Therese Plummer

Old Girls in Low Cotton Therese Plummer

Somewhere people act normal - but not in the Downy Mount Mobile Home Park, where recently widowed Marfa Bacot lives with her mother-in-law, Lulu, who cleans from hell to breakfast and has her make-up tattooed on so she's always ready for the rapture.

As if it's not crazy enough inside the trailer, Marfa has to deal with the other eccentrics who populate the park, from the runaway polygs stockpiling water for the end of the world to the man who hears from extraterrestials through V8 cans to the domineering Don Ella, who runs the park with an iron fist and attendance-mandatory parties. Marfa dreams of a new life on her own outside Flagstaff, but first she'll have to let go of her old one.

Helen Childress wrote the movie Reality Bites. She is a seventh-generation Texan.