The Necklace: Thirteen Women and the Experiment That Transformed Their Lives

by Cheryl Jarvis

  ONE YEAR AFTER joining the women of Jewelia, Mary persuaded the group to adopt Miracle House as its next fundraiser. Miracle House provided an intensive, residential drug-rehab program for women. Ever since the program had saved the life of someone in Mary’s family, she’d wanted to give back. One of these days, someday, maybe, she’d tell herself. But she had no idea what to do.

  With this group of women, she knew just what to do. She took charge of the fund-raiser, just as she’d taken charge of company events over the years.

  This function was markedly different from the one at Deco. Rain pelted the rooftop of Table 13, a much bigger restaurant, which gave the feel of a much smaller crowd. But that didn’t matter. What the evening lacked in atmosphere, it made up for in poignancy, as two women gave tearful testimonials. Their stories, crediting Miracle House with saving their lives, moved the crowd, including a tearful Mary. With the women of Jewelia she’d realized a dream.

  The fifty-dollar donations at the door netted seventy-five hundred dollars for the organization. At Deco, the donations to the Coalition to End Family Violence totaled fifty-four hundred dollars. Neither take was a huge sum of money, but it was money that would make a difference.

  The coalition used the money to provide ninety days of play therapy for children at its shelter who’d been victims of domestic abuse. Miracle House was able to subsidize ten women who needed treatment but couldn’t afford it. “We’d just had a funding cut,” said director Brenda Davison, “so the money they raised felt like it came from heaven.”

  Astonished by the ease with which thirteen women working together could make an impact, the group found a direction: grassroots philanthropy in the community, where the women knew the needs and could see the results.

  A year and a half after they’d joined together, the women of Jewelia had raised more money with their diamond necklace than they had spent buying it.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Mary Karrh, the pragmatist

  . . .

  Rediscovering a passionate life

  . . .

  JONELL HANDED OUT A MEETING AGENDA WITH HER USUAL mischief:

  1. Where has Jewelia been—in lots of interesting places—in cold water and between oh how many legs?

  2. Where is she going next?

  3. Who can she help?

  4. Is everybody happy?

  In one way, yes, everyone was happy. The fund-raisers gratified the women. An article about Jewelia in People magazine thrilled them. But some women felt that outside forces were coming into play and that, clearly, the group needed protection in the form of a limited liability company, an LLC.

  Jonell was astonished.

  “Why would we need such a thing?” she asked.

  “What if someone comes to one of our fund-raisers and sues us?” someone answered.

  “I’ve been sued as a real estate agent and I’ve been sued as a neighbor,” Jonell countered. “But I still wouldn’t sue anyone. I hate that the world works that way.”

  “But that’s the way the world works,” someone responded.

  “I know that’s the way the world works,” Jonell said. “My real estate contracts contain eighteen pages of disclosures. But this isn’t business as usual. We’re a group of women sharing a necklace.”

  But the businesswomen among them wanted business as usual. They wanted rules of operation.

  Jonell didn’t like rules. From the get-go, she’d chanted, “The only rule will be no rules.”

  Someone said, “No rules is a rule.”

  “That’s true,” Jonell ceded. “But let’s have one place in our lives without more rules.”

  “What if a woman wants out?” someone asked. “Can she decide who to give her share to, or does the group decide? And what part of her original investment does she get back?”

  “We’ll figure it out when the time comes.”

  Jonell wanted to wing it. Others wanted to lay down principles to avoid jumping from crisis to crisis. To them, written agreements smoothed human interactions.

  Jonell quoted Katharine Hepburn: “Follow all the rules, miss all the fun.” Rules limit the possibilities, she added.

  Her arguers saw the downside of possibilities. Three business owners who’d suffered lawsuits in the past wanted protection to try to avoid ever going through that again.

  Mary Osborn, with her military upbringing, wanted structure.

  Dale Muegenburg, with her legal background, wanted a contract.

