All Fall Down: A Novel

by Jennifer Weiner

  I didn’t even try to defend myself, to point out the ways he’d let me down and made it hard to tell him the truth about how I was feeling. I’d been warned about what was known in the AA rooms as cross-talk. I couldn’t argue, or bring up L. McIntyre, or talk about how he used marathon training as an excuse to literally run away from his wife and his daughter. I couldn’t do anything but sit there and stare at my hands and try not to cry when Kirsten asked if he thought our marriage was irreparably damaged and listen to him sigh and then, slowly, say, “I don’t know.”

  After sixty days, most of the women who’d been there when I arrived had gone. Mary had left early, after her husband developed a bladder infection and her kids couldn’t manage it—and him—without her. Aubrey’s insurance had cut her off after twenty-eight days. When her parents and her boyfriend all declined to come get her, Meadowcrest had gotten her a bus ticket back to Center City. Lena and Marissa and Shannon had all gone and been replaced by a fresh crop of Ashleys and Brittanys and Ambers and Caitlyns. Addicts, it seemed, were a renewable resource. The world made more of us every day.

  By nine o’clock on my discharge day, I was standing in the reception room with my bags neatly packed. By noon, I was in a meeting in a church on Pine Street. Hi, my name is Allison, and I’m an addict. Hi, Allison, welcome, the room chorused back. At three, I was in Bernice’s office in Cherry Hill. Technically, it was an intake evaluation, during which she’d determine whether I was an appropriate addition to her intensive outpatient group, the just-out-of-rehab folks whose therapists had determined they were ready to live in the world again. “One thing we gon’ do right this minute,” she’d said, and spun her big push-button telephone around on her desk until it faced me. While she watched, I called every one of my doctors who’d ever prescribed me anything stronger than an aspirin, and told them what had happened and where I’d been.

  Some of them had been brusque and businesslike about it. Dr. Andi had practically been in tears. “Oh, God, Allison. Was this my fault? Was this going on and I didn’t see it?”

  “Don’t blame yourself,” I told her as Bernice listened on speakerphone. “I was playing you. I was good at it, too. Just . . . if I ever call you in the middle of the night and tell you I’m in agony . . .”

  “Nothing!” said Dr. Andi, laughing. “Not even a hot water bottle!”

  “Now go and do the next right thing,” Bernice told me. I’d left her office feeling rattled and dazed. No more pills. Not unless I went back online or I found new doctors, convinced them I was in trouble, got them to give me what I needed . . . I shook my head, raised my shoulders, and quickened my pace along the street. No more. That part of my life was over. I had a daughter who needed me, I had a life to live, and I was determined to be clearheaded for all of it.

  My determination lasted exactly twenty-three days. Looking back, I was trying to do too much, too fast, to have it all be normal again. Then, at ten o’clock one night, after a day of outpatient therapy and meetings and Monopoly with Ellie, I found myself thinking, Would just one glass of wine be so bad? Just a glass of red, like a million other women were probably sipping at that very moment, a little something to ease me, to calm me, to send me off to sleep?

  I had the glass in one hand and the bottle—leftover Manischewitz from some Passover seder—in the other. Even though I’d never been a drinker, I could taste the kosher wine, sweet as syrup on my tongue, warming me, calming me as it went down.

  I don’t know where I found the strength—if that’s what it was—to put down the bottle and pick up what people in meetings called the thousand-pound telephone. I called Sheila, a big, tall home health aide from my IOP group who’d been addicted to crack and who called me, and all the other women in the group who were under the age of fifty, baby girl. “SheilaIwanttodrink,” I blurted before I’d even said “hello,” or my name.

  “Who this?” she asked, laughing. “Which white girl calling me ’bout wanting a drank?” Drank was how she said it, and the delicious silliness of it made me laugh.

  “It’s Allison. The Jewish one.”

  “Ooh, Allison, with that pretty little baby, callin’ me ’bout wanting to drink. You’re not even a drinker, right?”

  “No,” I said. “Pills. But you can’t buy them on the corner.”

  “Not in your neighborhood, I guess,” she said, and cackled. “So what you want,” she said, suddenly serious, “that glass of wine or your baby? Because you know it is never just one glass of wine. Not for us. And you know where it ends, right?”

