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

by Cheryl Jarvis

  Jonell had seen a lot of women stare at the necklace but never with such transparent desire. She unhooked the diamonds and reached over the counter to clasp them around Rosslyn’s neck. The gesture was a natural act for a woman committed to egalitarianism but an unnatural one for the young woman on the receiving end. Rosslyn’s eyes glazed over. “Oh wow.” That’s all she could say between sharp, unbelieving breaths. “Wow. Maybe I’ll get one like this after I’ve been married ten years. God, I hope so. You have made my day.”

  Jonell absorbed the words she’d just heard with the bliss on Rosslyn’s face and birthed a grand, new idea.

  Outside, where regulars crowded the small, round tables, Jonell offered the necklace to a woman she knew, an ageless artist. “Would you like to wear the necklace for a while?” Jonell asked.

  “Oh yes! Could I?”

  The petite, tanned artist sat there looking as surprised and giddy as if she’d won the lottery. After fifteen minutes, Jonell offered it to another, and then another. On this morning, the regulars were mostly men, but that made no difference to Jonell. A developer, a sculptor, a salon owner, a realtor, a musician—they were all game to sport the stones. Some preened like peacocks. Some strutted. Some laughed. “I should have worn heels,” quipped a strapping police officer, the diamonds a standout against his navy blue uniform but an odd accessory to the gold badge. Once the crowd decided that white T-shirts didn’t do justice to the necklace, two artists good-naturedly stripped. Patti, with her ever-present Sony Cyber-shot, snapped pictures of everyone wearing the necklace, while Dale applauded each pose. The men debated whether the diamonds looked better on hairy chests or smooth ones. Smooth won, 6—0. As they discussed the necklace, the men considered what they might share: a boat, an RV, a Porsche? On this morning, Palermo was the place not just for lattes and the Los Angeles Times but also for an unexpected jolt of conversation and community.

  Ventura, originally San Buenaventura (“city of good fortune”), began as the last settlement of Father Junipero Serra, the Spanish Franciscan monk who founded the chain of California missions. Once a sleepy little town on California’s coast, dubbed by residents Mayberry-by-the-Sea, today Ventura is a thriving, eclectic mix of artists and farmers, entrepreneurs and environmentalists. Neither a playground for the rich, like nearby Monticeto, nor a tourist attraction like Santa Barbara, Ventura is a working-class community. One section of Ventura County, Oxnard Plains, claims one of the richest soils on the planet, giving it the moniker “Strawberry Capital of the World.”

  A revitalized downtown teems with new restaurants, galleries, boutiques, and day spas. Shops along the palm-tree-lined Main Street range from the bohemian and preppy to the erotic and quaint, generating the same kind of inclusive feeling as the downtowns of Boulder, Colorado, and Asheville, North Carolina. In spite of its new look, there’s nary a parking meter to be found.

  Jonell strode to her car even more quickly than usual. Seeing others have fun wearing the necklace had boosted her endorphins. Over the next three weeks she asked, “Would you like to try on the necklace?” as often as she said, “Good Morning.” She ringed the rocks around her mother, her daughter, her manicurist, her gardener, saleswomen and customers at Chico’s, waitresses at Starbucks, a homeless man and woman she’d come to know on her morning jaunts. Most wore the necklace several minutes, a few as long as an hour. By the end of Jonell’s month, some eighty people in town had donned the diamonds.

  At the next meeting Jonell excitedly told the group where Jewelia had been. When their turns came around, the others followed Jonell’s lead, but each with her own style, in her own way.

  IN THE MIDDLE OF the Maulhardt Industrial Center, in Ventura’s neighboring community of Oxnard, sits the office of the property management company that owns the twelve-building complex. A blue metal facade decorates the concrete exterior. The office itself is industrial bland, with white walls, gray commercial carpeting, and an acoustical tile ceiling. There’s nothing ordinary or dull, however, about the woman in charge.

  Nancy Maulhardt Huff is the first person you see at the eighteen-foot-long reception desk, an all-purpose space that functions as Nancy’s office and that of her fifty-four-year-old, part-time accountant, Noreen. No doors here, just a computer that the two women share. Nancy’s cluttered desktop displays: family photos, a banana, a People magazine (“for when things get slow,” she explains), colored files on her tenants, a stack of mail, and Post-it notes everywhere.