  “This experiment was supposed to be fun,” Jonell insisted. “Do we need a legal contract for a fun deal?”

  Others countered, “We live in a litigious society.”

  To Jonell, the “world’s out to get us” approach brought out the worst in people. To her opponents, Jonell’s philosophy was naive.

  Jonell wanted the group to operate from a place of trust; others believed that “the world isn’t always trustworthy.”

  Verbally adept, Jonell enjoyed debate. The dissension caused others to squirm.

  Jonell had her supporters. “Our whole legal system is an antiquated system invented by men,” said Roz McGrath. “Women can create something better.”

  Back and forth the arguments volleyed.

  In the midst of the controversy, one woman’s voice resonated with both sides. Mary Karrh shared Jonell’s sensibilities—she’d been a hippie, too—but throughout her working life, she’d been in business, the last two decades as an accountant. She understood both points of view.

  At previous meetings, her soft-spoken words were often drowned under the more strident voices. “Excuse me, can I talk now?” she’d ask, raising her hand. Her ideas were usually unheard until someone else voiced them later. This time, however, the women listened.

  “We already are a partnership,” she said. “We can form a legal entity in several ways, and an LLC can work well to deal with the business world. We also need some agreement to report our income and expenses for taxes. It’s just a formality. But we can have fun with it, create something different. We can still give money to charity.”

  Mary Karrh had found the right words to appease Jonell.

  The lull would be short-lived.

  VENTURA FINANCIAL PARK is a modern, two-story building with nineteen offices wrapped around a stunning open-roofed atrium. Mary Karrh sits behind her desk at the small accounting firm, which she’s owned with a female partner for eighteen years. Tax returns, issues of the Federal Tax Weekly, and a calculator rest on her desk. Boxes of client files hug the walls; more client files fill the bookshelves. During tax season, she works fifty to sixty hours a week; in off-season, she works half that number.

  Mary is tall and thin, with luxuriantly thick, short hair and a wholesome, pretty face. Freckles splash her face and arms. She wears little makeup, only mascara and blush. “I’ve always been natural,” she says. “It’s a lot less work. Fortunately, my husband prefers me this way, too.

  “Growing up, I had a hard time making friends. I was a military brat, so we moved around a lot, and I was shy. I was uncomfortable around other girls. I had little interest in clothes or makeup. Most of them wanted to get married. I wanted a career. I had lots of male friends, but I didn’t have a close female friend until I was eighteen. Men seemed more interesting.

  “I grew up comfortably middle class. As soon as I turned sixteen, I got a job as a cashier on the military base where my father was an air force navigator, and I got my own checking account. Even though there were no scanners then, I knew the price of every item, and at the end of the day, my accounting always balanced to the penny.

  “I never had issues with money until I was forty and my father died. He had no life insurance and there were problems with his Social Security benefits. I got this panicky feeling: What if something happened to my husband—he’s eight years older than I am—so I made him get life insurance. For the first time in my life, the thought of not having enough money scared me.

  “A few years later, I got the same pan
icky feeling when I thought about retirement. When would I retire? Could I even afford to retire? I took a ten-week seminar on money, where we had to talk about a specific concern. I talked about retirement. What I discovered was that I didn’t want to retire. I love what I do. Feeling productive in my work is meaningful to me. It’s stimulating to come into the office. I get to work with CEOs and CFOs. Accounting keeps my brain active. Why should I retire just because my friends or husband do or because I turn sixty or sixty-five? I realized retirement wasn’t connected to money. That discovery was huge, worth far more than the hundred-dollar cost of the seminar. I rarely talk about retirement now.

  “The seminar also encouraged us to change our attitude about money, treat it more as a game than an obstacle. Right at that time, Jonell approached me about the necklace. Buying it seemed outrageously fun—out of the box for me.”

  THE LLC DISCUSSION yanked Mary back “in the box.”

