I could hear her pacing in her room and I knew she felt trapped there by the eyes of the old women of the suburb. I had continued to eavesdrop on the old women’s conversation from the cold tile floor as they left the house that evening, clopping down the front steps with their bunioned hoofs stuffed into mis-shapen sandals. ‘We all have dead husbands,’ I heard Gladys hiss into the ear of another of the old girls. ‘She may have been a bit younger when she lost him, but so what,’ another one said. My mother heard them too and she was furious. Then I saw her decide not to brew on it and she broadened her thoughts. The next afternoon I discovered why. She must have decided that the only way to beat the enemy was to employ them. So during the cicadas five o’clock chorus I was marched across the road with my first communion dress that had sat for weeks in a paper bag crushed behind the door of my mother’s bedroom. My mother called to warn Gladys that I was on my way over with the dress and a bag of beads that had been passed on from a cousin in far north Queensland.
