All Fall Down: A Novel

by Jennifer Weiner

  “So you made sure Dad would never get mad at you again.” By acting like a little girl, a bubbleheaded teenager, I thought but did not say, as my mother nodded again.

  “And you stayed away from me.”

  She looked up, her eyes accusing. “You didn’t need me!”

  “What?” I looked at Kirsten, hoping she’d jump in. “What little girl doesn’t need her mother?”

  “You were so smart,” said my mom. Her voice was almost pleading. “You could do everything by yourself. You never wanted my help getting dressed, or picking out your clothes, or with your homework. You didn’t want me walking you to school.” She dropped her voice to a whisper. “I felt like you were ashamed of me. Like you knew what I’d done. How stupid and reckless I’d been. You didn’t want anything to do with me.”

  I closed my eyes, trying to imagine my mother, my beautiful, distant mother, as an alcoholic, who’d kept this secret for more than thirty-five years. How circumscribed her life must have been. No car. No friends, not real ones, because who could she trust, and how could she talk honestly to anyone? No relationship with me, and a kind of desperate, clingy, please-don’t-leave-me marriage, in which other people—my dad, me—did everything because she didn’t trust herself to do anything. It explained so much.

  “Were you ever going to tell me?”

  She didn’t hesitate before shaking her head. “How could I have told you that I’d almost gotten you killed? How could you ever forgive me? But now . . .” She lifted her head, looking around. “If I’d known that you were at risk I would have said something. I would have warned you. But I never thought . . .” She shook her head again, and pressed her hands together. I saw that she was trembling, and that there was a fine mist of sweat at her temples, and above her upper lip. She must have wanted a drink so badly. I wondered what it had cost her, to get herself out of bed, and dressed, and all the way out to New Jersey, alone and sober. I wondered if she had a flask in the car, or if she’d tucked one of those airport-sized bottles into her purse, and if she was counting the minutes, the seconds, until she could slip away, into the bathroom or the backseat, to unscrew the lid with slick, shaking hands, to raise the bottle to her lips and find that relief.

  “You weren’t like me. You were strong. You had it all figured out.”

  “I don’t have anything figured out,” I said. “And I’m not strong.”

  “I wonder,” Kirsten said, “if you two might have that in common. The ability to put on a show, where everything looks good from the outside.”

  I didn’t answer. Probably, even now, my mom did look fine from the outside. Her makeup was always perfect, her clothing was impeccable, and she had a mantel full of tennis trophies to prove her athletic prowess. But inside she was a wreck, a walking-around mess. Just like me. My mother raised her head. “Allison,” she said, “you need to know that I have never once been impaired around your daughter.”

  “Did you quit?” I asked.

  She bent her head. “When your dad was diagnosed, I made myself cut back to just two glasses of wine at night,” she said. “I want to help you, Allison.”

  “Was it hard?” I asked. Could you really go from being a fullblown alcoholic to drinking just two glasses of wine at night? Was my mom telling the truth? There was no way of knowing.

  “I’ll do whatever I can to help you,” she said. “Only please.” She was crying again, but her voice was steady. “You have to stop taking those pills. You have to try. For Ellie’s sake. You can’t hurt her, and you can’t waste your life hiding, the way I did, pretending that things are okay, being drunk or on pills or whatever, and not being a real mother, and not really living your life.” She got to her feet, crouched in front of me, and grabbed both of my hands in her icy ones. Up close, I could see what I hadn’t seen, hadn’t wanted to see, my whole life. It was there in the web of wrinkles around her eyes, the way her lip liner didn’t strictly conform to her lips and, more than that, the faint sweet-and-sour fruity smell that exuded from her pores. I’d never given a name to that odor, any more than I’d given a name to Dave’s scent, or Ellie’s. People had their own smells, that was all. But now it was like I was getting blasted with it, like I’d dived head first into a vat of cheap white wine, in which my mother had been marinating for decades.

