21.
“NEVER SETTLE FOR ANYTHING BUT FIRST CLASS,” GAMMIE told me as we sped down the Pacific Coast Highway in that 1970s Cadillac she called Big Red. She wore a red silk blouse and a red silk scarf and smelled like Coco Chanel.
I smiled and nodded and said, “Okay” because I loved my Gammie like a tomato.
“You’re not common,” she said. “You can’t afford to look cheap.”
And I smiled more and nodded more and I still loved my Gammie in a way that tasted raw and whole, but truth told, I just thought she was a classist bitch when she said shit like that.
I was a teenage squatter with a fading black eye, my boyfriend in jail, and I’d just come to visit for a week because the squat was cold without him and maybe I wanted to feel like a little girl again just visiting her Gammie off the Pacific Coast Highway and here all my Gammie could think to say was, “Never settle for anything but first class.”
MORE THAN 20 years later, maybe I knew what she meant. About settling. About not being common. About the way she was a classist, sure, but she was more than that.
GAMMIE HAD BRIGHT Picasso posters on her walls, leopard-print sheets on her bed.
In her walk-in closet, Gammie had a giant mirror with lights all around it, and she’d sit there applying makeup like she was some kind of a movie star. Or maybe a stripper.
She wore Max Factor foundation. Dior lipstick. She brushed her long gray hair, then tied it into a bun. She poured herself her morning vodka and sipped it slow, then headed out for an early lunch with the ladies.
I stayed home, sat there in front of Gammie’s big movie-star mirror applying Max Factor foundation and Clinique concealer, trying to cover up the fading bruise of my common black eye.