The bedrooms were in the back of the house. Grannie's was the largest with a queen size bed. She folded her quilted pink polyester bed spread neatly over two pillows. A small closet held her 1940s ballgowns, purple and black tulle skirts stuffed behind sliding wood doors. The huge round mirror of her vanity shown like the moon, reflecting her black wigs upon styrofoam heads graffitied with uneven eyes I scrawled in black eye pencil.
       Grannie always took care in her grooming. Although her full lips, black hair and round eyes had faded long before, her skin was still smooth and supple. She wore her hair cropped short and permed in those days, a curl of gray at her widow’s peak. Her brown makeup kit opened like a small oval guitar case with eyelash curlers, lipsticks and strange, green foundation sticks the size of small chocolate bars. “Meesh-yong,” she would call me tenderly by my Visayan nickname, “pluck only from below,” she advised as I shaped my eyebrows, her own nearly bare and filled in with brown pencil.
       Grannie was a quick wisp of a lady. Her arms and legs were thin and bony like mine. She would stride ahead of me at the Ala Moana mall, then a one story concrete strip of a few dozen stores. Some days we would visit her at the Ritz, a variety store in Ala Moana where she worked as a salesperson for a little extra cash. Before that, Dad took me to see Grannie at the Dole pineapple cannery during her