  I’d never noticed. I’d never even guessed. Even though the clues were all there, I had never put them together to come up with the inescapable conclusion. What was wrong with me, I wondered, as my mother squeezed my hands and held on hard. Was I just as selfish as she was, that she’d been sick and suffering, and I’d never seen?

  “Promise me, Allison.”

  “I never want to be in a place like this again,” I said. It was the most I could give her and not be lying.

  “That’s a start,” Kirsten said.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  I staggered out of the room, a minute after my mother’s departure. I hadn’t remembered the Accident when I was a girl, but I now felt like I’d been in one in that little room, like a bus had run me over and left me flattened on the pavement.

  “Drink a lot of water,” Kirsten said. “Breathe. It’s a lot to take in.”

  I tottered along the women’s path, head down lest I accidentally make eye contact with the men, and snuck a glance at the visitor’s parking lot. My mother’s car and driver would be waiting. She could go out into the wide world, wherever she wanted to go. Soon, I would have that freedom, too. Where would I go? What would I do?

  It was a sticky June day, the drone of bumblebees and lawn mowers in the humid air that sat like a wet blanket on my limbs and my shoulders. The sun blazed in a hazy blue-gray sky, and the air itself looked thick with pollen that dimmed all the colors, making it fuzzy and faint. Somewhere there were kids splashing in swimming pools, dads underneath umbrellas, streaming the game on their phones, moms dispensing sunscreen and sandwiches and saying Oh, won’t that hit the spot to offers of a cold beer or some white wine or a vodka-and-cranberry, tart and refreshing, just the thing for a hot summer day.

  Behind the administration building I found a little garden, overgrown with weeds, the borders of the flower beds ragged, squirrels chittering in the dogwood tree, a splintery wooden bench in its center. I sat on the bench, staring numbly straight ahead. I felt like I’d been looking at one of those optical illusions. Examine it one way you’d see a beautiful young woman, the smooth lines of her chin and cheeks, the ripe curls of her hair. Then you’d blink or tilt your head and realize you were seeing a withered crone, her nose a tumorous hump, the young girl’s hat really the old woman’s rat’s nest of hair. The world I had once known did not exist, had never existed. Instead of the Tale of the Childlike Mom, the Distant Dad, and the Love They Shared, I had, instead, to consider the Story of the Drunk Mother, the Dad Who Could Never Trust Her, and the daughter who was an endless source of worry for both of them.

  Had I known? On some level, I must have at least guessed. All those afternoon naps in her bedroom with the shades drawn . . . and yet she’d emerge every morning in her tennis whites or her golf clothes to drink a little glass of orange juice (wheatgrass juice in the 1990s) and go off to her game. There was that ever-present tumbler full of wine and seltzer . . . but I never saw her take a sip of anything stronger. She smoked, but so did plenty of moms back then. She didn’t drive, but that didn’t seem worse than other parents’ idiosyncracies: Dorothy Feld’s mother had weighed three hundred pounds until she got her stomach stapled; Kurt Dessange’s dad wore a toupee that looked like it was made out of spray-painted pine needles.

  “All those years,” I said out loud. Years of lying, years of hiding. Years of her knowing she wasn’t living right, that she wasn’t the mother or the wife she could have been. Years of loneliness, because those kinds of secrets you couldn’t tell, not to your own mother or sister or your very best girlfriend. I don’t love my husband. I’m having an affair. Sometimes I can’t stand my children. I could imagine saying these things, but
I’m a secret alcoholic? I drove drunk with my daughter in the car? I want to stop and can’t? Who could tell another soul things like that? Who would react with anything other than horror?

  You’re only as sick as your secrets. Another little slogan I’d picked up. Not to mention that whole fearless and searching moral inventory, where you’d list all your faults and then tell someone else exactly what you’d done wrong. “That sounds horrible,” I’d told Wanda at the desk, after she’d finished her whispered recap of the previous night’s Bachelor episode. “No, no,” she’d said, with a kind of crazy glow in her eye, “it’s the most liberating thing you can imagine! It makes you free!”

