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

by Cheryl Jarvis

  “I was a good student, good athlete, class leader, and captain of the cheerleaders, but my parents seldom came to my school functions. They were too busy raising my brothers. I rarely got my mother’s attention. When I was a senior in high school, I thought, ‘Maybe now,’ but then she became pregnant again. I remember the one time she came to see me cheer. She’d brought my younger brother along. I was thrilled to see her in the stands. Ten minutes later, after finishing a routine, I looked up to see her leaving. Later she told me my brother had threatened that if they didn’t leave the gymnasium he’d scream his head off. At the time, not getting more of her attention was hard. Plus, I would have liked to show her off. She was very glamorous.

  “My situation was very different with my own daughter. She was my only child for twelve years. Four of those, I was a single parent, so it was just the two of us, and we bonded. I taught in schools where she was enrolled. When she made cheerleader, I coached the squad. When she was a sports reporter, I moderated the school paper. I chaperoned her proms. I endured three hours of Duran Duran—not my favorite music—so that she and three friends could go to the group’s concert in L.A.

  “I was just as involved with my son. I was always his team mother, saw every game. When he was in high school playing football, I dropped everything to help his team’s preseason “Hell Week,” where the players practiced, ate, and slept at school for five days. I actually took vacation time to help out. I hauled water and Gatorade and oranges to the field. I made big pans of lasagna and huge pasta salads for sixty-five boys. I served their lunches and dinners, cleared the tables, and loaded the dishwashers.

  “The players were supposed to bring mattresses from home in order to sleep on site. I noticed that my son’s mattress was still in our truck, so even though he was a six-foot, 190-pound kid in prime physical condition, I decided to lug his mattress to the sleeping room for him. I was wrestling with this extra-long mattress, dragging it on the ground, when a couple of coaches walked by me. I heard one say to the other, ‘Do you think she’s going to come back tonight to tuck him in?’ I was so embarrassed. When my son saw what I was doing he was mortified. He grabbed the mattress, and I slunk away. That’s when I realized I was a helicopter mom.

  “The pattern was so entrenched, though, that I couldn’t throttle the engine.

  “When my daughter wanted a house, I took time off from work and spent my weekends helping her househunt. Practically every day for three months I inspected the house with her as it was being built, went over every detail. I helped her select tile and flooring and fabrics and furniture. I helped her move in and unpack and hang draperies. I designed her backyard.

  “I’ve really missed teaching. I never expected to stay with the sign business more than a few years. I think of Pink Floyd’s lyrics from The Dark Side of the Moon: ‘And then one day you find / ten years have got behind you.’ I’ve stayed with the business because it’s enabled Karen and me to work together.

  “I’ve worked all my adult life, as a teacher and a business owner, but my primary identity has been as a mother. If my kids need me for anything, everything else fades away. I still help both my kids with their finances. I suffer through my daughter’s relationships. Chrissie Hynde sang, ‘Take me into your darkest hour and I’ll never desert you / I’ll stand by you.’ That’s the way I feel as a mother.

  “I realize that my hovering is a weakness. I see now that in raising me the way she did, my mother gave me a great gift: independence. I was more independent at twenty-one than either of my children were. What I’ve also come to realize is that the more you hover over your children, the more empty the nest when they leave. And children have to leave.

  “My son took a job promotion and moved to Nevada—the first time in twenty-eight years he’s lived more than thirty minutes away. My daughter just started a new job—the first time in twenty years we haven’t worked together. It’s been a huge adjustment. Detaching is hard. I miss them.

  “Growing up, I had a wonderful group of girlfriends from second grade through high school. The nuns dubbed us ‘The Fast Fifteen.’ We shared clothes, confidences, crises, laughs. When my mother was preoccupied with my brothers, I turned to these girls. Forty years later, we’ve stayed connected and get together every year.

  “Now with Jewelia I have a wonderful new group of women friends. I’ve joined the morning walkers. Nancy Huff and I bought season theater tickets together. Having these women in my life fills a tremendous void. I once thought my husband and I would retire to the Florida Keys, but I don’t think that anymore. I don’t want to leave these women.”

