We spent several hours getting ready. Merilee painted our nails Peach Passion and set our hair with Dippity Do and hot rollers. Because it was a “special circumstance,” I was even allowed to wear lipstick.

“Just this once. But don’t you dare tell your father.”

That morning after Daddy had left for work, my mother told me she would be keeping me home from school. I glanced over to where Anna was doing dishes, but she didn’t turn around.

“What for?” I asked suspiciously.

“We’re going on a short trip.”

“Where?”

“Well, Jacqueline, I am taking you to meet your grandmother.”

“On an airplane?”

“No, dum-dum, she lives in Van Nuys,” my mother said.

This was news to me and a relief. Van Nuys was only about ten miles away.

“Then why haven’t I ever met her before?”

“Ask her.”

Now it was almost noon and we hadn’t left the house. I had never seen my anxious mother this anxious. She was even more nervous than the time Daddy called to say Paul Newman would be coming for a drink after tennis. That day, my mother went nuts rearranging the furniture and yelling at poor Anna to make some kind of crab “ho-re de-vors” she found in a magazine. Then with all that, Paul Newman didn’t even show.

After smoking a pack of Marlboros and trying on twenty different clothing combinations, Merilee finally settled on a flowered tube top and white capris. I was already dressed in my newest, most favorite outfit; a purple pantsuit that Nicole had owned and outgrown.

“Oh hon, you’re going to fry in that,” my mother fretted, looking over at me while she sprayed her hair for the third time. She threw a bunch of makeup into her purse and grabbed a sweater from the pile. “Let’s go, Jacqueline,” she admonished like I hadn’t been waiting for her all morning. Then, she rushed past me, hollering, “I’ll be in the car!”

I stepped into my sandals and checked my reflection in the mirror. Not bad, except my mother had sprayed so much Aqua Net that my hair appeared lacquered on like doll hair. She had forgotten to turn off the rollers. I pulled the plug so the house wouldn’t burn down and crowned myself with a purple plastic headband.

Now, strapped into the red convertible, my hands gripping the side of the car, we flew over the speed bumps of Malibu Colony Road, and off to grandmother’s house we went. With KHJ blaring on the radio, we blew past the security gate, my mother—her face half-hidden behind large black sunglasses, her stiff curls slapping and twisting under a pink silky kerchief—was unfazed by Jackson the guard, who shook his fist and yelled for her to slow down.

“What should I call her?”