  Nancy runs the company. She also picks up the phone, which rings steadily throughout the day.

  Being the head honcho and answering the phone all day doesn’t feel odd to Nancy, or to those who know her. They’d tell you she’s a bundle of contradictions. She’s a trust fund baby who grew up in a five-thousand-square-foot home on a golf course, with tennis lessons at a country club and a quarter horse at a neighboring stable, but is as down-to-earth as they come. She was pregnant when she married at twenty, yet the marriage has endured nearly four decades. She’s a devout Catholic who enjoys bawdy repartee. During a typical week, Nancy will visit her widowed mother several times and call her twice a day. Nancy will look in on her brother and check his house for gas leaks. She’ll handle the finances for her brother, her mother, her marriage, and her business. And, with it all, she arrives at the office every weekday in perennial high spirits.

  The phone rings.

  “Maulhardt Industrial Center . . . Hello, sweetheart, how are you?”

  She looks at her left palm, then listens some more. “Okay . . . love you . . . bye.”

  “That was my son in San Francisco. I didn’t have any reminders for him. I write my to-do list on my hand with a black marker. I’m always writing on my hand. I call it God’s Palm Pilot.”

  The phone rings.

  “Sister Jill. How’s life, girl? I can’t believe you forgot my birthday. . . . Come up and see me. Can you bring your mother? . . . I need you to start praying for Mom. . . . Okay. . . . Love you. . . . Bye.”

  “Jill was my college roommate. Now she’s a nun. Living with me drove her to God.”

  Mike, a real estate broker in the adjacent office and one of Nancy’s twenty tenants, drops in to say hello. “I got a picture of your baby,” says Nancy. “Here I introduced you to your wife and I’m mad you didn’t name the baby after me. . . . Oh look, you’ve got new glasses. Don’t you look cute? Do I look thinner? That’s all I care about. I weigh more now than I ever have. I’m going on the South Beach diet after my birthday.”

  Nancy talks a lot about her weight, but it’s not what you notice. There’s a pixieish quality to Nancy, with her short blond hair (“Give me a bedhead,” she instructs her hairdresser), her fresh un-made-up face, her quick movements, her constant chatter. “My nickname in high school was ‘the mouth,’ ” she says. You just know that Nancy was one of the popular girls in school, someone you wanted to be around, because life was just plain more fun when Nancy was there.

  She’s wearing a cap-sleeved brown cashmere sweater (“twenty-eight dollars from Talbots”), wool glen plaid Ralph Lauren slacks (“twenty dollars from Macy’s”), brown suede Gabor flats (“more than everything else put together”). She kicks off the flats and pads around the office in polka dot socks (“from Marshalls”). Tortoiseshell reading glasses slide down her nose.

  “I used to have a PI as a tenant,” Nancy says after Mike leaves. “He came in with great stories. I called him ‘my private dick’ until my husband made me stop.”

  Nancy continually looks out the glass front windows to see the action in the parking lot. As soon as she sees someone approach the office she jumps from her chair and walks out the door into the lot to greet them, talking all the way back to her desk.

  “Guillermo!” Nancy leaps up to walk toward the door.

  “Do you want your car washed?” he asks.

  “Yes, I’d like my car washed. Noreen, you want yours washed? It’s on me. . . . Hey, Mike, you want your car washed? I’m paying. . . . Wa
sh them all, Guillermo!”

  “I like to give him the business,” Nancy says after he leaves. “I can give my money to the Catholic Church to pay for some pedophile’s sex case or I can give it to a single dad raising two children—hellooooo?”

  The phone rings.

  “Mom, are you okay?”

  Nancy checks her palm—nothing on there to tell her mom.

  “Okay, I’ll call you later. Love you. . . . Bye.”

  “Oh, look, a bus! We never see buses in Oxnard.”

  The phone rings.

  “Yes, hi honey. . . . I can’t remember what I was going to ask you. . . . Okay. . . . Sure. . . . Gotta go.” She hangs up.

  “That was Wayne. Last week was our anniversary—thirty-seven years. To celebrate we had sex with Jewelia. It was fun and different. Can wearing it to bed be good for her? I wonder.”

  “I’d like to try that,” says Noreen, who’s calculating rent increases.

