All Fall Down: A Novel

by Jennifer Weiner

  “Oh. No. Sorry.”

  Kathleen Young was heading toward us, her pleasant smile still in place, but I noticed the creases around her eyes had deepened.

  “Mrs. Lefkowitz, you’re not scaring away prospectives, are you?”

  My new friend gave Ms. Young a sunny smile. “You mean I shouldn’t tell them about the rats in the showers?”

  “She’s kidding,” said Ms. Young. Mrs. Lefkowitz gave me another smile of surpassing sweetness.

  “I hope I’ll see you again,” she said. “And that pretty little girl!”

  “Nice to meet you,” I said, and gave her little paw another squeeze.

  “Right this way,” said Kathleen Young. “This is the Manor,” she said, walking at a swift clip past opened doors with nameplates on them. “Our residents who require the most care stay here. This,” she said, opening a door, “is a typical double room.”

  I stepped inside. The room wasn’t large, with most of the space taken up by adjustable hospital beds with side rails that could be raised or dropped. There were two oak dressers; two bookcases; two armchairs, one on each side of the room, each upholstered in blue plastic, dyed and patterned to make it look like cloth. The bathroom had all of the stainless steel rails you’d expect, with a metal-and-plastic chair in the oversized walk-in shower cubicle, and grippy mats on the floor. Back in the room, I let my fingertips drift along the armrest of one chair and tried not to wince at the feeling of plastic. Would my dad see the difference between the furniture in his house and this stuff? How could he not? Noticing my expression, Kathleen said, “Of course, our residents are welcome to bring their own furniture. Most do. We find it helps with their sense of dislocation.” I nodded, mentally erasing the hospital bed, the cheap bureau and bookcase, and the plasticized armchair, and replacing them with things from my parents’ home. Better.

  “Are there single rooms available?”

  “Of course. They’re significantly more expensive . . .”

  “That shouldn’t be a problem,” I said, and watched Kathleen’s pupils expand. Years ago my father, in a tacit admission that my mother was equipped to handle precisely nothing that his golden years might entail, had bought himself a life-insurance policy and all kinds of disability and extended-care policies, too. There was money to pay for everything he’d need, and to pay for the help my mother might eventually require, now that my father was unable to arrange her days. “Tell me about the, uh, level of care.” I’d done all kinds of research about the questions I was supposed to ask, even if the answers were all on the website. As Kathleen recited statistics about physician’s assistants, physicians on call, and nurse-practitioners, LPNs, and nurse’s aides, and how it was a goal at Eastwood to encourage as much independence as was feasible and safe, I thought of when I was twelve, and my father had taken me to New York City.

  The whole thing was an accident. He’d gotten the tickets for South Pacific as my mother’s birthday present. For weeks, she’d gone around playing the cast recording, singing “Younger than Springtime,” making appointments for a haircut and color, trying on and returning different dresses. I had come home on the Friday afternoon of their proposed trip and found her sick in bed. Some kind of twenty-four-hour bug, I’d thought, remembering the sounds of retching, murmuring behind closed doors, my dad asking if she wanted a doctor and my mother, shrill and weepy, saying she’d be fine, just fine, she just needed to sleep. My father had emerged tight-lipped, visibly unhappy. He’d already paid for the tickets, made plans for dinner, reserved the hotel room. If there’d been time he would have found a way to cancel the whole thing. Instead, he’d mustered up a smile and said, “How’d you like to go to the Big Apple with your dear old dad?”

  At twelve, I was not looking good. My breasts and my nose had both sprouted to what would become their adult dimensions, with the rest of my body and my face lagging behind. I had braces, with rubber bands to pull my upper jaw back into alignment with my lower jaw, and my oily skin, in spite of all the Clearasil and the benzoyl-peroxide-soaked scrubbie pads, was routinely spattered with pimples. I was wearing my hair with bangs, figuring the more of my troubled complexion I could hide, the better, and my oversized button-down shirts, paired with pants pegged at the ankles and flowy everywhere else, did nothing to minimize my size. But on that night, due to some miracle of luck and timing, my skin was clear, my hair was behaving, and I looked like a girl any father would be happy to escort to a show.

