composure crumbled. Why did seeing herself wearing the diamonds disturb so? How was this possible? She’d longed to be a part of this experiment. She’d struggled just to join.
DALE MUEGENBURG WALKED regularly with Jonell and Nancy Huff. Three times a week, the three of them met at seven-thirty A.M. at Palermo, a coffee shop downtown on Main Street. The women walked west on Main, past the Mission toward Ventura’s pier. They breathed in the salt air from the Pacific and finished up an hour later with cheese bagels and double lattes. Dale had been one of the first to hear Jonell’s idea and one of the first asked to participate.
The idea appealed to Dale but not the expense. Money was an issue. Dale hadn’t worked full-time since she’d been a paralegal at Ted’s law firm, where the two of them had met twenty-seven years ago. With her marriage to Ted, a widowed attorney with three children, Dale felt she’d acquired a full-time job at home. She’d tried various part-time gigs, including two years as a high school French teacher. But five years ago, Ted’s elderly mother needed care, so Dale had withdrawn from the workforce completely. Which meant she didn’t have an independent income. Which meant she could spend a hundred dollars without consulting her husband, but not a thousand.
At dinner that night, she didn’t mention the necklace because she was nervous about telling Ted. She needed time to figure out the best way to approach him. She wasn’t going to ask his permission, but she wanted his support.
Go slowly, she told herself, get a sense of his feelings about it. Just put the idea out there, let it simmer.
Ted was a good listener—a trait that contributed to his considerable charm. He seemed to take in every word he heard, and even more, he seemed genuinely interested in what people had to say. He was five feet, nine inches, bald and bespectacled, and exuded sex appeal.
So the night Dale told Ted about the necklace-sharing plan, Ted focused on what Dale was saying. His face said, “Tell me more,” but his mind asked, Was I hearing her right? The three walkers were going to buy a twenty-two-thousand-dollar necklace? Was she crazy? If these were the kinds of women she walked with, she needed a new group.
Aloud he said noncommittally, “You girls.”
Two weeks later, Dale brought up the subject again.
“Jonell’s idea looks like a go,” she said. “I’d like to be part of it.”
Not this again, Ted thought. “You already have nice jewelry,” he said.
“This is more about sharing it.”
“I didn’t think you liked diamonds.”
> “There may be more to it than wearing it.”
I am not on board with this. “I still don’t get it.”
When Dale met resistance she didn’t push back. That characteristic had served her well when she was twenty-nine and the “overnight” mother of teenagers. And it’d served her well in her marriage to Ted. She dropped the subject.
While Dale was calculating how best to win over her husband to the purchase, her husband was calculating how best to talk her out of it. He hadn’t been in the legal profession for three decades without becoming a strategist, too. He knew he couldn’t—wouldn’t—stop her, but who knows what resentment he’d harbor? And resentment, he knew, could damage a marriage. But they were still paying pricey college tuition for their youngest daughter. At this point, a diamond necklace was an extravagant and unnecessary bauble. More than questioning the expense, though, he realized he was hurt. He’d given Dale so many beautiful pieces of jewelry in their twenty-four-year marriage. Weren’t they enough? And why would she want diamonds? Flashy wasn’t her style. She was understated, tailored.
Ted decided to talk to Wayne Huff, whose wife, Nancy, had agreed to the venture. Wayne was a general contractor with a gentle manner and a warm smile.
“I think this is a bad idea,” Ted said one Sunday afternoon at Wayne’s house.
“Why?” asked Wayne. “It means a lot to the girls. You’ll be happier if you let her do it.”
“Why do you think that?”
“You think you’ll be happy with an unhappy wife?”
“No. . . . But the expense . . .”
“Think of it as an investment in your relationship.”
Ted liked and respected Wayne, so his words carried weight. Intellectually, Ted knew Wayne made sense. But emotionally? Ted still wasn’t sold on the idea.