  Dale came to the next meeting with a thirty-four-page operating agreement that she and her committee had labored over for weeks. Jonell blanched when she saw it. Mary Karrh flinched. Eye-scanning the document, Mary thought, here’s the legal world’s version of covering your ass: code sections, protocols, thirty-five definitions, legalese of “whereins” and “heretofores,” four pages of tax effects that Mary thought certain she was the only one who could understand. The voluminous document even required signatures of the husbands because of California’s property law.

  Half the group loved the document on sight. Jonell hated it.

  Tensions flared. Voices rose. The debate ceased being fun.

  Finally, Jonell lost her patience. “This group was my idea,” she snapped, “and I don’t want this document.” Jonell hoped that would end the argument. She’d grown up an only child, which meant eighteen formative years of never having to negotiate with siblings, years of getting her way. She wasn’t getting her way now, and she didn’t like it.

  Among the women were seven firstborns, including Dale, women who’d led their siblings, their classrooms, their businesses. Dale suggested the group go over the document, paragraph by paragraph, “wherein” by “heretofore.” Once again, discussion devolved into deadlock.

  Once again, Mary Karrh’s words emerged as the voice of equanimity and compromise. “This arguing isn’t productive,” she said. “Let’s study the document at home. Some of us would like something simpler, less conventional. I’ll volunteer to create a compromise between the verbal agreement Jonell would like and the formal document others want, something everyone can live with. We can discuss it at the next meeting.”

  Everyone agreed. Then the women defined consensus: Each woman would get her say and every other woman would listen to it. In the end, even if a member disagreed with what the group wanted, she had to let go of her position to align herself with the group—the only way to resolve the issue and move forward.

  The experience had exhausted Mary. She was looking forward to Saturday, when she’d head to the golf course, a favorite place to unwind.

  Saticoy Country Club is a low-key, unpretentious club whose primary attraction is golf. The challenging 120-acre course, which some golfers whisper is “the best-kept secret in Southern California,” winds through avocado groves and agapanthus fields, sycamore and eucalyptus trees, and views of both the Santa Susana Mountains and the Pacific Ocean. Ventura’s enviable sunny skies, cool air, and seventy degrees—ordinary weather for Ventura, extraordinary to much of the rest of the continent—make golfing a year-round sport. Today’s a club tournament, though Mary plays in spite of it, not because of it. Entering the tournament is the only way she can play golf today. She’s wearing kneelength white shorts, a black polo shirt, and a visor with the pink ribbon breast cancer symbol, which is repeated on a pin and a rubber bracelet.

  “I think of my life’s timeline as Before Cancer and After Cancer,” she says while driving an electric cart. “After I was diagnosed—the year I turned fifty-one—I knew everyone would want to know how I was but didn’t necessarily want to call me. So many people don’t know what to do or say. So I took charge. My husband and I researched the disease and the treatments, and I wrote e-mails about what was happening. So many women asked to be put on my e-mail list that it grew longer and longer. Tamoxifen turned me into a creature I didn’t recognize, so those e-mails I wrote were my therapy.

  “Comfort doesn’t come naturally to my husband. When I was diagnosed he wasn’t there for me. He wasn’t a shoulder to cry on. He’s not affectionate by nature, so I knew it wasn’t personal, but when cancer strikes, it is personal, and I took it hard. I turned to my women friends, and I made new ones—they were there for me.”

  One of the women that Mary’s playing with in the tournament walks to the tee box. She swings.

  “Great drive,” Mary bubbles, then bounds over to the woman to add a hug. “I love your swing,” Mary adds, “the way you hold your head so still.”

  Mary lines up her shot and swings. Her drive lands in the bunker. “Oh, crap!” she moans, then laughs. “When the weather’s so beautiful it’s hard not to be happy. It’s difficult for me to play against friends because I want them to do well, too. I like to play golf because it’s a gentleman’s game, a game of honor.”

  Mary tallies the score. She’s always the designated scorer, she says, just as she’s the designated checker of the restaurant tab. She also keeps the books for the women of Jewelia.

  She steers her monologue back to her breast cancer.