  IN THE AFTERMATH of the sharing brawl, Mary O’Connor, like the English teacher she once was, cared only that the sharing was defined. Nancy Huff, meanwhile, turned to a woman she respected and whose opinion she valued: her daughter Christen, a twenty-seven-year-old nursing student. “Are we being selfish?” she asked her plaintively.

  Christen’s first response to the wedding loan, like those of some of the other daughters, had been irritation. Her irritation, however, lasted only thirty minutes; it was much shorter-lived than her mother’s. Christen answered her mother bluntly. “I think you’re losing sight of what’s important,” she said. “It sounds to me like you mothers are having a ‘high school’ moment. It doesn’t matter to me who wears the necklace. I still want to wear it on my wedding day and when I have my first child. I want to wear it for the significant moments of my life.”

  Christen suggested a journal so that women who wear the necklace to public events, like weddings, could write what the experience meant to them. A journal would grant the necklace not only a history but also a soul.

  Amid a flurry of e-apologies, Nancy e-mailed the group Christen’s idea, which the women unanimously loved. Christen Huff had not only helped resolve the controversy, she did so with such creativity and graciousness that she assured the women that their legacy of sharing would continue into the next generation.

  The next day, at the gift shop in Palermo, Patti skated through the wares, zip, zip, zip. She found a portfolio-style soft leather journal with an Asian-influenced floral filigree design, colors of gold and red and green blooming onto a black background—the perfect accessory for Jewelia.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Roz McGrath, the feminist

  . . .

  Raising awareness of women’s lives

  . . .

  THE CONTROVERSY OVER SHARING HAD TAKEN A TOLL on Jonell. Something’s gotta give, she decided, and that something was running the meetings. She was too talkative, too opinionated, too forceful. Her dominance inevitably provoked opposition.

  “You wear it, you chair it,” Jonell announced at the next meeting.

  “Great idea!” said one woman after another. Jonell laughed to herself. Wonder how long they’d been wishing for that? Roz McGrath was next in line to wear the necklace so she’d be the first to implement the new idea. Roz looked forward to leading the group. She’d come up with a fun project. As one of the three childless women in the group, she couldn’t listen to the “sharing” debate. She left the meeting early and didn’t read the subsequent e-mails. She didn’t have time for such nonsense. She was overwhelmed by commitments, the first of which was selling her produce at the farmer’s market. She had work to do.

  SATURDAY MORNING, at eight A.M., Roz pulls up to the market in old town Camarillo in her beat-up ’76 Chevy pickup, imprinted with the sign ORGANICALLY GROWN MCGRATH FAMILY FARM.

  Roz ties a purple apron over her pale blue camisole and short khaki skirt. She’s freckled and petite, with dark brown hair and eyes. She looks a little like Stockard Channing, who combines a soft face with tough roles. Roz embodies a dichotomy, too: both gentle and genteel in her demeanor, but rugged in the dirt and rabid in her politics.

  Divorced for eleven years, retired from teaching for four, she co-manages the family farm, selling its crops at eight markets from Ojai to Santa Monica. The business also supplies organic produce to some
thirty high-end restaurants in Santa Monica, Malibu, and Beverly Hills.

  A fifty-eight-year-old blond hunk, a commercial diver and her new love, helps arrange the vegetables in appealing groupings. On the canopied display space burst an array of color and texture: French green beans, Italian ferono beets, miniature Asian corn, plump carrots, curly red-leaf lettuce, baby greens, black radishes, green onions, parsnips, chard, and strawberries. Lots and lots of strawberries.

  “I like beets the most,” Roz says. “I boil them until I can poke a fork through, then slice them and serve with gorgonzola and walnuts.”

  To the side of the main table, Roz groups bouquets of lilac caspia, golden yarrow, Indian red straw flowers, artichoke flowers, and sunflowers.

  “Just put a little hairspray on the caspia and it’ll last longer,” Roz advises a buyer.