  “Try my silver dress,” my mother had croaked from her bed. It was meant to be knee-length. On me, it was a hip-skimming tunic. Paired with plain black leggings and my mom’s black leather boots, it made me look almost like a grown-up, sophisticated and smart. She swept my bangs back with one of the wide cotton bands she wore to yoga, then blow-dried and straightened my hair and let me wear a little lipstick, red, which made my skin look olive instead of sallow. “Nice,” she whispered with a smile, before turning on her side and falling noisily asleep. My father had been dressed in his newest suit and the tie my mom had gotten him for his birthday. His eyes widened in appreciation as I came down the stairs, with my mother’s good black winter coat draped over one arm. “Those boys don’t know what they’re missing,” he’d blurted, and then instantly looked ashamed, but I carried that compliment close, like a jeweled locket, something wonderful and rare. He had held the car door open for me, regaled me with stories of the brain-dead interns from Penn’s and Temple’s graduate schools who descended on his office every summer, and how one of them had gotten so drunk at the managing partner’s Fourth of July party that he’d vomited in the hot tub. Exiting the car, paying the parking-lot attendant, holding his arm out to hail a taxi, or holding a door open and saying “After you,” he’d looked so handsome, tall and assured in his camel-hair topcoat, his shoes polished to a high gloss, the Rolex my mother had bought him for his fiftieth birthday gleaming on his wrist. In the theater, he kept one hand lightly between my shoulder blades as he steered us toward our seats, and in the restaurant, the pride in his tone was unmistakable as he introduced me to the maître d’ and the waiter, who both seemed to know him, as “my daughter, Allison.”

  I could remember everything from that night—the look of the theater, lit like a temple in the frosty Manhattan night, the smell of perfume and silk and fur in the air, the rustle of programs as the audience settled into the seats, the plaintive voice of the lead actor, lamenting about how paradise had once nearly been his. I remembered how women’s eyes had turned toward my father, the approving looks they gave him, how I’d felt about the way he belonged in their company, tall and smart and successful. I could name everything we’d eaten at the little French bistro on Fifty-Sixth Street, and could conjure up the taste of lobster bisque laced with sherry, profiteroles drizzled in dark chocolate, the single sip each of white wine and red wine and after-dinner port he’d let me have. Half-asleep in the taxi’s backseat as it cut through the traffic, humming the overture to myself, I had thought that I would never feel more content, more beloved, more beautiful.

  Today is MONDAY, read the sign in the dining room, where tables for four were draped in pink cloths and set at wide intervals, the better to steer wheelchairs around them. On a shelf were dozens of paperbacks by Lee Child, Vince Flynn, Brad Thor. Was there some kind of law that men who wrote military thrillers had to have two-syllable names where the first and the last sounded interchangeable? There were romances for the ladies—your Nora Roberts, your Danielle Steel—and board games in worn boxes, some with their sagging edges reinforced with duct tape, the same games I played with Ellie: Sorry! and Parcheesi and Monopoly and Battleship. Our next meal will be DINNER, read the whiteboard at the front of the room. Tonight we are having CREAM OF MUSHROOM SOUP, LONDON BROIL, MASHED POTATOES, and GREEN BEANS. Oh, Dad, I mourned, and wondered how my mother would survive, seeing her beloved husband in a place like this.

  Kathleen interrupted my reverie, giving me a glossy “Welcome to Eastwood” folder and a big smile. “I
f you’re ready, we can go back to my office. There’s some preliminary paperwork you can fill out, and then, once our finance department has had a look, they’ll be in touch. Did you bring your father’s tax returns?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. The insides of my eyelids were stinging, and I was already blinking back tears. “I think I’m going to have to take care of that another time.”

  “Are you all right?” Kathleen’s tone was not unsympathetic. She must have seen this dozens, if not hundreds of times—spouses and children who thought they were ready flipping out and running when it came time to sign the forms, to write the checks, to make it real. I managed a nod, and then hurried past the front desk, through the doors, out to the parking lot, and into my car. One dream in my heart, I heard in my head, and brushed my sleeve against my cheeks to wipe away the tears. One love to be living for . . .. One love to be living for . . .. This nearly was mine.

