“God, do people actually live here?” Molly wonders aloud, taking it slow as she navigates the Suburban down a hill to an old-fashioned town, complete with white church spire and village green. “It looks like a movie set.”

She’s right. It’s a strange and beautiful land, innocent and pristine, yet with a faint air of danger that comes with alien territory. As a girl, I dreamed of traveling far, but I never did. In my family, vacations were few and far between, and when we went somewhere, it was usually a car trip to a state park. For my parents, life at home was enough.

My mother had a favorite escape, and it was as simple as turning on the TV. She was fanatical about the TV soap Dallas, about a family like none we’d ever known. In my head, I hear the brassy theme song that heralded the start of the show. It’s one of the most vivid memories of my childhood. The churning melody signaled my dad’s bowling night and my mother’s sacrosanct program. On Sunday nights, the routine never varied. She would shoo him out the door, then fix an Appian Way pizza out of the box, oiling her hands with Wesson and expertly spreading the dough in a thin circle on a round baking sheet. A splash of canned tomato sauce, a sprinkle of questionable-looking cheese, and heaven was only minutes away.

Unlike any other day of the week, we didn’t have a proper, sit-down family dinner on Sundays. No salad or side dishes, no pretense of a token vegetable. Just slices of hot pizza and glasses of cold milk. Maybe a Little Debbie for dessert.

Then, despite my deeply resentful protests and martyrlike sighs, I was sent to bed. Even in the summer, when the light lingered for an extra hour, Mom made me decamp upstairs to my room, because Sunday nights were sacred. They were Dallas nights.

Mom wanted no interruptions. I suppose she would have taken the phone off the hook, but she didn’t have to, because all her friends were doing the same thing—hastening their children off to bed, urging their husbands out the door—so they could spend an hour in that fabled living-color world of millionaire matrons and the scoundrels who loved them.

I wasn’t allowed to watch and wouldn’t have wanted to, anyway. To a kid, the endless adult conversations, high-stakes oil deals and secret affairs were deadly.

Sequestered in my room, I always knew when the show started. First, there would be the clink of a glass. On Sunday nights, Mom opened the wicker-clad bottle of jug wine we kept in the cupboard and poured herself exactly one round-bellied, stemmed glass, full to the brim. Next, a curl of cigarette smoke would snake its way upstairs, emanating from a Parliament 100 with recessed filter, whatever that meant. It was all part of Mom’s curious ritual of self-indulgence. I wonder if she ever imagined Southfork Ranch as a real place, tucked into the green folds of the Texas countryside, with skyscrapers in the distance.