A Long Jewelry Story with No Happy Ending

I am not a fan of jewelry. It might be because I have so many other needs or interests that it strikes me as a waste of money. It doesn’t seem practical. Jewelry just hangs there.

I do a lot of computer work, and bracelets bang against the keyboard. Rings twist around and get in the way of the keys. I wear a name tag all day to move through security doors. A necklace seems superfluous. It itches my neck. I have a difficult time with clasps. My favorite bracelet had a magnetic clasp. It snapped together. But I carry so many purses, book bags, lunch bags, and stuff, in the course of traveling, it got tangled up in the straps and broke.

Pins punch holes in my clothes. I have a utilitarian pair of hoop earrings that don’t hurt when I’m on the phone and I never take them off. I have a plain gold wedding band. The morning of my wedding, my husband presented me with a small diamond engagement ring that didn’t go with the band. His family had shamed him into getting it, even when he told them I didn’t want one. We were set with matching bands. Whenever I see it in the jewelry box, I get sad. It represents coercion to me, not my wedding. Despite knowing me well, he believed someone else who said I would like something he knew I probably wouldn’t.

I have been in my husband’s family for 16 years now, and surely in that time I have mentioned I don’t wear jewelry. I show up for things sans jewelry. I don’t talk excitedly about jewelry. Either they don’t believe me or they aren’t listening, or they think I can change. My husband is no help. When they tell him what they’re getting me, he never says, “Don’t. She won’t like it.” He says nothing. So I get jewelry.

I was now in receipt of three new beads for a bracelet I no longer had. There’s a commercial running where one woman admires another woman’s charm bracelet and she excitedly defines who she is by the charms on the bracelet. There’s a soccer ball! (Because she drives her kids to soccer? Or does she play soccer?) There are YouTube videos where you see a bracelet full of beads and a narrator tells you what each one means to her. I can see there is effort here to define me with these beads. One is my initial. One is a cat. I have cats. The other beads are generic.

But I no longer have this bracelet. Putting the charms on and then fastening it to my wrist proved insurmountable last year. A charm would always fall off and roll into the best hiding place it could find. They banged into the keyboard. Charms would snag sweater sleeves. I couldn’t just slip it off. I had to wrestle with the clasp, and when it broke my fingernail down to the quick, I was done with it. I sold it on eBay to a woman who needed it to fulfill her daughter’s 16th birthday wish.

The bead market on eBay is weak, so I risk the after-Christmas rush and try to return them without a gift receipt since the barcoded price tags are still on the charms. Kohl’s is ready and waiting, with directional signs to all the return stations.

This is how Kohl’s sells things. They put a tag on the item with an outrageous price. Then they put up little signs on the racks that translate the tags into sale prices. If the price tag says $58, it’s “on sale” for $24. So I knew going in I didn’t really have $80 worth of beads, but I might have enough for a blouse. I did. I had $58.50 worth of beads. The tags on the blouses said $58, but the little sign on the rack said $58 was actually $24.80, so I had enough for two blouses!

Heady with success, I decide to try to return a diamond chip tennis bracelet to JC Penneys that I actually got two years ago. It was still in the gift box, except the barcode and price were peeled off. I had looked it up that first year on JCPenney online where it was selling for $75, but figured there must have been a sale in the store. On both eBay and Craigslist, there are many dozens of similar bracelets and people aren’t buying them.

I wait my turn at the jewelry counter and when the saleswoman greets me, two women start shouting that they had been waiting “an hour.” They have not, but they were there before me so I shrug and my clerk goes to help them. They have thick Eastern Europian accents and severe Communist-era haircuts and blocky builds. The older woman wears an old fashion headscarf. The younger woman wants to see a ring. Then another ring. Then another. They settle on one, but want to pay on credit. They have no cards so have to fill out a new credit application. The clerk and I wait. They turn it in. The clerk asks to see their ID. They have none. No driver’s license, nothing. The clerk says she will have to check with the manager.

This clerk has Mad Customer Service Skilz because I know she knows the answer is going to be NO, but the ladies stand there like there’s still a chance. The answer is no, the clerk says very apologetically. They leave without any visible disappointment. I am convinced they knew all along. I develop a backstory that they are actually Romanian gypsies and they were hoping the counter would be so crowded today, the clerk would leave the tray of rings out, get distracted, and they could pocket a few. Because why else would this woman who has no cash need a ring so bad the day after Christmas that she will go in debt for it?

Well, turned out she wasn’t the only one. While I wait for this most patient of sales clerks to look through pages of inventory photos trying to find a match for my mystery bracelet, a short, obese woman with over bleached, frizzy hair comes up asking about layaway. There is no layaway for jewelry, fill out a credit application, she is told. She does. She has two rings on every one of her fingers, including her thumbs. I am not kidding. She smiles at me. “I can’t believe you don’t want that bracelet,” she says. “Give it to me!” And she waves her ringed fingers at me. Multiple bracelets jingle on her arms. I can’t believe she is going in debt for more rings the day after Christmas. On the other side of the counter, I see an elderly woman intently filling out a credit application.

There is some kind of need and loneliness going on here, these women alone, shopping for themselves, the day after Christmas. They don’t have gift cards, or, apparently, money or a credit card. They fill out applications for new loans. My sales clerk can’t find my bracelet in the inventory. I don’t tell her it’s from two years ago. I just smile and say, “it must have been regifted then.” The woman with many rings suggests again I can regift it to her. The clerk with the Mad Customer Service Skilz says if I can find it online somewhere with a price and an inventory code, to please come back.

I look at the bracelet. Apparently for some it is a cure for every kind of sad and lonely. It is worth borrowing money to get. And yet, I can’t see it. It works no magic on me.

You may think this story ends with me giving it to the woman with all the rings, but no, it doesn’t. I am still trying to figure out an alchemy that will turn it into something I need, that will cure my sad and lonely, even for a moment.