  An elderly man approaches to buy beans and carrots. “Thanks, young lady,” he says.

  Roz smiles at him. “You’re welcome.”

  When he’s safely out of hearing, Roz says, “I hate it when people call me young lady. I’m not young, and I’m not a lady. I’m a woman and an older woman. So don’t call me that. And don’t mess with me.” She smiles a knowing smile. She knows that people will continue to call her that, and she knows that she’ll continue to be irritated.

  A sixtyish woman, who’s selling at a neighboring stall and who’s decked out in a large flowered hat, waves to Roz, then sees something that catches her eye. She walks over to Roz’s display.

  “You’re wearing the diamond necklace!” she exclaims.

  “Yes, it’s my time of the month,” Roz quips.

  “I had to come see it up close. It’s darling with your outfit. I’ll never forget when you wore it the first time. I’d never seen anyone wear jewelry like that at a farmer’s market. The next week, I wore my double-strand pearls. You inspired me. You’re a pioneer.”

  ROZ LIKES TO HEAR those words. She comes from a family of pioneers and has considered herself one for a long time.

  In the 1850s, her great-grandparents left Ireland during the potato famine to become two of the first Anglo farmers in Ventura County. At its peak, the family amassed five thousand acres. Today, Roz’s immediate family—one of the last farming segments of the McGrath clan—organically farms some three hundred acres.

  Roz can claim many firsts. She was firstborn in a family of ten. With her mother’s recent death, that makes her the matriarch of a family of thirty-three. Roz joined the National Organization for Women in its early years and subscribed to Ms. the first year the magazine hit the stands.

  A former chapter president of the California Women for Agriculture, she was the first woman to serve on the Ventura County Farm Bureau. She worked on a pilot program in Ventura to hire women in nontraditional areas like the oil fields. In 1976, she became the first executive director of the county’s Coalition to End Family Violence. There she established the first shelter for victims of domestic abuse. She was the first among the women of Jewelia to persuade the others to adopt her particular cause—the coalition—as its premier fund-raiser.

  She ran for state assembly three times, when women comprised less than 15 percent of those in elected positions there.

  “I RAN FOR OFFICE BECAUSE, as a teacher, I was angry that the State of California, if it were a nation, was the seventh wealthiest economy on the planet, but in funding for public education, it was forty-eighth in the country. The experience was disillusioning. Men still dominate politics, and politics are still corrupt. My second campaign, I ran against a far-right evangelical, who put flyers all over churches portraying me as a pro-choice heathen. That he used churches as a forum for politics appalled me. I was very naive.

  “I was devastated when I lost, because the tally was so close. I lost by less than half of one percent of the vote. The hardest part was losing to such a loser, who was backed by the NRA and the Christian Coalition. Plus, he had far less experience than I had. I cried for two weeks. I was so grief-stricken that I had to see a therapist. Then I went back to teaching kindergarten and was fine. I’m glad I ran. I met some incredible people who are friends today. I like to think I inspired other women to run for office.

  “What made me much sadder was Bush’s selection in Florida in 2000. I felt an overwhelming sense of doom. After 9/11 I wanted to leave the country, move to Ireland, but I was entrenched here. By the time Bush was elected for a second term, I was one depressed Democrat. The group got me over my despair about the election.

  “I’m not involved in politics anymore, though if there were a way I could be involved in the impeachment of George Bush I’d be there one hundred percent. I have some ‘impeachmints’ I keep with me in the car. I thought I’d offer them to the group at the next meeting, get a reaction.”

  She smiles her knowing smile.

  PIONEERS THINK AHEAD, so the first time that Roz hosted the group, she set up a meeting at Ventura’s Community Foundation. If the group ever made money, she told the women, they could leave a named legacy to better women’s lives.

  The second year, she wanted the group to think about women’s lives in a different way. The women positioned chairs in a makeshift circle, with Roz seated where she could see everyone. Roz had led classrooms, women’s groups, and board meetings for years, so leading tonight’s meeting was a natural for her. She was assured and calm and soft-spoken as she went through the business agenda. She didn’t hand out her “impeachmints” after all. Instead, like the teacher she was for thirty years, she passed out a writing exercise: “Name a woman of historical significance, living or dead, who you admire. Why do you admire her? How did she have an impact on your life? Do you think the younger generation knows who she is?

