“I knew fairly early in my twenties that I didn’t want or need children to fulfill my life. Parenting is a full-time job and there’s no turning back. I observed my parents dealing with the demands of ten children. I saw my mother suffer from constant worry. I knew I wanted something different. This decision has probably had the greatest impact on my life. It’s allowed me more time, energy, and money to give to the common good. I have no regrets. I’ve always had children in my life—students, nieces, nephews, godchildren, children of friends. Nurturing is an important aspect of anyone’s well-being, and I like to think I’ll be remembered as a nurturing person.
“I’ve always believed in taking the road less traveled. That’s why I said yes to the necklace—it was the road less traveled.
“Even though as a group we come from different places culturally, socially, and politically, as women we can come together to reach for common goals. I’ve learned that it doesn’t matter if we’re Republican or Democrat, Catholic or born-again, our goals as women are similar: to raise money for causes that will effect change in our community, that will benefit the lives of others.
“We’re the product of our upbringings, which were the most liberating for girls in the history of humankind. We now have the opportunity to use our gifts and to do some good. There’s always power in numbers, and this time thirteen proved to be a lucky one.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Experiment
. . .
Creating its own history
. . .
MAGGIE HOOD HAD SLEPT ONLY SIX HOURS, BUT SHE awakened eager to start the women’s first all-day retreat. She’d made progress with the group. She’d called Jonell and Priscilla to have lunch. When Maggie’d offered to start the retreat with a meditation, the women had agreed. Services at her metaphysical church always started with a centering meditation, which Maggie loved. She opened her fitness classes the same way.
Last night, she’d worked three hours to prepare. She’d written out every word. She’d chosen her music carefully. She’d rehearsed aloud. The contention over “sharing” hadn’t been that long ago, so she wanted her meditation to be healing. She knew she’d been given an opportunity, which she didn’t want to blow. She didn’t want some word slipping out that might offend. She called Patti’s older sister, Kathleen, for advice.
Kathleen Morris, a life coach in Ventura, had been volunteering her considerable talents to the group because she loved her sister, had known Jonell for years, and thrilled to any endeavor that contained the word possibility. She’d accompanied Jonell the day she purchased the necklace, written name tags and collected donations at the group’s fund-raisers, helped with Priscilla’s wedding, and coached Jonell before meetings. She’d been so giving and wise that the women named her an “honorary Jewelia.”
Kathleen had short gray hair and an open face. Like Patti, she smiled easily and often and, like Patti, when she smiled her hazel eyes glistened.
The women asked Kathleen to lead their retreat, which they wanted to be a conversation for the future and about the future.
In the clubhouse room of her condo complex, Kathleen arranged the black metal chairs in a semicircle, while Patti accessorized the room with white and fuchsia lilies, lavender peonies, and, for calming, lavender diffusers. The sisters set out coffee and juice and fresh fruit.
At eight-fifty A.M., the women started arriving with muffins and cookies. Farmer McGrath toted a bowl of justpicked strawberries from her farm. Along with these offerings of food, the women bore their high spirits like nectar.
Shortly after nine, Maggie inserted Gentle Landscapes in her portable CD player. Wearing black workout clothes, she sat up front in Kathleen’s director’s chair, its cloth back and seat batiked exotically. Maggie was nervous about remembering the words, but she was excited. She loved guiding meditations. She loosened her arms and hands by stretching, then gracefully extended them to rest on her knees in the seated yoga position. Her muscles relaxed. With Indian flutes and woodwinds playing softly in the background, she began:
“I invite you to close your eyes, take a deep breath, recognize we are in the presence of Spirit, of an abundance of love, peace, harmony, and commitment. . . . We come here in a safe place to be fully self-expressed. . . . We bring acceptance, connection, and, most of all, love. . . . We are here today to accomplish something that is bigger than each of us as individuals.
“Imagine sitting on the bank of a river. . . .
