All Fall Down: A Novel

by Jennifer Weiner

  I tried not to flinch. Vicodin and Oxy. My favorites, my nearest and dearest . . . and, at that very moment, I wanted about a dozen of each. I wanted not to be there, not to have been seen by the ladies in the carpool lane, who were probably already spreading the word, not to be in that classroom that smelled like little-kid sweat and banana bread, being lectured by some old battle-ax who probably had no idea what it was like, trying to raise kids and hold a job and run a household these days.

  “She took those pills for years. I believe that we all got used to it when Vicki didn’t seem quite right, or when she was tired all the time. We’d ask her about what she was taking, and she’d say it was no big deal, and because she had prescriptions, because she was under a doctor’s care, none of us worried. We didn’t know she was borrowing pills from her friends when her prescriptions ran out, or buying them from someone she met at the gym . . . or that she’d gotten a prescription for Xanax and was trading those for her neighbor’s painkillers.”

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “What happened was, she died,” Mrs. Dale said. In the quiet, empty classroom, I heard myself gasp. “On the death certificate it said respiratory failure, but she had taken about five times more pills than she should have, and she had a few glasses of wine on top of it, and she went to sleep and she didn’t wake up.” She looked at me, unflinching. “Her little girl found her. It was a school morning, and my niece’s husband was in the shower, and Brianna went into the bedroom and tapped her mom’s shoulder.” I sat there, frozen, my body prickling with goose pimples, my eyes and nose stinging with unshed tears. I could picture it—a woman about my age, in a nightgown, on her back in bed, underneath the covers. The sound of running water from the bathroom, the billow of steam and the smell of soap, and a little girl in Ariel pajamas shaking the woman’s shoulder gently, then more insistently, not noticing the stiff, unyielding texture of the flesh, or how cold it was, saying Mommy, Mommy, wake up! And in my head, the little girl was Ellie.

  I swallowed hard. Oh, God. What was I going to do? I had to stop, that was clear. But what if I couldn’t? Mrs. Dale was looking at me. I wanted to explain, to tell her how this had happened, how stressful my life was, between my job and my parents and my husband and his work wife and Ellie, and how sometimes I didn’t like being a mother much at all—how I liked the concept, but the reality of it was killing me. I couldn’t take the tears and tantrums and endless Monopoly games, the way Ellie would wander down the stairs half a dozen times after she’d been put to bed, requesting a glass of water, a story, her night-light turned on, her night-light turned off, how she’d bang on the door when I was in the shower, or even on the toilet, just trying to pee or put in a tampon, until I was ready to scream, to grab her by her little shoulders and shake her, shouting, Just stay in bed, please! Just leave me alone and give me five minutes of peace!

  “Brianna was four,” said Mrs. Dale.

  “Four,” I repeated. I imagined Ellie going to move-up day with only her daddy in the audience to cheer as she crossed over the bridge to first grade. I thought about her getting her period with no one to tell her what to do . . . or, worse, some bimbo of a stepmother who’d regard my daughter as competition. Her bat mitzvah . . . her first date . . . senior prom . . . college acceptance letters. All without a mother to encourage her and console her, to love her, no matter what.

  I dropped my head. No more, I thought. I can’t do this anymore. And right on the heels of that thought came, inevitably, another: I need them. I couldn’t imagine leaving Ellie to face life without a mother . . . but I also couldn’t imagine facing my life without a chemical buffer between me and Dave, me and my mother, me and the Internet, me and my feelings. How could I survive without that sweet river of calm wending its way through my body, easing me, untying knots from the soles of my feet to the top of my head? How could I make it through a day without knowing I had that reliable comfort waiting at the finish line?

  I gave my head a little shake. This was stupid. So I had let things get a little out of hand. So I’d come to school a little loopy. Nobody had gotten hurt, right? And I wasn’t going to die. I wasn’t. I wasn’t taking that much, and it was prescription medication, not heroin I was buying on the streets. It wasn’t like I was some cracked-out junkie . . . or like I’d end up dead in bed with a mouthful of puke and a little girl to find me. I was smarter than that.

