I was really into making bead necklaces when I was in nursery school, and I loved wearing them and giving them as gifts. In fact, Emmett and I got to be friends at Hollingworth Preschool when I used to make him bead necklaces and he wore them all the time. He never came to school or, the moms say, left the apartment without wearing one of my creations. We don’t remember any of this, but we believe the moms, because in every single picture of Emmett ages three and four, he has a bead necklace on. According to the stories our moms tell, I always gave him my best necklaces (unclear how I determined the rank, but I was supposedly very definite about the quality) and kept the second bests for myself. In my second year at Hollingworth, though, I made my best ever bead necklace, the Platonic Ideal of Bead Necklaces. They knew this because that was the one and only bead necklace I couldn’t part with, couldn’t even give it to Emmett. I asked Mom and Dad over and over, “Isn’t this one the most beautiful?” And they, being them, said that yes, wow, that is a rare beauty of a bead necklace.
That’s what they called it: a rare beauty of a bead necklace, and after a while just Rare Beauty. That one I kept for myself, and stopped wearing any of my others. I gave all those second- and third-rankers away to grandparents and lesser nursery school friends, who I’m sure were thrilled to receive my rejected bead necklaces.
I wore Rare Beauty every single day when I was in the big-kid afternoon class at Hollingworth, and through the following summer. Until one day on the subway platform at Seventy-Ninth Street, waiting for the uptown 1 train, I got mad at Mom for some nothing; Mom can’t remember what it even was. Probably I was just hungry or tired so I wanted her to make the day start over from dawn and she didn’t. I was so massively little-kid angry, I took Rare Beauty off and threw it down on the platform near Mom’s feet.
Mom said, “Gracie, please pick up your bead necklace. Come on, sweetheart.”
And I said, “No! You pick it up!”
Mom says she wishes she had just picked it the heck up. But it was hot, August in the city, and it had been a long day, and I sounded bratty and she didn’t like that tone of voice, so she said, “No, Gracie. I’m not picking it up. You threw your bead necklace on the ground. You need to pick it up. The train is coming, sweetheart. Please pick up Rare Beauty.”
“You do it,” I said. “You pick it up.”
I turned my back on my necklace, and her.
Mom said, “I’m not picking it up, Gracie. If you don’t pick it up right now, Rare Beauty will be lost forever.”
I crossed my arms over my chest and refused to look at it. The train came. We got on without my necklace. And obviously Mom was right; it was lost forever. It’s not like I can go to the MTA lost and found now and say, Hey, ten years ago I left a rare beauty of a bead necklace on the uptown platform of the 1 train at Seventy-Ninth Street. Do you have it?
Oh, certainly, miss! Here it is in this special box. We’ve been wondering when somebody would come to claim it because, wow, it sure is a rare beauty!
Don’t think so.
So that was the end of that perfect bead necklace. Mom says I didn’t make myself a new one and never mentioned it again, so she didn’t either, until I was, like, ten and didn’t remember the incident at all. She was laughing, telling it, but then she got sad at the end. She said she has always regretted that she didn’t just grab it at the last second and shove it into her pocketbook, so at least she would have it as a memento.
“It’s okay, Mom,” I said last time it came up, this past fall. “I don’t even remember it, except in the story, and anyway, it was completely my fault. You totally made the right call.”
“But you were just a little child,” Mom said. She blinked twice and went to take a shower. That was weird. It was just a bead necklace. How much of a rare beauty could it even have been?
This morning I woke up with a jolt. I was in the middle of a dream where Mom was telling that old story of the time I threw down Rare Beauty, and she stopped where she always stops, but this time not because she got suddenly sad but instead to go get the secret small blue box of stationery and photos of Bret out of her sock drawer. In it were no old photographs. Instead the blue box held only the most perfect bead necklace anyone had ever made. As she put it over my head, Mom said, “I picked it up at the last minute. All this time, I was just saving it to give back to you at the right moment.”
My hand was clutching the necklace Emmett had given me.