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The slow process of disentanglement was more tedious than it was painful. At least it had been for Allison. Patty hadn’t commented on it.
It had begun with hair ties in the bathroom. Patty bought the same brand as her, bought whatever was cheapest at the drugstore. So two piles began to form on opposite sides of the faucet. Ones wrapped in bottle blonde threads versus ones wrapped in black threads.
Maybe that was the problem. Maybe Allison always felt so empty inside, so desperate for other people to look at her, because she was fake on the inside as well as the outside.
After the hair ties came the socks. These were trickier because both women had a tendency to hoard stained socks with holes the toes would go through. But Patty was a size 6 wide and Allison was a size seven so Allison sorted the socks imperfectly by trying each of them on. The middle category of socks that could have very well belonged to either woman would have to be sorted out by Patty.
Then, came the relative calm of the underwear drawer. Only one errant pair of Patty’s had made its way upstairs. It was black with worn elastic at the waist and its presence in Allison’s dresser wasn’t as innocent as the socks or the hair ties. These drawers hadn’t made their way up the stairs by themselves. Allison had slid it up her sleeve after a late night hookup, depositing it between her own faded pink, similarly well worn underwear. Allison could not quite bring herself to remove the pair and put it with Patty’s hair ties or socks. The most she could do was rearrange her own underwear to cover it, hiding her theft from her own eyes. Out of sight out of mind. If she didn’t see it in the drawer it was practically like she hadn’t stolen Patty’s underwear. What kind of psycho stole her friend’s underwear? The same type of psycho that tried to murder her husband.
The delivery of the errant items, or better yet, their return, passed without comment from Patty. It was only later that night when she was alone, with a door locked between them, that Allison let herself cry.
And in the night, behind that locked door, Allison slid Patty’s underwear on in place of her own, craving a fragment of her dear, complicated, mess of a friend.
But the fear of losing herself again, of becoming subsumed to the wills and whims of another, kept the door between them locked.