  Except, a little voice inside me whispered, wasn’t Mrs. Dale’s niece on the same stuff as you? And you’re buying extra, and you’re not taking it as prescribed. Not even close. I told the voice to shut up, but it persisted. Instead of taking one every four hours, you’re taking four every one hour . . .. and you’re drinking on top of that.

  You need help.

  No, I don’t.

  This can’t go on.

  I’m doing fine!

  “I’m fine,” I muttered, half to Mrs. Dale and half to myself . . . but, even as I said it, I could imagine a little girl shaking her mother’s shoulder. Her mother’s cold, stiff, dead shoulder.

  “I’m not trying to scare you,” said Mrs. Dale. “But I know what this looks like. And I know it can happen to anyone. The nicest people. The smartest people. My niece was so beautiful. You’d never look at her and think that she was a drug addict. She was just taking what the doctors gave her. Right until she died.”

  “I appreciate what you’re saying, but that’s not me. I don’t have a problem.” Never mind the surveys I’d taken, the questionnaires I’d filled out, the increasing number of pills I needed to get through the day. Never mind the promises—not before nine, not before noon, not while I’m working, not when I’m with Eloise—that I’d broken, one after another, every day, stretching back for months. “I don’t. I just made a mistake today, and you were right to take my keys, and I swear, I swear on my daughter’s life, that it’ll never happen again.” I took a gulp of lukewarm coffee and forced myself to ask, “Are you going to report me?”

  After an interminable pause, Mrs. Dale shook her head.

  “Thank you. I’m sorry. I promise . . . I swear to you,” I repeated, “this will never happen again.”

  She gazed at me, and her eyes, behind her bifocals, looked kind. “There’s no shame in asking for help if you need it,” she said . . . and then she walked out, leaving me alone with my coffee, and my keys.

  I waited until she was out the door before I shoved my hand in my purse and touched the Altoids tin, then the prescription bottles, one, two, three, four. I had pills halfway to my mouth before something inside me, the little voice of reason, rose up and demanded, What the FUCK are you doing?

  I put the pills back. I put the cap on the bottle. I put the bottle in my purse, and laid my head on top of my folded arms . . . and then, alone in the empty classroom, I started to cry.

  THIRTEEN

  The next morning, I didn’t take a single pill. I dropped Ellie off at school, treated myself to an extra-hot latte with a double shot of espresso, and then drove to Center City, pulled on oversized sunglasses and a baseball cap and slipped through the side door of the church on Pine Street I’d found online the night before. In the basement, about twenty people, most of them men, sat in folding metal chairs. Tattered posters were thumbtacked to the walls. One read “The Twelve Steps” and the other “The Twelve Traditions.” In the front of the room was a wooden desk with two more folding chairs behind it and a sculpture of the letters AA carved out of wood on top, along with a battered-looking three-ring binder and a basket. I pulled my baseball cap low, flipped my collar up, and took the seat closest to the door. The chairs began to fill, until there were almost fifty people in the room.

  I looked around, dividing the attendees into categories: Aged Homeless (lots of layers of dirty clothes, and not many teeth) and Young Punks (pale, white, wormy Eminem clones in obscene T-shirts and with multiple piercings). There were old guys in Phillies jackets you’d pass on the street without a second look, and a single woman in a business suit with g
old hoop earrings and leather pumps that I knew couldn’t have cost less than five hundred dollars, but it was mostly a collection of people who looked nothing like me.

  “This seat taken?” asked a young man—maybe a teenager—in a blue T-shirt. When I shook my head, he sat down, swiped at his nose, and gave the pimple on his chin a squeeze. “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey,” I said back. He had a ring through his nose that made me think of Ferdinand the bull; Ferdinand, who didn’t want to fight, just sit and sniff the flowers. I glanced at my phone—five minutes until this thing kicked off—and continued my appraisal. The crowd was mostly made up of men, but in the back of the room I spotted two more women, both in their fifties or sixties, looking like, as Dave’s frat buddy Dan might have said, they’d been ridden hard and put away wet. One of them had unnaturally blonde hair pulled into a high ponytail that went uncomfortably with her weathered face. The other was a brunette with gaudy earrings and a phlegmy cough. The blonde wore sweatpants, the brunette, a pair of high-waisted jeans and a mock turtleneck, à la Jennifer Aniston, circa Friends, season one. To pass the time, I made up jobs for them. The blonde was a cashier at a gas station; the brunette waited tables at a diner. Not a hipster diner with Pabst Blue Ribbon on tap and a legitimate chef using artisanal ingredients in the kitchen, either, but a grungy place somewhere in Northeast Philadelphia, where the mashed potatoes came from a box, where truckers and cabdrivers and construction workers came to eat meatloaf and play Patsy Cline on the jukebox.

