This has been floating around in my mind for a few weeks. It's just a piece, not the whole thing.

The house is always the same in my dream: large, 12 foot ceilings, 32 paned windows, stairs that are steep and leading to rooms I cannot access: my mother's home in Southeast Oklahoma on a street named for the second president of the United States; the others followed south to Johnson. In this very Democrat dominated corner of the state, Nixon didn't get a block named after him. That's when time and growth stopped in this town.

We moved there the year my brother was born. He was the only heir to the name no one could pronounce but everyone knew. His father had married my mother, an outsider, a foreigner, only after living with her for seven years, then killing himself five months later, leaving her pregnant and neither wealthy, nor the heir to his estate. She packed us up and bought the house on the street with no other children. Behind gingerbread trim, the other houses held tucked-away aging widows bestowed with the same names of the flowers in their meticulously kept gardens: Rose, Myrtle, Iris. Every Sunday the sons would come to either take their mothers to church or to visit on the side screened porches taking coffee poured from polished silver decanters- black, no sugar.

The women who had known her husband in high school smiled politely, then pushed their shopping carts past us, into isle three to gossip by the bread. They couldn't help but compare their own small bosoms and wide hips, polyester pants, frosted-Farrah hair and fake nails to her still young, firm breasts, slim waist, Levi's and polo, blunt cut naturally coordinating chocolate milk-brown hair and eyes, but it was her confident walk and presumption of acceptance that fueled their fire of resentment and jealousy. It was quickly decided that she was there to steal their men or at least bed them.