What if a Diamond Isn't Forever?

Thoughts on losing a stone.

My mother’s ring, on the sleeve of the wedding dress she sewed for me.

A diamond is forever.

That’s what the ads promised. The slogan drove the most successful ad campaign of the last century. Big, brilliant rocks dazzled on hands that never washed a dish or planted a rose bush. You couldn’t open a glossy magazine without seeing a perfectly manicured hand pointing the way to a lifetime of wedded bliss.

What a contrast to my pear-shaped sliver in its dry riverbed of arthritic joints. Even though it’s made of identical carbon, compressed by the same billion years of pressure, my little bauble is nothing much. It’s modest, not flashy. It is not a girl’s best friend.

The difference between their diamond and mine is that theirs is a stone. Mine is a story.

---

“A diamond?”

He took my arm and led me to the jewelry counter. My department store name badge, pinned to the peasant blouse I’d bought with my employee discount, said everything. Magician-swift, the salesman had arranged three rings on a black velvet tray before we got there. Three carat weights: small, medium, and minuscule.

A ring. What could be simpler? We were engaged. I held out my left hand, then pulled it back.

“Can I think about it?” Seeing his surprise and disappointment, I added, “I’ve got five minutes to get back to Gourmet. Mavis will be sharpening the knives.”

He walked me to the elevator. I pushed the button, praying it would take me nonstop to the eighth floor. It did. I dashed to the back room and punched in. Only three minutes late. Six would get me a docked paycheck.

“Sorry, Mavis. I was looking at —”

She grabbed her purse and headed towards Small Electrics, where Gloria stood with crossed arms.

Longing tightened in my throat as I rearranged whisks and madeleine tins. I wanted something, a tiny bit of sparkle. But a diamond? I didn’t think I deserved one.

---

I hadn’t foreseen the truckload of conventions and expectations bearing down on me, horns blaring. No ring? Well, that’s different.

I’ve lived in the same Midwestern state my entire life. It’s a good place, with good people. We’re known to be friendly and generous, willing to shovel your walk, jump-start your car in the dead of winter, bring over a casserole when there’s a death in the family, all without prompting. I up among people who have a reputation for being nice.

And yet, a smile sometimes masks another message. That’s different, spoken in a certain tone, can be hurtful. You’ve been labeled, with no way to call out the speaker. Memories are long. Different is forever.

I thought of getting a fake stone. The symbolism, I thought, might shut people up. But they’d know. People always knew.

An acquaintance who’d lived overseas suggested an alternative. It seemed both simple and elegant, two of my favorite descriptors.

“Europeans are practical,” she said. “They disdain consumerism. I mean, two months’ salary for some signifier?” She was studying Barthes.

We bought matching 14-karat gold bands. While engaged, we wore them on our right hands. As part of our wedding ceremony, we moved them to our left.

Well, that’s different.

Our guests pelted us with fistfuls of rice as we left the church. That hard rain didn’t dull the shine of our new, bright-blue Ford Pinto, a gift from his parents. If not for them, we’d have been sitting in a piebald Chevy with questionable brakes.

A few blocks down the road, we pulled off to the side. We hugged each other, fiercely.

“I love you so much.”

“I love you more.” We’d show them what a perfect marriage looked liked. A diamond is forever was a marketing slogan. We were not. My heart felt like it was about to burst through the bodice of my wedding dress.

The satin and French lace gown was soaked with sweat. His rented tux had dark circles under the armpits. It was ninety-two degrees. The church was not air-conditioned. But it was where I’d been baptized, where I’d sung in the choir.

But that tender moment was marred by a trickle of shame.

“Couldn't you have picked a hotter day?”

I’d expected the woman who’d been a fixture at our kitchen table, drinking my mother’s coffee and finishing her jigsaw puzzles for as long as I could remember, to manage at least Congratulations. But if this was what she said to my face, the comments circling among the guests about my meteorological choices had to be worse.

I smiled, biting back my words. No. I picked the hottest day I could find.

Seven years later, when our rusted-out Pinto was towed away for scrap, grains of rice still clung to the fibers of the carpet. I held our infant daughter as we walked up the front steps and into our house.

“At least it didn’t burst into flames,” I said. Pintos were known for that. As are marriages, I thought. Mortgages, wallpaper, flooded basements: no one tells you about arson, or a fire’s accelerants. We’d seen the abrupt uncoupling of friends, watched their ties come undone smoothly or clench into ugly knots that had to be ripped apart.