  “First time?”

  Oh, joy. Ferdinand was making conversation. I hoped a curt nod would appease him. It did not.

  “You court-stipulated?”

  I didn’t know what that meant. “Excuse me?” I asked, and then yawned. For the past twenty minutes, I hadn’t been able to stop yawning. My nose was running, and my eyes were watery. Allergies, I figured. Also, I felt like I was jumping out of my skin. My toes wanted to tap; my legs wanted to bounce and kick; my torso wanted to squirm. It was all I could do to hold still.

  “Didja get, like, a DUI or something?”

  “Oh, no. No, nothing like that.” Were all the people at this meeting here just because a judge told them they had to be?

  He gave me a grin. When he smiled I saw that, in spite of the ring in his nose and the spiderweb tattooed on his neck, he was still more boy than man. Not too long ago, he’d been climbing off a school bus every afternoon, and dressing up on Halloween. Someone had kissed him when he’d fallen down, had put silver dollars under his pillow in exchange for his baby teeth, had signed his report cards and attended his parent-teacher conferences, had worried when he’d stayed out late, lying awake in the dark, waiting for the sound of his key in the front door.

  An elderly man in a plaid shirt and khaki pants with a large bandage on one cheek took a seat behind the desk and rapped his knuckles on the table. “Welcome to Alcoholics Anonymous. My name is Tom, and I’m an alcoholic.” At least, that was what I suspected he said. Between the way he mumbled and his thick-as-taffy Philadelphia accent, I caught maybe every third syllable.

  “Hi, Tom!” the room chorused, their voices cheery, as if being an alcoholic was something awesome to celebrate.

  “This is an open meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. Anyone who wishes to attend may do so. The only requirement for membership in AA is a desire to stop drinking. I’ve asked a friend to read ‘How It Works.’ ”

  As Tom’s friend, a rotund white-bearded man who’d introduced himself by saying “I’m Glen, and I don’t drink alcohol,” droned through both sides of a laminated piece of paper—something about half-measures availing us nothing, something else about suggested steps as a program of recovery—I began plotting my escape. Aside from the business-suit woman, who was probably completing a degree in therapy or social work and observing this as part of her coursework, there was no one in the room I could imagine even having a conversation with.

  “Many of us exclaimed, ‘What an order! I can’t go through with it,’ ” Glen read. I shrugged my purse onto my shoulder. Who talked like that? No one I knew. “Do not be discouraged. No one among us has been able to maintain anything like perfect adherence to these principles. We are not saints. The point is that we are willing to grow along spiritual lines. We claim spiritual progress, rather than spiritual perfection. Our description of the alcoholic, the chapter to the agnostic, and our personal adventures before and after make clear three pertinent ideas. One, That we were alcoholic and could not manage our own lives.”

  Not me, I thought. Except for that little slipup the day before, I was managing my own life just fine. Not to mention my daughter’s life, my husband’s life, and my parents’ lives.

  “Two,” Glen continued. “That probably no human power could have relieved our alcoholism.”

  Wrong again. I could do this myself. I just hadn’t tried. I would cut back on my own. Eighteen pills today, then sixteen pills tomorrow, and fourteen by the weekend, and ten a day by Monday . . .

  “Three: That God could and would if He were sought.” Everyone in the room joined in, chanting those last words: could and would if He were sought. At which point, I realized that I had wandered into a cult. Why hadn’t anyone told me that AA was some strange turn-it-over-to-God deal? I thought it was a self-help thing, where you got together with other drunks and druggies and figured out how to solve your problem. Shows what I knew.

  “Any anniversaries?” Tom asked from behind the desk, looking around the room. “Anyone here counting days?”