  EIGHT

  “Allison Weiss?” The girl waiting at the door was tiny, with a nose the size of a pencil eraser and feet so small I bet she had to shop in the children’s department. It was May, the weather springtime-perfect. The scents of flowers, cut grass, and freshly turned earth wafted on a warm breeze (I could see a gardener digging the beds adjacent to the parking lot), and the sky outside the television studio was a perfect turquoise, dotted with cotton-ball clouds.

  I smiled at the young woman with the warmth and goodwill that only the pure of heart, or the people who’ve recently swallowed a handful of OxyContin, can muster. “I’m Allison Weiss. Are you Beatrice?” I had gotten the call the night before, from a woman who’d introduced herself as Kim Caster, a producer for The News on Nine, the local evening newscast. “Did you hear about that mess in Akron?” she had asked.

  “I did.” The mess in Akron was the kind of story that had become depressingly familiar since every teenager in America, it seemed, had been issued an iPhone. On a fine spring weekend, a fifteen-year-old girl had gone to a party. She’d gotten drunk. Four different boys, all football teammates, had taken advantage of her. Then, just to add to the fun, they’d posted photographs of their deeds on Instagram and video on YouTube. Within the next twenty-four hours, almost every kid who attended the town’s high school saw what had happened. The girl had tried to kill herself after a few of the most lurid shots ended up on her Facebook page. The boys had been arrested . . . but their defenders spread the word that the girl had come dressed provocatively with a vibrator in her purse and had texted her friends that she was looking for action.

  “As someone who writes a lot about sex and relationships—and, of course, as a mother yourself—what are your thoughts?”

  “I don’t think owning a vibrator, or even having one with you, is a standing invitation for guys to do whatever they want,” I’d said. “A girl can wear a short skirt and not be asking for it. She can even get drunk and have the right not to be raped. It’s never the victim’s fault.”

  “Mmm-hmm . . . uh-huh . . . great . . . great,” said the producer. “And what about the argument that it wasn’t really a gang rape because some of it involved only digital penetration?”

  I’d rolled my eyes. A columnist at no less an institution than the Washington Post had made that very point on the op-ed page last week, and the Examiner had reprinted his column. In our better days, I might have given Dave some grief about it, but these days Dave and I were barely speaking. It felt as if we were trapped in the world’s longest staring contest, neither of us willing to blink and bring up the topic of L. McIntyre, or Dave’s ever-lengthening stay in the guest room, or the pills. “There’s no ‘only’ when it comes to rape,” I said. “I don’t think it matters whether it’s a penis or a finger. Anything you don’t want inside you shouldn’t be there.”

  The producer had seemed impressed enough with my answers to invite me to come on the air for the channel’s Sunday-morning Newsmakers on Nine show, where local folks gave their opinions on the issues of the day. I’d spent an hour on my makeup and allotted myself fifteen minutes to just sit quietly and catch my breath after wrestling myself into many layers of compressing undergarments, and now here I was. I’d calibrated my dosage carefully; just two pills, enough to take the edge off, to let me push through the sorrow that threatened to keep me pinned to the bed in despair.

  “Follow me, please,” said Beatrice, whose hair bounced as she walked. “We’ll go right to makeup.”

  “That bad, huh?”

  Beatrice stopped mid-stride and turned and studied me carefully.

  “That was a joke! Don’t answer!” I said.

  “Oh. Okay.”

  Kids these days, I thought, as Beatrice waved a plastic card at an electronic eye and glass barriers parted.

  “Makeup” turned out to be a closet-sized room with two beauty-salon chairs, a mirror that covered one wall, and a table stocked with a department store’s worth of pots and tubs and containers of eye shadow and foundation and fake eyelashes arrayed like amputated spiders’ legs. One chair was empty. In the other sat a middle-aged white guy with short, sandy hair, bland features, a wedding ring on his left hand, and a class ring with a gaudy red stone on his right. The makeup artist introduced herself as Cindy, handed me a smock, and went back to patting foundation on the man’s face.