Slowly, carefully, Maggie guided the women to a place free of distraction or discomfort, judgment or criticism. Nancy fidgeted in her chair. Priscilla reached into her purse for her rosary. After fifteen minutes, Maggie brought the meditation to a close:
“Now look into the water to see the reflection of every woman in the group and see reflected back to you love and wisdom and generosity. We release everything that does not serve the higher good. Standing at the water’s edge feeling light and free, we await on the threshold of a future and a dream. When you open your eyes, look at the other women’s faces. See there compassion and connection. As things unfold, we support each other with love, and so it is. . . .”
Maggie opened her eyes. The room held utter stillness. She’d never heard the group quiet before.
“That was beautiful, Maggie,” said Jonell. The others followed with choruses of “That was great,” “Yes,” “Thank you.”
Maggie smiled. Her skin glowed, this time from an inner workout. The women’s faces told her that she’d said the right words. She’d been heard.
“What we’re about is causing a future,” said Kathleen. “So here’s the question: What will it take to have this group work for you?”
One by one the women spoke: Active listening. Collective vision. Communication. Gentleness. Respect. Trust.
The morning’s discussion focused on “workability”; the afternoon’s, on the women’s visions for the future.
As each woman had her say, their differences emerged, as though highlighted in boldface. Jonell looked around the room at what she’d created, feeling by turns surprised, hopeful, heartened, and frustrated.
SHE’D STARTED A group of what she’d hoped would be likeminded women only to discover that each woman had her own reason for buying the necklace, and each woman’s reason wasn’t her reason. Jonell wasn’t looking for friends or support or sisterhood. She’d attracted women friends all her life—she owned fourteen bridesmaids’ dresses to prove it. For her, the experiment was political, a way to espouse her views on consumption and materialism and the planet’s dwindling resources. From the outset, she’d seen the necklace as a vehicle to put her utopian principles into action.
Jonell wasn’t looking to change her vision. She was looking to change everyone else’s.
Her experiment did change the women, just not the way she’d anticipated.
She wanted the group to raise its consciousness, read more books. Some said, flat-out, No.
She wanted the group to walk in peace marches. The Republicans bristled, said, No way, no how, no.
She wanted the group to support feminist causes. Some said, No, other causes too.
She wanted the group to think globally. Some said, No, home first.
She imagined an offbeat social experiment. She hadn’t figured on the diversity of the women. She hadn’t envisioned the friction.
The friction, however, was key. The conflicts were the very thing that provoked the women to think about who they were and what their lives were about. The controversies pushed them to define their own values more clearly, to take a stand, speak up for what they would and would not support. The group became a mirror to who they were and, perhaps, to who they wanted to be.
Some softened their loud voices; some strengthened their soft voices. Some found their voices for the first time. In this safe community of women, each voice grew more authentic.
Jonell had a strong, authentic voice to begin with, and she never struggles to express her opinions. She displays th
em, literally, on her clothes, her refrigerator, the walls of her garage. One of her favorites: Tom Robbins’s “Flapping your arms can be flying.” Rarely is her conversation without a platform nor her enthusiasms disconnected from politics. What she’s struggling with now, though paradoxically enjoying at the same time, is expressing her views to women who have become stronger in debating her. Every charismatic leader needs followers, but the women of Jewelia are no longer content to follow.
In spite of herself, Jonell changed too. She learned what all strong people inevitably have to learn, that they have limits. In recognizing hers, she realized a new strength: an ability to let go. To keep her vision intact, to keep the group together, she learned the necessity of compromise. She learned that she could bend. She understands more fully now another of her favorite sayings: “Don’t believe everything you think.”
Jonell hasn’t toned down her voice—she still champions her causes to the group—but she’s redirecting it. She hopes to write a column for the Ventura city magazine called “The Champagne Socialist.”