  A young man in a blue sweatshirt and dirty work boots raised his hand. “I’m Greg, and I’m an alcoholic and an addict.”

  “Hi, Greg!” chorused the room.

  “Today I got thirty days.”

  The room burst into applause. “And,” Greg said on his way up to the front of the room, where Tom gave him a bear hug and what looked like a poker chip, “my parole officer says if I stay clean for ninety and I pass all my piss tests, that bitch has gotta let me see my kid.”

  Awesome, I thought, as the room clapped for this charming sentiment. Greg has a kid. Greg has a parole officer. Greg just called his kid’s mother a bitch. Suddenly I needed to leave with an urgency that approached my desperate need for a pill first thing in the morning. I sidled over toward the coffee urn, thinking that I’d stay there until the group’s attention was occupied, then make a break for it. Meanwhile, I pretended to be interested in the dog-eared posters framed behind smeary glass: KEEP IT SIMPLE. ONE DAY AT A TIME. THERE BUT FOR THE GRACE OF GOD.

  I don’t belong here, I thought. These people aren’t like me. I’m not as bad as they are; not even close. I can figure this out on my own.

  “This is a speaker meeting,” said Tom. “I’ve asked one of my sponsees, Tyler, to speak.” He pointed to his left, where a man who was maybe twenty-one, with skin the color of skim milk past its sell-by date, sat slumped in a thin, discolored T-shirt, jeans, and battered sneakers.

  “Hey,” he said, managing to pull himself upright. “I’m Tyler, and I’m an alcoholic and an addict.”

  “Hey, Tyler!”

  Tyler hocked back snot and scratched his forearm. “Yeah, so. Um. Tom here’s my sponsor. He’s a real good guy. And he said I gotta come to a meeting and speak, so here I am. I’ve got . . . what is it? Fifty-seven days today.”

  The room applauded, with people calling out “Congratulations!” and “Way to go!” and “Keep coming back!” Tyler ducked his head modestly and delivered the next part of his speech directly into his sternum.

  “I know I’m s’posed to be sharing my experience, strength, and hope, but I’m mostly gonna be sharing hope, because . . .” He gave a self-deprecating chuckle. “I don’t really have much experience with this whole not-using thing.”

  With that, Tyler launched into his tale. Mom was an alcoholic, Dad was a heroin addict. They’d leave him alone in the house for days at a time while they were “out partyin’.” Tyler had his first drink at eleven, stealing a pi
nt of his grandfather’s vodka and drinking the whole thing. “And, from then on, I guess it was just one big party.” I dumped powdered creamer into a styrofoam cup and listened. “I’d drink vodka before school, sneak a few beers during lunch, smoke a joint in the parking lot before I came home. And that was ninth grade.” By tenth grade he was smoking meth; by the time he was expelled in the eleventh grade, he was sneaking out of the house in the middle of the night to hitchhike to Kensington, where he’d started to shoot heroin. Finally, his parents performed an intervention. No word on whether they’d cleaned up their own acts or were just sober enough to notice that their son was in trouble.

  “They said I had to move out or go to rehab. This was after I, uh, stole my mom’s engagement ring and pawned it, ’cause I was all strung out, you know, and I, like, needed to score, and I didn’t care what it took. Didn’t care who I hurt. That was me when I was using.”

  As quietly as I could, I tossed my coffee cup into the trash can and slipped out the door. This isn’t for me, I thought. I didn’t do meth, I didn’t shoot heroin, and God knows I never stole anything from anyone. I didn’t even smoke!

  I walked briskly back to my car. Anyone who saw me would think I was a regular stay-at-home mom on her way to pick up some essential, forgotten ingredient—a dozen eggs, a cup of sugar—before her kids came home from school. Which I was, I decided. I wasn’t an addict, like the people in that room. I was a working mother under an inordinate amount of stress due to her job, her marriage, and a father in crisis; a woman who had, quite naturally, turned to an available remedy to help her manage her days.

  “I’m fine,” I said. And then, to prove it, I bought a dozen eggs and a bag of brown sugar at the grocery store, and had fresh chocolate-chip cookies waiting when Eloise came home.

  FOURTEEN

  “Mommy!”