  “I know,” I said. I was gripping the phone tight, tight, tight. Tears were coursing down my cheeks. They’d told us that in rehab, and in group: we had given up the right to drink or take drugs like normal people. No Champagne toasts at weddings, no Vicodin after we had our teeth pulled. And what did we get in return for that sacrifice? Our lives back. Not just returned, but improved. Bernice closed every session with the Promises: “If we are painstaking about this phase of our development, we will be amazed before we are halfway through. We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness. We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it. We will comprehend the word ‘serenity’ and we will know peace. No matter how far down the scale we have gone, we will see how our experience can benefit others. That feeling of uselessness and self-pity will disappear. We will lose interest in selfish things and gain interest in our fellows. Self-seeking will slip away. Our whole attitude and outlook upon life will change. Fear of people and of economic insecurity will leave us. We will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us. We will suddenly realize that God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves.”

  To me, it sounded like bullshit . . . maybe because I was still clinging, hard, to the notion that my life had been pretty much okay, or that I’d pulled out of my tailspin before things had gotten really bad. I didn’t want better; I just wanted what I’d had before it all got so crazy, before we moved to Haverford, back when it had been the three of us in the row house in Center City. This was a point about which Bernice and I disagreed. “Don’t you quit before the miracle happens,” she would tell me. “I want you to experience everything this program has to offer. There’s a new life out there for you, and it’s better than any life you could ever have imagined. I want you to have that new life.”

  “Okay,” I would tell her, and she’d tell me to keep doing the next right thing, and the next right thing, and the next right thing after that, and that “God” stood for Good Orderly Direction and “Fear” stood for Face Everything and Recover. All those silly sayings, those stupid platitudes, the ones I’d scoffed and rolled my eyes at. Now I wrote them down, I memorized them, I printed them out in pretty fonts and stuck them on my computer monitor, on my bathroom mirror, on my refrigerator door, and recited them to myself while I waited in supermarket lines.

  In the mornings, before I put on my exercise clothes, I rolled out of bed, onto my knees, and prayed, even though I felt stupid, like an imposter, like someone acting out the idea of prayer instead of actually doing it. Dear God, I would think. After months and months of hearing the phrase “God of our understanding,” of listening to people refer to “my Higher Power, whom I choose to call Goddess,” or “Nature,” I still couldn’t come up with any image of God except the old tried-and-true: an ancient dude with a long white beard and a stern look on his face. Thank you for helping me stay sober another day. Thank you for not letting me hurt Ellie, or myself, or anyone else, while I was using. I’d run down my list, thanking God for central air-conditioning when it was hot out and my space heater when it was cold, for a favorite sweater, a comfortable pair of boots, a peaceful few minutes with my daughter.

  I thanked God for my mother, who’d moved into a posh fifty-five-and-over community near Eastwood, near my dad. She’d taken up bridge, and found new friends for golf and tennis, and she came into the city two, sometimes three days a week, to spend afternoons with Ellie and give me time to go
to my appointments and my meetings. I thanked God for my dad, who still, sometimes, knew who I was when I brought Ellie to visit him every other week. “Proud of you,” he would tell me, and I wasn’t sure what he thought he was proud of me for. Did he know I’d been in rehab, or why? Did he remember anything about how I’d become an accidental writer? Did he know that I was married and a mom? Or, in his head, was I still eighteen, with my acceptance letter from Franklin & Marshall in my hand, telling him about my big plans for my future?

  I thanked God for Janet, who drove to Center City once a week to have lunch with me. I’d regale her with funny stories from my AA and NA meetings. Janet especially liked to hear about Leonard, who’d begin his recitations by thanking God “for keeping me out of the titty bars for another day.” “What happens if he goes back?” she’d asked, and I’d told her how shamefaced Leonard looked when he’d stood up and said, “Well, they got me again!” We’d split a dessert and talk about our kids, our parents, and whether sex addiction was really a thing. “I love you,” she would say, her face solemn, and she’d hug me at the end of every visit. Once, she’d cried, telling me that she thought she should have noticed, should have seen that I was in trouble, should have done something. I told her it was my problem and my job to solve it. “Just be my friend,” I said. “That’s what I need most.” I thanked God that L. McIntyre was, like Dave had insisted, just a friend. “Maybe it could have been something more,” he’d told me over dinner after my third week home. “But what kind of jerk cheats on his wife while she’s in rehab?”

  Thank God for Dave, I thought . . . and, last, I would thank God for what was, blasphemous as it sounded, the best development of my new, sober life, a small black-and-white dog named Bingo.