“Rather than push a reading list on a group that doesn’t want a book club,” she says, “maybe I should go where people want to study.” Jonell’s wide-ranging curiosities have led her to consider graduate programs in urban planning, politics, and gerontology, as well as courses in architecture, archetypes, poetry, and philosophy. In a typical week, Jonell might attend a theosophy lecture, an erotic poetry reading, and a meeting of the city’s Downtown Organization. She discusses ideas she’s gleaned from the stack of nonfiction tomes and novels at her bedside. She watches Charlie Rose every night. Her mind never stops racing, never stops making connections.
“I’d like a job in community activism,” she says. “I know I have another career in me. Seeing how receptive other women have been to this experiment, how the town has embraced it, makes me feel that I can do anything.”
JONELL IS DRIVING to check out a six-million-dollar estate on Saddle Peak Road in Malibu. The listing sheet advertises a thirteen-acre mountaintop site with a long, gated private drive leading to a modern villa and panoramic views of the city. Jonell loves to drive, and as she steers her seven-year-old silver Mercedes through the winding canyons, she never stops talking. She’s frugal by nature, she says, with little furniture or art in her home that didn’t come from her mother. But she bought herself a “nice” car because she has to drive clients to “nice” sites. Her son calls her “the only revolutionary who drives a Mercedes.”
Jonell’s wearing sage-colored soft corduroy pants and a coordinating loose sweater from J. Jill. Her clothes are classic and low-key; her conversation, provocative and highspirited.
Jonell talks about her fifteen-year marriage. For the last decade, she and her husband have lived in separate houses and enjoyed trysts on weekends. “Living apart gives us all the advantages of an intimate relationship—the familiarity, the safe sex, a date when you need one—without the daily tensions of domestic life,” she says. “It keeps the romance and the conversation alive. It’s nice to have a man in my life, but I don’t need one all the time.” She smiles impishly. “Kind of like a diamond necklace.”
She talks about her daughter, who’s moving out of her mother’s house. The transition means that Jonell will be alone for the first time in twenty-eight years. “Who am I going to talk to?” she asks. She laughs after she says this, but concern lurks behind the laughter.
The directions to the remote listing site are vague, but Jonell stays calm as she gets lost twice and maneuvers hairpin turns for an hour on a twisty two-lane road through steep canyons. When she finally arrives at the Malibu mansion, she moves her wiry frame quickly through the rooms, then asks the listing agent half a dozen questions. Fifteen minutes later, she’s heading back to Ventura.
An hour later, she stops at the east end of town. There she and her mother own a small trailer park, four small houses on the property, and a liquor and grocery store on the corner. Jonell’s late father was an entrepreneur, who in 1964 cannily opened a liquor store near the oil fields teeming with industry.
Jonell’s there as landlady collecting rent.
“Hi, Bob. How are ya?”
“Good.”
“How do you like the way we painted that trailer? We’re going to paint that one over there next.”
“One day you may turn this all into a commune,” says Bob.
“It already is one,” she answers.
Jonell walks quickly but stops to chat with everyone she sees.
“Hi, Charlie, how ya doing? Have you got your patch on?”
An elderly man sitting in a lawn chair rolls up his sleeve to show her his nicotine patch.
“I’ve been smoking sixty-five years, started at fifteen,” he says. “And now I’ve quit.”
“That’s so great, Charlie. That’s marvelous. I’m proud of you. Keep up the good work.”
The corrugated metal trailers with the ceramic frogs and plastic flamingos on the lawn are a far cry from the Southern California mansions, but Jonell is as comfortably at home here as she is in Malibu.
Since working in real estate, she says, she’s thought a lot about housing and what home ownership looks like when you don’t need a single-family home anymore. She often fantasizes with some of the other women in Jewelia about how they’ll live together one day in the trailer park—extensively renovated, of course. In the fantasy they’ll share one large-screen TV, one hot tub, one garden. “I envision it with both men and women,” she says, “but more women respond to the idea. Why should we move to some assisted living facility with strangers when we can live with our friends?
“Jewelia is turning out to be a dry run for living together. If we can share a necklace, we can share real estate.
