Double cousins Alice and Teresa Guthrie

grow up among Okie relatives on the western tip of the Mojave Desert in the Lancaster Heights, a shabby area sparsely settled with house trailers, a Quonset hut, tar paper shack and a dugout, a storm cellar type habitat with tamped dirt walls. Each dwelling had an outhouse and some had chicken coops with wire enclosures.

Reared in the 1950s and 1960s by pious parents with big plans for their only daughters, the girls come of age and escape the high desert community for L.A.'s palm trees and begin lives in a wider world.