The first necklace is the type of pearl necklace Marge Simpson or Lucy Ricardo would wear. Perfect spheres of identical size, uniformly strung. This is for my mother. The second is similar. A string of pearls, though oblong. An imperfect piece of natural beauty. Like the teeth my step-mom kept from her daughter's teeth-losing years to make sentimental jewelry. Teeth that she would keep hidden away in a drawer until her kids were old enough to appreciate how big they had grown. Teeth she kept until her daughter's sons were old enough to lose teeth.
I bought the necklaces in The Philippines. My eye got caught by a pretty Filipina fidgeting bored behind a glass display counter of pearl jewelry. Maybe she was just wiping the sweat from the back of her neck, but she acted restless. I didn't go to her right away. I wasn't there to buy jewelry.
The Souvenir Shop on Camp Navarro, The Philippines is a quietly competitive commercial zone all within one large room. The store is set up as two different clothing and accessory sellers, two plaque and memorabilia sellers, and a fifth counter selling moderately priced jewelry and paintings of celebrity's pictures (with the picture in the lower left- or right-hand corner of the painting). The fifth seller also sold T-shirts.
I walked into the Souvenir Shop out of curiosity, in search of trinkets from a far-away land that I could give to my Brothers. I found a pool stick inlaid with a snakeskin pattern on the handle, and an inlaid stone tiger-figure prowling up the center of the stick toward the cue. The heavy price made me take a minute to consider our friendship. I walked over to look at something else. I'm never immune to the power of shininess.
"Can I help you?" she asked in perfect, accented English.
"NothankyouI'mjustlooking," my holstered answer, at-the-ready for salesmen.
I'm caught gazing at a piece for more than a millisecond. "You want see this one?"
Hesitated "uhhhh" and "yyyyyeaaaahs" to be excluded to understate my inability to interface with women confidently these days.
"Yes please."
She has a springy purple bracelet attached to her wrist with keys to the back of the display counter. As she slides the mirrored backdrop away from the pearl necklaces and earrings and bracelets, they somehow appear less brilliant than before. The illusion of the jewelry's beauty is encapsulated by the display case, and is somehow marred by pulling back the wizard's curtain. For a brief moment I feel the disappointment between the exhilaration of want, and the responsibility of have, instigated by the removal of a shininess multiplier.
She sets the necklace in front of me on the counter in a red, velvety box. The box shows the necklace as you would imagine it on cleavage. This necklace is not like the others. It is not uniform. It could only be called a pearl necklace because pearl is the only stone on the pendant, beside zirconium. It falls like the leaves of a vine, curling into six points. Three points are zirconium leaves. The others are perfect ovoid pearls, extending from the branch's tip like dew drops.
"How much is this one."
--
"Okay I'll take it."