But we were lucky. If a faucet leaked, he fixed it. When I broke my arm, he washed my hair. I grew cucumbers for bread-and-butter pickles, raspberries for jam. I baked baguettes using Julia Child’s recipe, and sewed him a robe from a bolt of terrycloth I’d bought for almost nothing. When my first short story was published, he handed out copies of the small literary journal to everyone.

For my thirtieth birthday, he bought me a diamond.

---

“What’s this?” A small black box.

“April,” he said. “Your birthstone.”

“How did you know?” I may have mentioned it.

His hands shook as he slipped it onto my finger, next to the wedding band. It was comically loose.

“What size did you buy?” I tried it on my thumb. Still too big.

“Eight. The saleswoman said to go according to your shoe size. So I came home and checked. We can get it resized.”

He watched as I held it up towards the ceiling. It caught the light, a bit of fire. Maybe there was something to this forever business.

“There are flaws. It’s not perfect.”

I pulled him close, and kissed the top of his head, where his hair had begun to thin.

“It’s okay,” I said. “I’m not perfect, either. I wear clown shoes.”

I smiled at the thought of him squinting at the linings of one of my footwear, trying to find a numeral that hadn’t rubbed off. My job, chasing after a toddler, did not require anything more stylish than battered running shoes.

---

You can guess what happens if a ring is worn at all times for decades. I brought my mother’s and grandmother’s to a custom jeweler who patched the places that farm work and laundry had thinned to the width of a single piece of embroidery floss. She searched for gems with an old-fashioned cut, and didn’t overcharge when she found them.

My own diamond looked dull, even gray. I soaked it when I remembered, brought it in for cleaning about as often as I got my nails done: twice a year, then every other year, then never. A prong broke, but only one. If I’d made the connection, I would have recognized that as my birthstone deteriorated, so did I. We were gray, inert, scattered through with ineradicable faults.

The family jewels.

One night in bed, an unexpected question.

“What’s that you’re always doing with your hand?”

I held it up. The Vulcan sign. “Live long and prosper.”

“Not that. The other thing. With your thumb.”

My hand went reflexively into a position. I slipped my thumb under my index and middle finger and pressed it firmly against the diamond.

“Yes. That.”

“Really?” I was aghast. It was completely unconscious.

“Oh, who knows. A habit.”

Faint smile. “If you say so.” He went back to reading his book.

---

Reaching for the soap dispenser in a public restroom, I felt it. Sharp prongs closed around an empty space.

My diamond was gone.

I scanned the tiled floor. Peered under the stalls. Beneath the sink. I rifled the towels in the waste can. Ran back to the parking ramp, retracing my steps to the car.

Through slush and sand on gray pavement — why did this have to happen in February? — I used my phone’s flashlight, running my hand over floor mats and cushions. Stuck my fingers into cupholders. I emptied my purse onto the passenger seat and sifted through receipts, shopping lists, lipsticks, mints, Kleenex.

Nothing.

In the driver’s seat, I pulled my puffy coat close. It was filled with down feathers, but there was no comfort. How could I explain this?

Went straight to the restroom when I got to Lunds. Wouldn’t you know, I forgot to buy groceries?

I took off the ring, sharp as a nettle, and stuck it in my pocket. I backed out of my space and headed towards the street. A fluffy snow. Wipers.

It’s not you fault, it’s not your fault, it’s not your fault.

It was my fault.

---

After I pulled into the garage, I sat with my head against the steering wheel. I had to do it. One last try.

The garage floor was covered in sand and coarse salt crystals. Each one, a potential gem.

I reached into my pocket to pull out the ring. I could take it to my jeweler, ask her opinion. Can I get something nice? Pear-shaped, new setting? Would she turn judgmental?

Wait. What was that? At the bottom of my pocket, clinging like a rice kernel to the carpet of our Pinto, was my little stone. I don’t want to tell you that I pulled it out and dropped it on the floor. But that is exactly what I did.

I found it, put it back in my pocket, and went indoors.

“Honey. I forgot to buy groceries,” I called out.

He stood in the kitchen doorway and took everything in. Messy hair, red cheeks, the black gloves I was wearing. The ones I never wore.

“Let’s order from Tea House.” He took out his phone to check the menu.

We were married for forty-three years. Last month would have been forty-five.

I sat in one of the Adirondack chairs on our back patio next to the grapevine he’d planted. My chair. He always sat in the other one.

“Did you know about the diamond?”

No answer. Of course he knew.

I thought of that evening on a park bench near his apartment on a July evening, all those summers ago. Sunlight slanting through the trees. Sounds of children. He asked me to marry him. I said yes.

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