  “Free,” I croaked. My mom had never been free. She’d lived her whole life under the yoke of her secrets, with a man who probably desperately wanted her to get better but didn’t know how to fix her, or how to help. So what were my chances? Where did that leave me? Was it possible that I wasn’t really an addict, that I could take pills, just more carefully than I’d taken them before? Or was it like everyone in here said, that the only path the pills would put me on would end in jails, institutions, and death? Half-measures availed us nothing, said The Big Book. We stood at the turning point. Well, here I was. Which way would I turn?

  One afternoon on our honeymoon in Mexico, Dave and I had gone fishing. It had been one of those perfect days: not too hot, with a crisp breeze, the sun glinting off the waves’ surfaces, and the fish shoving one another out of the way for the privilege of swallowing our hooks. We’d caught half a dozen striped bass in just four hours on the water. Then, while we’d sat back (with beers, I remembered, and the tortas I’d bought in a little panadería on the street), the mate had set up a table and two twenty-gallon buckets of water near the back of the boat and expertly gutted each fish, stroking the blade down the center of their bellies and deftly sliding out their guts. I felt like that now, like someone had sliced me open and dumped out my insides, then stitched me back together and set me on my feet.

  “So how’d it go?” Lena asked at lunch, which was manicotti, limp noodles and rubbery cheese in a meat sauce that made you sorry for the cows that had given up their lives to enter the food chain. Just the smell turned my stomach. I’d made myself a cup of tea and sat, shivering, in my customary spot between Aubrey and Mary.

  “Are you all right?” asked Shannon.

  “Clearly, she isn’t,” said Mary. “Just look at the poor girl!” She squeezed my shoulders. “Honey, what’s wrong?”

  “What did they say?” asked Aubrey. “Were you, like, molested by an uncle or something?”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” said Mary.

  “Well, it happens,” I heard Aubrey reply.

  “Not that,” I said, in a voice I barely recognized as my own. “It turns out that my mother’s an alcoholic.” I took a breath. “It explains a lot.”

  “You didn’t know?” asked Lena.

  “I feel pretty stupid,” I admitted.

  “Hey,” said Lena, “addicts lie.”

  I nodded, wondering what that said about my mother, and what it said about me. She’d lied, but I’d never noticed, never tried to figure it out. I thought of that day I’d gotten lost in Avalon when I was little, how the streets and the store and the sidewalks and the sand had all looked different, completely different, like they belonged in a world I couldn’t even imagine, and how the walls between this world and that one were so thin. One slip, one misplaced foot, one secret out in the open and you’d go crashing through the boundaries and find yourself in that other, unimagined world where everything was different, where everything was wrong. I made myself drink my tea, and a glass of water, and follow the group out onto the Meadowcrest lawn, where we sat in a circle and listened to a man with a flowing gray beard and a woman young enough to be his daughter who was probably his girlfriend bang on African drums and tell us that music had the power to heal. Eventually, I opened my notebook again, flipping through pages of jokes and songs that would get me to my daughter. Eyes on the prize, I told myself, and bent my head and began to write.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Three days after I came up with the concept of a talent show at our table, we had more skits and songs than we could use. The entire women’s campus had caught talent-show fever. Girls who hadn’t been interested in anything but reconnecting with their boyfriends or their dealers were busy writing lyrics or scraping together costumes or finding props for The Sound of Rehab.

  As we walked to Share, two girls, Amanda and Samantha, were performing a version of a Run-D.M.C. rap called “My Addiction,” instead of “My Adidas.” “My addiction walked through high-school doors and danced all over coliseum floors . . . spent all my dough just blowing trees . . . we made a mean team, my addiction and me.” I was learning all kinds of new words and phrases. “Blowing trees,” I learned, was smoking marijuana. “On my grind” meant working. “So, when I’m at my desk, writing a blog post, that means I’m on my grind?” I asked, and both Amanda and Samantha started laughing and said, “Nah, it’s a little different than that,” but they wouldn’t tell me how.

  We were almost at the art therapy room when Michelle popped her head out of her office. “Allison W., can I see you for a moment?”

