The Necklace Thirteen Women and The Experiment That Transformed Their Lives

by Jarvis, Cheryl

• ISBN13: 9780345500724
• ISBN10: 0345500725
• eBook ISBN(s): 9780345509475
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-08-25
• Publisher: Ballantine Books
• More Book Details
• Purchase Benefits

Summary

When a group of 13 middle-aged women friends decides to buy and share a $37,000 diamond necklace, they learn more than they ever thought possible about themselves, friendship, and the power of possibility.

Author Biography

Cheryl Jarvis is a journalist and essayist and the author of The Marriage Sabbatical: The Journey That Brings You Home. She has written for The Wall Street Journal, the Chicago Tribune, Cosmopolitan, Redbook, and Reader’s Digest. A former television producer and magazine and newspaper editor, she has taught writing at the University of Southern California and at Washington University and Webster University in St. Louis.


From the Hardcover edition.

Excerpts

Chapter One



Jonell McLain, The Visionary

Making an idea happen

...

Jonell McLain was sitting at her desk looking at the piles of paper surrounding her, struggling not to feel overwhelmed. She wondered why she could never clear her desk, never cross off the forty-five tasks on her to-do list. Were there always forty-five things on that list? It sure seemed so. She felt like Sisyphus, the king in the Greek legend who was condemned to push the same rock up a mountain, over and over. Some days she felt like all she accomplished was moving piles. Some papers she could swear she moved a hundred times. Part of the problem was that she was full of ideas, so she was continually adding projects to the list. Executing them, well, that was a skill she hadn’t yet mastered.

Today, the list didn’t make her queasy as it often did. She’d just finished a deal on a house and so was feeling the high that real estate agents feel when they finally receive their big commission checks. This one represented three months of work and emotional exhaustion. People bought homes when they were undergoing major life transitions, so naturally they were on edge. The shock of prices on the West Coast made those buyers moving to California especially anxious. Because the work was so stressful, Jonell always rewarded herself after each closing.

She hadn’t decided what to buy herself this time, so she headed to the mall just to buy her clients a box of See’s candy, part of the gift basket she’d have welcoming them to their new home.

The Pacific View Mall was the only mall in Ventura, a California beach town sixty miles north of Los Angeles. Jonell moved her wiry frame quickly through the dusty-pink shopping enclave, stopping only to glance in the window of Van Gundy & Sons, a decades-old, family- owned jewelry store, the Tiffany’s of Ventura. Usually Jonell’s glances were as quick as her strides, but this time she stopped. She stared.

In the center display case a diamond necklace glittered against black velvet. A few years earlier she’d searched unsuccessfully for a simple rhinestone necklace to wear to a formal event. Now here it was, the exact one she’d had in mind. She recognized the style as the necklace version of the tennis bracelet, so dubbed after tennis champion Chris Evert lost her diamond bracelet during the 1987 U.S. Open and stopped the match to search for it. The diamonds were strung in a single strand all the way to the clasp, the center diamond the largest, the two closest to the clasp the smallest. The gradations were minuscule, the effect breathtaking.

But this was Van Gundy’s. There was no way this necklace was made of rhinestones.

Jonell rarely wore good jewelry, though she owned her share of it— diamond wedding rings from two husbands, 14-karat-gold earrings, pricey watches. Luxury jewelry was something else. Hmm, she thought, wonder what a really expensive piece of jewelry looks like up close? What it would feel like to wear something so lovely and extravagant?

On a whim she entered the store. “Could I see the necklace in the window?” she asked nonchalantly, as if she did this every day.

She reached up to touch the delicate gold chain she wore. Back in 1972 a boyfriend had given her this necklace with the peace symbol pendant, and in 2003, at the start of the war in Iraq, she’d put it on again. She placed the diamond stunner over her old gold charm. It was, she thought, simply exquisite—and exquisitely simple.

She took a breath, and as she breathed out, she asked the price.

“Thirty-seven thousand dollars.”

Jonell couldn’t stop the gasp. All she could think was Who buys a thirty-seven-thousand-dollar necklace?

She looked in the mirror again. She couldn’t help but think about the choices she’

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Excerpted from The Necklace: Thirteen Women and the Experiment That Transformed Their Lives by Cheryl Jarvis
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