  “Here,” says Nancy, transferring the diamonds from her own neck to Noreen’s. “Take it home. You’ve got the cutest husband.” Noreen breaks into a wide grin.

  The phone rings.

  “Lindy, hi. I’m giving you a night with Jewelia for Paul’s sixtieth birthday present. I’ll bring it to the party Saturday night. Remember, Jewelia never says ‘no.’ ” Nancy hangs up.

  “I never turn down my husband,” she says. “Many years ago I agreed to let a girl with cancer live with us. Between taking care of her and my kids, I neglected Wayne, and he left for six months. I vowed never to neglect him again. I’m not always in the mood, but eventually I get there.

  “I’m probably the only person who’s given bush for Bush. I told Wayne, ‘I’ll make a deal with you. If you vote for Bush I’ll give you sexual favors.’ I live with a Democrat. What else could I do? Men are distracted by their little brain, as we call it.”

  The phone rings.

  Nancy listens a few minutes. “Your problem, Gary, is that you have ADD. . . . Okay. . . . Okay. . . . Bye.”

  “I have ADD,” she says. “I’m superhyper. I drove my parents crazy.”

  “I STARTED DRIVING on my dad’s ranch in Oxnard when I was eight. When I was thirteen I took my parents’ car and drove forty miles to Santa Barbara. In high school I’d tell my parents I was spending the night with a friend, then drive with my girlfriends to Mexico. To me they were adventures, but to my parents they were crimes.

  “My mother was a socialite who gave me three coming-out parties. My dad was a commercial developer who groomed my brothers to take over his business. He thought I should stay home and raise kids. When Wayne asked my dad if he could marry me, my dad said, ‘No deposit. No return. She can’t cook. She can’t sew. I don’t know what she can do.’

  “Is it any wonder I had no self-esteem? When my dad died, everyone, including me, thought my brothers would run the business. But two of my brothers weren’t in a position to do that and the one who’s the CFO had another business that he ran. So I took charge.

  “I didn’t think I could do it. I’d been home eighteen years raising three kids. I hadn’t finished college. I wasn’t computer-savvy. I’d come home from the office feeling sick and overwhelmed and panicked. I’d wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat asking myself, ‘What am I doing?’ I got the help and encouragement I needed from women. My dad’s secretary, who was the brains behind the business, taught me everything she knew as she was dying. My sister-in-law showed me how to use QuickBooks on the computer. Noreen here was a lifesaver. Jonell gave me courage I didn’t know I had. I couldn’t have done it without my women friends.”

  “I never imagined I’d be running a business like this. The income from my father gave me a comfortable life, but earning the money myself has made me feel smarter and more confident. I wake up every morning and feel good. I think I’m twenty-one. We’re our own mirrors now.”

  NANCY ’S HAVING LUNCH with Noreen in the small meeting room across from the reception desk. Nancy sprinkles almonds on her salad, deals Triscuits onto her plate like cards, and sips from a bottle of water.

  Nancy’s older brother Steve walks in. Steve’s a tall, burly guy, as quiet as Nancy is chatty. Without saying a word he heads toward his office.

  Nancy calls out to him, “Do you think your wife would like to wear Jewelia for your anniversary?”

  He turns around and stares at her.

  “Noreen’s gonna get laid. Paul Miller’s gonna get laid. I’m just looking out for you, Stevie. It’s all about you getting lucky.”

  Steve’s expression says that he’s used to his sister’s lively patter. He goes into his office and shuts the door behind him.

  “I work hard on my relationship with my brother,” says Nancy, “in part because he has a wife and four daughters I love.”

  She finishes her salad, then jumps up to make the rounds of her tenants. To a new tenant, she says, “Call me if you need anything. I’m the landlady mom.” She assures a woman whose husband recently died, “Don’t worry. I won’t raise your rent.”

  Walking back to her office, Nancy talks nonstop. “My brother thinks I should play hardball, but I don’t believe in that. My dad thought compassion was the most important thing in business. I attribute everything to my Catholic girls’ education. It gave me a sense of humor, and it gave me my morality. People say I remind them of my dad, which makes me feel that I’m in the right place. He was my hero.”

  At her desk, Nancy answers the phone half a dozen more times.

  Steve’s wife, Leslie, walks in. “I need the necklace,” she says, “since you apparently promised something to my husband.”