  “You wonder why you’re still here when so many others have died. You feel that your life needs to mean something. I threw myself into fund-raising for breast cancer. Every year I raise over five thousand dollars. I’ve gotten zero from friends who live in million-dollar homes and five dollars from people on Social Security. Of the nongivers, I always think, ‘We have so little time left. Why be selfish?’

  “Cancer’s given me an opportunity to be a better person. When people die suddenly they can leave a mess. It’s a gift to know that you’re going to die. Why wait till then to tell people how you feel about them? If I died today, there’d be little unsaid. Generosity isn’t just about giving money; it’s giving of yourself, your time, your words. Now I hug like I’m never going to let go.

  “I used to be very political in the sixties. I marched in Ban the Bomb demonstrations, participated in sit-ins at People’s Park in Berkeley—did everything but get arrested. But I lost the passion. I didn’t turn into a complete yuppie, but I joined the corporate world, became increasingly apathetic. As a hippie I felt I helped make an impact. That feeling started to come back with the breast cancer fund-raising, now even more with these women. Jonell’s passion is contagious. This group has made me feel more involved, more alive. It’s made me feel passionate about life again. Of all the investments I’ve made, the necklace was the best twelve hundred dollars I ever spent.”

  MARY KARRH DROVE excitedly to the next meeting. She felt good about what she and Jonell and Dr. Roz had achieved: In four hours, they’d pared the document to seven pages, using simple language and making the agreement less restrictive. She’d e-mailed their edited version to the other shareholders. Although she felt a little uneasy that no one had responded, her attitude remained upbeat and hopeful.

  As soon as the business part of the meeting got under way, she knew within minutes their simpler agreement wasn’t going to fly. The women didn’t even want to discuss it. Their dismissiveness disappointed Mary.

  It devastated Jonell. She felt both betrayed and abandoned by her friends. Once again she pushed her stance, and once again she hit a wall as hard as the diamonds that had started it all.

  Jonell’s body stiffened. Her mouth quivered as she tried to hold back tears. Her emotions told her that the time had come to let go. Her intellect told her that if she didn’t yield, the group wouldn’t survive.

  “Do whatever you want,” she said. “I’m done.”

  The LLC marked a turning point: the end of Jonell’s g
roup and the beginning of the group. She’d wanted to see what would happen when thirteen gutsy women got together. Now she saw: Together, they were a force. Together, they outvoted her. From the beginning she’d wanted the group to prove stronger than the individual. She just never imagined she’d be the individual the group would be stronger than. She never imagined that the group’s voice would become more powerful than her voice.

  She signed a document that violated everything she believed, and she stayed upset for months. She never mentioned the LLC again.

  The group would move forward and Jonell with it. Once again, the very thing that anguished Jonell would prove the beginning of something wonderful for all thirteen.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Nancy Huff, the exuberant

  . . .

  Creating more fun

  . . .

  AFTER THEIR SEVEN-THIRTY A.M., THREE-AND-A-halfmile beach walk, Jonell, Patti, and Dale stopped at Palermo. Nancy Huff usually joined the “Walkie Talkies,” as some of the townsfolk called the women, but she had to get to her office early today. This September morning, the diamonds glittered against Jonell’s black Lycra tank top. She’d just gotten the necklace—her second go-round with it.

  Soured by the aftertaste left by the LLC discussion six weeks ago, Jonell’s mind started to spin again. The others could contract the group with legal protections, she thought, but she’d figure out a way to expand what the necklace was all about.

  Rosslyn Nikala, the twenty-seven-year-old barista behind the counter, took the women’s order of three double lattes and a cheese bagel. Then she noticed the necklace. “I love diamonds,” she said, speaking slowly, accentuating each word, prolonging the l-o-v-e. “I have a diamond engagement ring,” she went on, displaying her left hand, “diamond earrings, a diamond necklace my husband gave me for our first Valentine’s Day after we married, but it has just three diamonds. One day, I want one like yours.”