And Dale knew it. On her next walk with Jonell, she confided her anxiety about finding a way to overcome Ted’s resistance.
How to get the husbands enthusiastic? Ideas were Jonell’s forte. This one she figured out early on. She’d had to when few husbands responded like Tom Van Gundy to their wives buying a diamond necklace, even sharing the purchase. Jonell’s husband had thought the idea was absurd. So did a number of others. They’d rolled their eyes, they’d teased, they’d smirked. Their reactions, whether strong or subtle, relayed the message: Man, what a frivolous idea.
The obvious tactic to change the male mind-set, Jonell decided, was sex.
“We’ll have a rule,” she said, her eyes full of mischief. Jonell’s eyes were usually full of mischief. “Well, not a rule, because I don’t believe in rules. We’ll have a guideline. Each woman, when it’s her time with the necklace, has to make love wearing only the diamonds.”
She paused, then smiled her impish smile. “Why can’t women take over the world with sex and diamonds?”
Dale didn’t know if the ploy would work, but she wasted no time giving it a shot. At dinner that night, she mentioned the “guideline,” treating it as a joke to cover her embarrassment. She was discomfited by the ruse, even more by the vision of herself naked with the necklace.
Jewelry as a pleasurable sex-inducing object? Ted had never imagined such a thing. But the image immediately seduced him. What a way to dress up my wife’s gorgeous body.
He smiled. “You definitely have to do this.”
With that, Dale cleared the last hurdle with the ease of a Florence Griffith-Joyner.
NOW HERE DALE WAS in her hotel room wearing the necklace for the first time.
The moment of feeling like a royal had vanished. Now she was feeling more like a chambermaid. My dress isn’t worthy of it. From there it was a short step to I’m not worthy of it. I’m too heavy. Looking in the mirror at the beautiful necklace and her size 14 dress, Dale realized how tired she was of not feeling good about herself. In front of the mirror, she made a vow: I will lose twenty-five pounds. When the necklace is mine to wear eleven months from now, I’ll shimmy into a size 8.
__
REMINISCING ABOUT THAT moment in front of the mirror, Dale says, “Part of not feeling good about myself was that I didn’t care about sex anymore. I’d always seen myself as someone with a strong sex drive but with menopause it just ended.
“In the beginning of our marriage the sex was really good. Then over the years things changed. I got pregnant, out of shape, gained weight, didn’t feel sexy. Kids were coming and going. I was distracted, tired. Life got in the way.
“Sex began to feel like childbirth. You remember that childbirth was painful, but over the years you forget just how much it hurt. I knew that I used to love sex, but I couldn’t remember what desire and enthusiasm felt like.
“A lot of women in their fifties don’t care about sex anymore. I’ve talked to a number of married women who haven’t had sex in years. People get into ruts, then they become comfortable there. It’s easy to see how it happens, but women put themselves at risk for their husbands having affairs. For me that’d be devastating. I made a conscious decision that I’d become interested again.
“I heard a doctor on a talk show say that the ‘more sex you have, the more you want.’ He recommended a book called The Sex Diet. The only copy I could locate was a used one, online at Powell’s. When I told a friend, she said ‘Eww, a used copy of a sex manual.’ I hadn’t thought of that, so I was relieved when it arrived in its original, sealed wrapper. The book came with little booklets, one for him, one for her, full of ideas. I gave it to Ted for Valentine’s Day as a joke. Neither of us read the book, but I glanced at the tearout booklet. I was too shy to do anything extreme, but the ideas stirred my imagination, got me wondering what I could do to be more lively and enthusiastic.
“Then I signed up for a seminar on intimacy. It wasn’t a couples seminar per se but we both went. It made a much bigger impact than I’d ever anticipated. We both realized we weren’t communicating. In fact, for more than twenty years we’d never talked about sex. Only some oblique references if I was saying ‘no’ too much, and that was hardly a conversation. I was shy about initiating sex, and talking about it felt embarrassing to both of us.