  “Noreen’s wearing it tonight. You need to come back tomorrow. But then I have to have it back Saturday. I promised it to Lindy for her husband’s sixtieth birthday party.”

  “MY HUSBAND WILL go to Paul’s birthday party because he’s a longtime friend,” Nancy says later, “but usually Wayne doesn’t want to go anywhere. I used to call him Sparky. Now I call him Sparkless. I’m a social animal, but he’s not.

  “The morning after our wedding, I said to Wayne, ‘I’m so excited. We can walk on the beach, go to Mass at a little chapel in Montecito, then brunch at the Biltmore, explore Santa Barbara. We’ll have a great day.’ Wayne looked at me and said, ‘It’s the Super Bowl,’ and turned on the TV. In tears I ran to a pay phone to call my dad. ‘I want to come home!’ I cried. And he said, ‘You’re not coming home. This isn’t your last Super Bowl. Get used to it.’ I told him to put Mom on the phone and he said, ‘No. Wayne’s just breaking you in early. This is life.’ I was twenty, pregnant, and scared. If this was life, I didn’t want it.

  “But I was Catholic. I had to make it work. Plus I was madly in love. Once the kids came, I had lots to keep me busy. When they were in school, I was the soccer mom for every team they played on. I sat on the school board. When my youngest graduated from high school, I lost that community. I used to play tennis three times a week with a traveling interclub team, which I loved. But when I started working here, I had to give that up. So I lost that community too. My daughter and I used to do a lot together but then she moved to San Francisco. I feel isolated here in the office—not a lot of people coming and going.

  “Wayne’s in construction, so he’s up at five, in bed at eight. The night of my birthday he had a cold and fell asleep at six-thirty. I bought season tickets to the theater, but by the beginning of the third act he was asleep. As we’ve gotten older, he wants to be home more; I want to be out more.

  “I saw my friends going out with their husbands to plays and concerts and parties while I was sitting home. I became frustrated and angry. I’d made sacrifices for Wayne. It was my family’s money that allowed us to have the life we had. I felt he was cheating me out of something I needed.

  “I don’t like going places by myself. When I do, my mother has fits. I said to her, ‘So what am I supposed to do? Divorce him? That would solve the problem.’ But it’s not a reason to divorce. I love hi
m, more today than ever. He’s my best friend. Our businesses are related, so we have lots to talk about. I call him twice a day to ask his advice. He keeps me grounded and sane. The rest of our life together is good. Plus, he doesn’t keep me from doing anything fun.

  “Either I was going to snap my bands or find a social life. And if I wanted a social life it was my responsibility to get it. With Jewelia, I got what I needed: more girlfriends, more outings, more fun. Fun doesn’t just happen. You have to make an effort to create it. After I’ve had a few hours of fun, I’m much nicer to live with. I never thought about wearing the necklace to go out. Where would I wear it? I have much more fun loaning it to others than wearing it myself. There’s always a story in the loan.”

  __

  HERE’S THE ONE Nancy got to hear from her accountant, Noreen. “When I got home from the office, I was excited to show the diamond necklace to my husband,” she said. “He wasn’t too impressed by it until that’s all I had on. It took us back to our early days when sex was a lot more playful, before we settled into a routine. We giggled talking about all the other people who’d worn Jewelia naked. Having the lights on should be part of the rule. How else can you see the sparkles? The next morning, I didn’t want to give it back.”

  In the words of Nancy’s husband, Wayne, “Jewelia turned out to be one helluva sex toy.”

  Jewelia would turn out to be far more than that as the women shared the necklace with those they liked, those they loved. They shared it with granddaughters on their baptismal days, nieces on their graduation days, mothers on their birthdays. They shared it with colleagues and sisters and neighbors and friends, with giggly teens and grown men. Along the way, a string of bling produced little miracles.

  At School

  DONELLE CLAYPOOL, fifty-seven, fifth-grade teacher, Our Lady of the Assumption: “Teaching in a Catholic school, you don’t make a good salary, and a diamond necklace is out of my league. So wearing it for a day was a fantasy, like a little girl playing dress-up. I chose my clothes carefully, wore black to set it off. I’m short and heavy, and wearing the necklace made me feel taller and thinner. Not that anyone else would notice, but it was an internal feeling that made me feel good all day. What really felt good was the closeness I felt with Tina when she offered it to me.