The bedroom she shares with her husband is the perfect setting to discuss the necklace. In one corner, a bamboo hat rack is nearly invisible underneath handbags – quilted and jewelled and beaded bags, feather and leather, leopard and velvet bags, today’s and yesterday’s bags. And then there are the boas! Long ones, short ones, they come simple and sequinned, in red and chocolate and purple and pumpkin. In another corner, flowing over a wrought-iron quilt stand are wraps and more wraps – silk, woven, textured, fringed. A velvet wrap with mink pom-poms, a black suede wrap with cut-out fringe and a thick felt wrap with oversized pockets. On the bottom shelf of the stand a wicker basket cascades with scarves of cashmere and chenille, painted silks in olive and aubergine, a gold-and-black-sequinned scarf twists into a belt, then a headband, then a necklace.
No matter what Patti drapes around her lean body, she looks good in it. She has a compellingly photogenic face and at nearly five feet, seven inches, she has enviable blonde hair, thick and wavy, a healthy, outdoor glow, and long limbs seemingly always in motion. Her hazel eyes literally glisten when she smiles – and as Patti gives a tour of her bedroom, she smiles a lot.
More accessories fill the cherrywood dressing table: headbands and sunglasses and reading glasses, all jewelled and tortoiseshell and multicoloured and decorated for the holidays. In her walk-in wardrobe there are berets in every colour, dozens of belts and 150 pairs of shoes. ‘When I go to Las Vegas, I don’t gamble. I buy shoes,’ she says. ‘The boutiques at Caesars Palace have shoes you won’t find anywhere else in this country. I don’t buy the kind of things everyone else has. I don’t go to high-street chains unless I need socks. I like flea markets and charity shops.’
And then there’s the jewellery. On one wall, hanging from three etched glass hooks, dangle necklaces galore: chains and beads, rhinestones and pearls, chokers and pendants. In the dresser next to the hooks, she’s filled drawers with bracelets and bangles, plus jewellery inherited from her mother and jewellery for every holiday: brooches and earrings shaped like wreaths, pumpkins, shamrocks and flags.
In the wardrobe, there’s a fifty-four-pocket hanging jewellery holder with a pair of earrings in every section; and a thirty-pocket quilted case with jewellery in every section. More necklaces of multiple strands, multiple colours, necklaces made of pearls, gemstones, glass. ‘I have a mix of good and fake,’ she says. ‘If you have enough good, you can mix in the fake.’ Patti pulls out a necklace of burgundy silk cording with a tasselled ivory pendant hanging from a burgundy alligator spectacle case. She adjusts it around her neck, flips open the spectacle case, cocks her head to one side, then flashes a huge grin. ‘Would you look at this?’
There isn’t a drawer, a shelf, a stand or a chest without hidden stashes and caches of jewellery. The only place Patti doesn’t keep it is in a safe.
‘After we bought Jewelia a neighbour showed me her diamond necklace, which she keeps locked up. Other women I know make copies of their jewellery and wear the copies. If you’re going to do that, what’s the point of having it? That first month the necklace was mine to wear, I made the conscious decision that I’d wear it every day.’
During her first month with the necklace, Patti wore it to go body-boarding at a family wedding in Oahu, Hawaii; she wore it when she scored a very respectable 95 on eighteen holes of golf; and when helping to hose down a neighbourhood fire. She wore it to her husband’s paediatric dental practice, where she worked, and she wore it to the orthopaedic clinic when Gary underwent shoulder surgery. Then she donned the diamonds every evening while she worried about the aftermath of the operation. As she dragged on her cigarettes on the patio, she wondered if they would have to sell the practice? Would she be out of a job too, after twenty-nine years of running their office, managing the staff, coordinating the schedules and handling the books? For a while he’d been the only paediatric dentist in town, which meant seeing thirty to forty patients a day. That had been a lot of work, but gratifying too. She knew that her business sense had helped to make the practice successful. And Patti had met dozens of interesting women when they brought in their kids. In fact, that was the way she’d met Jonell.
What if they did have to sell up? For the first time in her life, this turn of events made Patti feel uncertain about the future. She was sick of people asking her if she was looking forward to retirement. No, she wasn’t looking forward to doing nothing. She was high-energy and always had been. She hated that word ‘retirement’ – really, she thought society should think of a new one. Gary was happy at the prospect, but Patti struggled with the unknown that lay ahead, grew restless just thinking about it. The necklace gave her something else to think about.
Everywhere she went – and Patti went everywhere – she talked about the necklace. Patti was a talker – not a rapid talker like Jonell, but a memorable talker. More than her one-of-a-kind accessories, what distinguished Patti was her Long Island accent. She left New York in 1975, but the accent didn’t leave her. Considering it another accessory, she kept it. When she talks, her hands move constantly, her fingers snapping to make a point, her beautiful, natural nails tap-tap-tapping on the table, the steering wheel, whatever surface is handy. When she walks, she recalls the dynamism of the streets of Manhattan, ever alert, moving quickly, with a stride befitting someone who completed the famous Waikiki Roughwater Swim over almost 4 kilometres of Pacific Ocean. On the streets downtown she talks to everyone – she knows everyone. She calls them ‘doll’, ‘babe’, ‘honey’, ‘lovey’, like a waitress in a lorry drivers’ café. She tells everyone she bumps into the story of the necklace.
People reacted to the necklace in varied ways. Some marvelled, some shrugged, some attacked. ‘What do you think you’re going to do with it?’
Patti didn’t have an answer for that one. That comment made her think: ‘What are we going to do with it?’ Scornful comments didn’t make her doubt what she’d done; they made her wonder if there was a better way to tell the story. So she changed a detail here, an anecdote there, and she kept talking.
‘It surprised me how much fun it was to talk about it. I liked the story of the deal – that is, getting the necklace for the price we did – but mostly I liked the story of the sharing. I liked that it was another conversation I could have with people. I had no idea where we were going with this, no idea where the necklace was going. Hell, I had no idea where I was going. But I was looking forward to finding out.’
Patti had just two more days left of her four weeks with the necklace when one of the other women – who? – asked to borrow it for a dinner dance. Patti said, ‘Sure.’ But when the necklace came back the next day Patti didn’t want it any more.
‘I’d enjoyed wearing it too much,’ she says. ‘I didn’t want to become reattached, then have to let it go a second time.’ It was time to pass it on.
Later, with the women, Patti talked about the possessiveness that surprised her and made her feel guilty and embarrassed. It reminded her of Gollum in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy – the character who became mentally tortured and physically wretched from his obsessive desire for the One Ring, ‘his precious’. Patti called the necklace ‘my pretty’ and her difficulty in letting it go ‘the Gollum effect’.
‘In talking about it,’ says Patti, ‘I realised that what made the necklace exciting to wear wasn’t the necklace itself. If I’d wanted a diamond necklace, I would have bought one a long time ago. What made it exciting was the story behind it. Getting to tell the story was what I’d become attached to.’
Before Patti’s turn with the necklace would come around again the following year, she and Gary would sell his dental practice and their lives would change in many ways. The group of women changed as well, with two members leaving, and a few tensions being aired and resolved.
During that first year Jonell, a voracious reader, gave the group a reading list and their first assignment: a book called Affluenza by three men no one had heard of. Jonell liked context. ‘If we’re going to talk about the necklace,’ she enthused, ‘this book will give us a frame of reference, make