“Ownership is overrated. We should elevate sharing. Wealth is individual; sharing is collective. We are not what we own. We are what we do, who we help, and the difference we make in the world. At the beginning, the group was so narrow in its concept of sharing. We think that by sharing we give up something, that we get less. But the more we’ve shared the necklace, the more profound the experience has become. By sharing, we’ve gotten so much more. If we share, there’s enough on the planet for everyone.”
“Sharing really is the way to happiness.”
THE WOMEN OF JEWELIA came together as friends, acquaintances, or strangers. They evolved into family. Like all families, their distinctive personalities rub up against one another, producing dysfunctional moments.
Nevertheless, the group is cohesive, invested not just in a blingy necklace but also in each other’s lives. In the past three years, the women have come to know and care for one another’s families. Daily e-mails relay their children’s successes, their mothers’ hospitalizations, their grandchildren’s christenings or mitzvahs. Through cyberspace, they share jokes and inspirational stories, pleas and prayers. They ask Dr. Roz for medical advice and Jone for design ideas. The constant e-mail chatter—what lured Priscilla to her first meeting—holds them enmeshed in one another’s lives, helps them push past their different approaches to life, and stretches their tolerance.
They know they’ll survive as friends. They don’t know how they’ll evolve as a group. They couldn’t have predicted what’s happened. They’re hoping for more surprises. Jonell envisions an intergenerational group, double in size, wider in reach. She thinks that, largely due to Patti, they can be an even greater force in the community. “Jewelia has led us to boldness,” she says. “As a group, we’re so much more powerful than we are as individuals.”
Among their most recent philanthropies, the group has adopted Gale Levesque, a fifty-two-year-old homeless woman who desperately wanted a job. The women bought her a cell phone with six months of minutes, bus passes good for two months, and two weeks at the Ocean View Motel. Jonell helped her compose a résumé and drove her to her first interview. Gale landed the part-time job and is looking for another one. She calls herself “the fourteenth sister.”
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sp; This past Christmas, the women of Jewelia discovered that the Salvation Army’s local Transitional Living Center had an empty kitchen. Gourmet chef Dale asked the center for a wish list, and the group filled the cabinets with commercial pots and pans, small appliances and cooking utensils. A plaque inscribed “Jewelia’s Kitchen” commemorates the necklace’s namesake. Patti’s continually on the lookout for new places in town in need. “Jewelia’s made me more aware of what I have and what others don’t have,” she says. “Now I see the difference between spending five hundred dollars on a purse and feeding the homeless.”
TODAY, THE NECKLACE itself is rarely part of the women’s conversation. But it continues to be a part of other people’s. As word has gotten around, the necklace has taken on a life and itinerary of its own.
Albert Garibay, fifty-seven, a retired deputy with Ventura’s sheriff’s department, needed a gift idea for his daughter Jenny’s twenty-ninth birthday. She’d been so wonderful helping him take care of his elderly mother that he wanted to do something special for her. What could he think of that would show the depth of his appreciation? A CD? She already had a stack of them. A blouse? Even he knew that was too ordinary. He’d seen Jenny pore over catalogs from Tiffany’s looking at jewelry she couldn’t afford. He’d heard her talk about the Ventura diamond necklace. He’d seen her stare at it at the Van Gundy wedding. She’d followed the necklace’s history by reading every word written about it. She’d never think that such a piece of jewelry would be possible for her, thought Albert, but he could imagine what she couldn’t, and what he could imagine, he could make real.
He called Priscilla Van Gundy, a longtime friend who’d been both a grade school classmate and a co-worker at the county jail. “I need a favor,” he said.
At nine A.M. the morning of Jenny’s birthday, Albert, his wife, his mother, and Priscilla and Tom Van Gundy surprised Jenny at the medical office where she worked as an assistant. “Happy Birthday from Jewelia,” said Priscilla as she laced Jenny’s neck with the diamonds. “She’s yours today.”
The Necklace: Thirteen Women and the Experiment That Transformed Their Lives Page 15