This was the stuff about Adrienne that nobody knew—except me, because she told me. Would you believe that I was flattered at first? It made me feel so special, the way she sought me out. At first she would just ask me to stay for a drink when I came to tidy up the house, but soon I was driving over every other day just to sit with her and talk. She really was lonely, abandoned by her friends, no family but Ethan left to speak of. And I thought we had a connection, something like sisterhood, only better: two women, both set apart and misunderstood, bonding across the barriers of class and culture because we shared something deeper, something real. She told me her secrets, and like an idiot, I told her mine. The pregnancy. The accident. The pills, and everything that came after. I told her how we struggled, and she told me I wasn’t alone. She’d wanted babies, too, she said. But Ethan had gotten a vasectomy during his first marriage, and either couldn’t or wouldn’t have it reversed. It was the kind of heartbreak all the money in the world couldn’t solve, and we shared it. She knew what it was like to be ten years married, bound to a man who dragged you down with him every time he stumbled. We’d even gotten married on the same day, August 8, 2008. Of course, her husband remembered theirs.
I thought we were in it together. But I was fooling myself. She didn’t confide in me because we were friends.
She did it because we weren’t, and never could be.
She’d gaze at me over the top of her wineglass, her soft blue eyes all sleepy in the light of the late summer sun, and say, “I just love our talks, Lizzie. I feel like I can tell you anything,” and it took me such a long time before I started to hear the part she wasn’t saying. I can tell you anything—because who are you to judge me? I can tell you anything—because I don’t have to care what you think. Because you’re country trash, junkyard girl, and no matter how low and shitty and grasping I am, I’ll still be better than you. Confessing her sins to me was comfortable, liberating, precisely because I was nothing. She might as well have whispered her secrets into the ear of one of the junkyard cats that still skulked the heaps at night, looking for vermin. Go on, unburden yourself. After all, what’s that mangy cat gonna do? Who’s it gonna tell? Who would believe it, even if it did?
When they came back the following year, I started to understand what I was to her, even if Adrienne didn’t. If you asked her, she’d probably tell you that we were friends, or better yet, that she was some kind of mentor to me. A big sister, worldly and generous, guiding a local yokel in the direction of self-actualization. She’d never admit that she kept me around because she liked having someone to feel superior to. That it made her feel magnanimous to feel like she was doing me a favor.
So I played along. I promised to be honest, and this is the truth: I gave Adrienne Richards exactly what she wanted. I told her I was so glad she felt that way, because I knew I could tell her anything, too. I’d gaze at her with big, moony eyes, the dirtbag ingenue, just dying for my beautiful patron to bestow her wisdom and blessings on me. I pretended to be thrilled when she handed me a shopping bag full of twice-worn couture, thousands of dollars’ worth of beautiful things that were utterly useless to me. As if I had anywhere to wear clothes like that.
“I was going to donate these,” she cooed. “They don’t fit me, since I went on paleo. But then I was getting ready to come up, and I thought, Lizzie could wear them! They might be a little snug on you. But you’re so handy, you know how to sew, don’t you? Maybe you can let them out.”
I took them. I thanked her. I didn’t bother pointing out that we were exactly the same size, that the red bikini and soft striped slub shirt she always wore at the lake had belonged to me first. That I gave them to her that very first week, when I came to deliver their groceries and change out the beds, because the pine trees were shedding like crazy and she was worried about getting tar on all the fancy-shmancy shit she’d packed. I didn’t remind her how she sashayed out, wearing my bathing suit, and crowed, “Oooh, it fits! We could almost be sisters, I mean, except, you know,” and I said, “Except you’re the one who grew up in a fairy-tale palace and I’m, like, the hunchback twin raised by wolves,” and she giggled. “Well, you said it, not me.”
I kept my mouth shut, and went home, and hung the beautiful, expensive clothes deep in the closet I shared with Dwayne. They still smelled like her, a musky mix of shampoo and perfume that would waft out and travel through the house. The scent was so strong, so foreign, that I would sometimes catch a whiff of it as soon as I opened our front door.