  “Find a quiet place to write,” Roz instructed the women. “You can move to anywhere in the house. Take your time.” As the women scattered off to their corners, she smiled. Now this was fun: another class to teach.

  The women spent so much time on their answers that by the time they gave them to Roz, it was also time to go home. Later, Roz had more fun guessing the women by their choices. The papers were mostly unsigned, but the writers were easy to discern. Jonell was the only woman who could have selected the anarchist Emma Goldman “because anarchy seems like the most positive affirmation of equality and inclusion.” Gunslinging biker babe Mary Osborn chose the risk-taking aviator Amelia Earhart, who ventured into the world of men. Tina Osborne, the Catholic teacher raised near Hollywood, split her vote between Mother Teresa and Jackie Kennedy. Francophile and gourmet Dale Muegenburg chose Julia Child. Nancy Huff chose Condoleezza Rice “because she stands by her commitment to Bush,” while Dr. Roz Warner chose Hillary Clinton for “her spectacular health-care initiative.” Roz McGrath’s choice: birth control activist Margaret Sanger, who was “morally responsible for the betterment of all womankind.”

  ROZ LIVES IN a charming farmhouse, set high on a hill surrounded by strawberry and raspberry fields. Eucalyptus and avocado trees line the driveway. Magnolia blossoms and sage bushes scent the air. A goldfish pond leads to the front door. A Great White Pyrenees, a Jack Russell terrier, a Welsh corgi, and a beagle move from room to room to patio, their steps a veritable percussion section. The spacious one-story house, with a sweeping view of the Oxnard Plain, exudes both luxury and comfort: a big country kitchen, beamed ceilings, a Celtic harp in front of a brick fireplace, Indian rugs, and books and photos everywhere. Twenty years ago, she bought out her siblings to live in the house in which they’d all grown up.

  “This group of women is a strange group for a feminist to belong to,” Roz says days after the meeting. “Diamonds are not a feminist thing to own. Books are a feminist thing to own. I have a huge feminist library. My first time with the necklace I didn’t know what to do with it. I forgot I had it on. I buy my clothes at Target. The idea of a diamond necklace is absurd to me. It’s something Marilyn Monroe wore in a movie. But as a fund-raising tool, that was different. From the start, I could see beyond the
wearing of it.

  “I don’t think most of the women in the group would call themselves feminists. It’s not strange as much as disappointing. In the seventies we were on different paths. They were having babies while was I getting an M.A.

  “My parents instilled in me the value of education, how it affects your destiny. I was a good student but I flunked ethics in college. The midterm asked us to explain why abortion and homosexuality were morally wrong. I wrote, ‘I can’t, Father, can you?’ I received an automatic F. So much for a Catholic education. I thought Christians were supposed to teach tolerance.

  “I was a hippie but not a dropout. I was an alternative thinker. I got my politics from my English mother. As a British citizen, she questioned the American viewpoint on everything from guns to the environment. She was much more liberal than her American friends.

  “After college I didn’t want to be some man’s helpmate. I felt I had a bigger destiny. I went to graduate school in the Bay Area and specialized in nonsexist education. That’s when I became a feminist. Northern California and Southern California are like two different states. Women here don’t remember what the ERA was. Feminism is still a threatening word, which saddens me because we all support feminist causes.

  “I think education is the key to life. My regret is that I didn’t pursue a Ph.D. in women’s studies. It wasn’t available then, and I wouldn’t do it now. A Ph.D. would absorb my life, and I want to garden and write and paint and play my harp and romp with my dogs. I volunteered with the Red Cross after Katrina—that’s what I’m supposed to be doing now. I’ve worked my entire adult life, and I don’t ever want to work full-time again. Plus, a Ph.D. wouldn’t make me feel better about myself. What would do that is writing or painting something that I could leave behind.