  I rolled my eyes, left the group, and took a seat on the opposite side of her desk. “Allison,” she began, “I understand there’s a talent show in the works.”

  I shrugged, saying nothing.

  “You know,” Michelle continued, “that any activities have to be approved by staff.”

  “Oh, sure,” I said. Then I resumed my silence. Michelle stared at me for a moment. Then she reached into a folder and pulled out a script that, judging from the coffee stains, looked as if it had been retrieved from a cafeteria garbage can. “ ‘How do you solve a problem like an RC,’ ” she read, in a tuneless, cheerless voice. “ ‘How do you make them understand your world? How do you make them stay . . . and listen to what you’d say . . . when they look at you like you’re a human—’ ”

  “You know,” I interrupted, “it really sounds much better when you sing it.” I sat up straight and demonstrated. “Many a thing you know you’d like to tell them. Many a thing you’d hope they’d understand . . . Low bottoms and low IQs . . . they’re low on empathy, too . . . with nary a prayer of ever getting canned.” I bent my head to hide my smile. “You see?”

  “Allison, I admire your team spirit. But you are not permitted to perform skits and songs that make fun of the staff members.”

  “Why?” I asked. “I mean, of course, assuming that there is a talent show.” I arranged my face into an approximation of confusion. “And why do you think I’m the one in charge?”

  “Allison, I’m not going to get into that with you. What I need you to understand—”

  I cut her off before she could finish. “What I need you to understand is that, to misquote Alexander Haig, I’m not in charge here. I’ve got nothing to do with anything. I’m just some poor, stupid pill-head who can’t figure out how many sessions with her therapist it takes to get a day pass.”

  Michelle narrowed her eyes, causing them to practically vanish into her doughy face. “Let me ask you something, Allison. Do you want to get better?”

  “Better than what?” I muttered. Better than you? I thought. I was pretty sure I’d achieved that particular goal already.

  “Think about it,” she suggested in a sugary-sweet tone, and sent me off to Share, where I listened to a thirty-eight-year-old mother of two named Dice describe her descent from high-school cheerleader to crackhead. She’d arrived at Meadowcrest after her parents told her they could no longer care for her boys (twelve and nine), and would be putting them in foster care unless she got her act together.

  I would never, I thought, as Dice described leaving her boys home alone or, worse, with strangers while she wandered the streets to cop. Her hands, with the nails bitten short and bloody, trembled as she worked to extract pictures of her sons from underneath the p
lastic lining of her binder. “That’s Dominic Junior, my little Nicky, and that’s Christopher. He eats so much I can’t even believe it. Like, mixin’ bowls full of cereal, gallons of milk . . . I tell him we should just get a cow, let him suck on that, ’stead of using all our money on milk . . .”

  Had she ever been like me and Janet, with a husband and a house, a car in the garage and money in the bank? Had she ever had a chance at that kind of life?

  “Allison?”

  I glanced up. Gabrielle, she of the pink lanyard and officious-bank-lady look, was staring at me. So, I noticed, were the rest of the eighteen girls and women in the circle. “Allison, are you ready to share?”

  “Um.” I closed my notebook, then drummed my fingertips on its cover. I had known this day was coming, but, of course, they never told you exactly when it would be your turn. I sat up straight, remembering how every Share began. “Well. Let’s see. I was born in New Jersey, in 1974. I think I tried liquor for the first time at someone’s bat mitzvah, when I was twelve or thirteen. We were sneaking glasses off the grown-ups’ table. I had maybe a sip, and I hated the way it tasted, and that was that until I was sixteen. Um.” I tilted my body back in my chair, looked up at the ceiling and noticed, without surprise, that it was stained. Everything in this place was worn and dirty, frayed and patched, like we didn’t deserve anything better. “I got drunk at a party when I was sixteen. Vodka and peach schnapps, which was a thing back then. I hated the way it made me feel, and I didn’t drink again until college . . . and even then, it was, like, a beer. Or maybe I’d have a few puffs of a joint.”

  “You’re kidding,” said a new girl whose name I didn’t know. I could have gotten defensive, but instead, I just shrugged.