“After the seminar, we came up with a code, a playful phrase to gauge each other’s gameness for sex. It was a way to signal each other without being too explicit. We’ve more or less abandoned it because we’re more open and straightforward now, but having this way of communicating was groundbreaking for us.
“Losing weight made a big difference. In eight months’ time, I lost those twenty-five pounds I’d vowed to lose. Ted didn’t mind when I was heavier, but losing the weight made me feel sexier.
“The biggest factor was finding an endocrinologist and telling her my sex life could be better. She put me on hormones and testosterone. The side effect has been a little more hair growth on my face—I’m continually plucking—but it’s worth it. The testosterone launched me into a whole new realm.
“Now I’m the one who wants sex more often. And I’ve become a lot less inhibited. Here’s an example. When we were getting ready to go to Ted’s college reunion we signed up to stay in the dorms. He’s eleven years older than I am, so he was in school before the sexual revolution. I started thinking about that time from his perspective, that he probably would have liked to have had a girl in his room. Playing into what I imagined his fantasy would be, I ordered a schoolgirl outfit: a plaid, pleated miniskirt, a sexy white blouse, and kneesocks. I knew I’d be embarrassed to buy it in an adult store in Ventura, so I ordered it by mail. If I’d tried on the outfit in a store I wouldn’t have bought it. Pleats don’t do a lot for me. The dorms had communal bathrooms, so to surprise Ted I had to put the outfit on in the bathroom, then cover up with my bathrobe. I didn’t want anyone else to see me in this getup. It was fun, and Ted seemed to appreciate it.
“I’m getting less embarrassed all the time about trying new things. It’s fun to look online at all the paraphernalia and costumes—cowgirls, harem girls, bar wenches. I wanted to try watching erotica, so I went onl
ine for that, too. I thought the movies were fun and stimulating, though I always wanted more of the story, while Ted, typically male, wanted to fast-forward to the sex. I’m continually thinking, ‘I wonder if this would be fun to try.’
“Making love with the diamond necklace was definitely fun, and sexy. We were giggling. It lent glamour and drama to the experience. I felt like I was on a movie set.
“At first when I was becoming more experimental I worried that I’d shock Ted. He came from a more conventional era. I didn’t want him to lose respect for me, think I was acting slutty, so I ventured cautiously. But he was fine with everything I tried, actually more than fine. The more appreciative he was, the more relaxed and confident I became. All of a sudden I wondered why I was being so coy.”
DALE HAD NOT GROWN up with coy women. The oldest of three girls, Dale was raised in an upper-middle-class family in Palo Alto, three houses away from the Hewletts of Hewlett-Packard fame. That neighborhood didn’t leave the deepest impression on Dale. The women in her childhood did that.
There was her exotic aunt Jeanne, who worked for the foreign service. She filled Dale’s home with artifacts from her posts: gazelle sculptures and zebra drums from Nairobi, a camel saddle and bust of Nefertiti from Cairo. She brought Dale a kimono from Hong Kong, a red leather jewelry box inlaid with silver hieroglyphics from Egypt. With her animated storytelling, she opened Dale’s mind to the fascinations of other cultures.
There was Dale’s mother, Mary, a “Rules” girl before The Rules was published. She taught Dale that if a boy was fifteen minutes late picking her up, she should refuse to go out with him. Dale wasn’t sure about such rules, but she could see that they worked for her mother, who’d attracted three marriage proposals before saying yes to Dale’s father. During her years as a young widow, family photograph albums showed Mary on the arms of a succession of handsome boyfriends. She didn’t have to work at attracting male attention, but she was comfortable receiving it, at ease in her sexuality. When her daughter boldly asked about her sex life with their father, Mary said, just as straightforwardly, “It’s great.” Greeting cards sent to her mother on her eightieth birthday reminded Dale of her mother’s success with men. One called her “sexy Mary”;
The Necklace: Thirteen Women and the Experiment That Transformed Their Lives Page 5