  I sat down in the empty chair. “Hey, that’s my brand!” I said to the man, who did not smile. “Hi, I’m Allison Weiss. Are you on the panel, too?”

  Without meeting my eyes, he gave a stiff nod. “I am.” His small brown eyes were sunk back into the flesh of his oddly rectangular head, like raisins in dough that had risen around them. “You must be the sex worker.”

  I laughed. I couldn’t help it. “Sex worker? Who do you think would hire me?” When the man didn’t answer, I realized that he wasn’t kidding. “I’m not a sex worker. I’m a blogger.” Realizing that might not sound any different to the uninitiated, I said, “I write about marriage and motherhood on a website called Ladiesroom.com.” Which, I thought with a sinking heart, also sounded vaguely pornographic. I mustered a smile. “Trust me, I’m about as far from a porn star as you could be.”

  “We’re all set,” said the makeup lady, giving the man’s nose a final dusting. He stood up and unsnapped his smock, revealing the plain black shirt and white clerical collar underneath. Oops.

  “Good God,” I said. The makeup lady giggled. The pills did not make me slurry or sloppy, but they did lower my inhibitions. On them, I’d say whatever was on my mind, and think it over later. Usually it wasn’t a problem. This might turn out to be an exception. I bit my lip and wondered if it had been a good idea to take anything before leaving for the studio. This, of course, led me to wonder if the shipment I was expecting that day would show up, and whether I had enough to get through the weekend if it didn’t. I wondered, as I walked down the hall, who Penny Lane’s vendors were, the druggy Oz behind the Internet’s green curtain. Were they cancer patients willing to sell their meds and suffer in order to pay off their bills and leave their kids cash? Scummy thieves who robbed cancer patients, then sold their pills for cash? Kids who worked in drugstores, sneaking out five or ten pills at a time, or people getting them from doctors without ethics, or maybe even actual doctors?

  Never mind. “Did you do your own makeup?” Cindy asked, cupping my chin in her hand and turning my face first left, then right.

  “My friend helped.” Janet and Maya had come over that morning, lugging a light-up mirror and bags of makeup. Maya had actually been excited enough to speak directly to her mother while they debated brown versus black eyeliner and whether my brows required additional plucking.

  “Not bad,” Cindy said.

  “Just please don’t make me look too slutty,” I said, as she began filling in my lashes with a brush dipped in brown powder. “Slutty would not do.” With that in mind, I’d worn a pencil skirt and pumps with a not-too-high heel, a fuchsia cardigan with a pale-pink T-shirt underneath, and a single strand of pearls. I was going for “mild
ly sexy librarian,” and I’d already solemnly vowed to refrain from looking at any and all online commentary on my outfit, my figure, or what I had to say.

  “Good luck,” Dave had told me as I’d gathered my car keys and my purse. He sounded friendlier than he had in weeks, and, almost without thinking, I’d turned my face up toward his for a good-luck kiss. Maybe he’d just intended to brush my lips with his, but I’d stumbled, as a result either of the heels or of the Penny Lane pills, and we’d ended up with his arms around me, the length of my body pressed against his, close enough to feel the heat of him through the cotton and denim, to smell his scent of shampoo and warm, clean skin. I’d opened my mouth and he’d settled one hand at the small of my back, tilting me against him, the better to feel his thickening erection, the other at the base of my neck so he could keep my head in place while he kissed me, lingeringly, thoroughly . . .

  “EWWW!”

  We sprang apart. I stumbled again—this time, it was definitely the heels—and staggered backward, praying that my skirt wouldn’t rip. “Ellie, what’s wrong?” I’d asked. Ellie, predictably, had started to cry.

  “I don’t like KISSING. It is DISGUSTING.”

  “Not when mommies and daddies do it!”

  “That,” my daughter proclaimed, chin lifted, “is the MOST DISGUSTING OF ALL!”

  “Well all righty, then,” I’d muttered, as Dave helped me to my feet. I could still barely believe what had happened, and wondered what had prompted it. Had he realized that, deep down, he really loved me . . . or, my mind whispered, had L. turned him down, telling him to go home to his wife unless he was ready to leave her?