  We’d gotten her in September, my first month back from rehab. Ellie and I had driven from Philadelphia down to Baltimore through a gorgeous fall afternoon, the sky a brilliant blue, smelling of leaves and wood smoke and, faintly, of the coming cold. Our first stop had been Target, where we’d bought everything we would need—a leash and harness made of pink nylon, a compromise between the faux-leather and rhinestone rig Ellie had fallen in love with and the plain red I preferred. We had plastic food and water dishes, a carrying crate, a ten-pound sack of dog food, a fluffy round brown-and-pink polka-dotted dog bed, a chewy toy, a squeaky toy, and the Cesar Millan video that Janet, who’d adopted three different rescue dogs, had recommended.

  “Can the puppy sleep in my room?” asked Ellie.

  “Fine with me,” I said. Ellie had been asking for a dog ever since she’d read Fancy Nancy and the Posh Puppy. Of course, she’d lobbied for a teacup poodle, but had been surprisingly amenable when I’d explained that there were many dogs who needed homes, and it would be better to adopt one of them. Together, we’d spent a half hour each night online, reading about breeds, watching videos of pups, getting a season pass on TiVo for Too Cute. Ellie had been keeping the tantrums to a minimum, and doing her chores—making her bed and clearing her dishes and helping me make her lunches and load the dishwasher—without complaint.

  “One eleven, one thirteen . . . here we go!” The house was a yellow cape, with a front yard dotted with little piles of dog poop. As we pulled into the driveway, the front door opened, and a teenage girl came out with a small white dog with black spots on a leash. The dog had a finely molded face, a whiskered snout, and a long tail that curled at its tip. One of her ears stood up straight; the other one flopped like a book page you’d turned down to mark your place.

  “BINGO!” yelled Ellie, and she was out of the car almost before it had stopped rolling. She raced across the lawn, fell to her knees a few feet away from the dog, then, as instructed, held out her hand for it to sniff. The dog, who’d seemed alarmed by Ellie’s charge, sniffed her hand, then wagged its tail, sat calmly, and allowed Ellie to pet it.

  “She is so CUTE!” Ellie said to the girl, who looked amused at Ellie’s antics. I walked over, shook her hand, and signed the papers while Ellie crooned at the puppy. She was a young adult dog, her Internet profile had said, somewhere between three and five years old. She had shown up pregnant at a shelter. They’d found her a foster family, where she’d given birth, and all five of the puppies were quickly adopted. “Now we just need to find a place for Mom,” said the website, and that, of course, had made me want to drive straight to Baltimore and bring the sad-eyed little dog home. She was, according to the website, some kind of terrier mix, a solid fifteen pounds, spayed, friendly, good with kids, and with all of her shots.

  “I wish we could tell you more about her,” said the teenager, who had a brown ponytail and a metallic smile. “She was a good mom when the pups were here.”

  “I’m sure we’ll figure it out,” I’d said. On the application, which had struck me as astonishingly detailed, there’d been a question about whether I had ever been arrested or in jail. Nothing about rehab or addiction, but still, I wondered if I would have answered those questions honestly . . . and, if I had, whether they would have turned me down. It was crazy: Who needed a pet more than a sick person trying to get better? Who would take better care of a dog than someone trying to demonstrate to the world that she was, indeed, worthy of its trust again?

  Ellie and I walked Bingo around the block, Bingo trotting briskly, Ellie clutching the leash with two hands. “Say goodbye,” Ellie instructed the dog. Bingo was docile as I scooped her up and placed her in her crate, even as Ellie begged me to let the dog ride in her lap. She didn’t make a sound the entire ride home. Once we were back in Philadelphia, we walked her around the neighborhood, letting her sniff the trees and hydrants. She ignored other dogs, hiding, trembling, behind my legs when they got close enough to try to sniff her. “She is SHY,” said Ellie, who didn’t seem to mind, as long as Bingo let her put the little tinsel collar she’d crafted around her neck, and hold the leash while they walked.

  “Do you think we should try to find a better name for her?” I asked.

  Ellie considered as we approached our front door. Finally, she shook her head. “I think she is a Bingo,” she decided, and I told Ellie that I thought she was right.

  At home, Bingo sniffed her dish full of kibble, had a few laps of water, then wormed underneath my bed, in spite of Ellie’s importuning and threats to drag her out into the open. “Let’s just leave her be.” Ellie had gotten into her pajamas, and we read Squids Will Be Squids and A Big Guy Took My Ball before I kissed her good night and tucked her into her bed. As tempting as it was to let Ellie sleep with me every night, I’d heard enough lectures about boundaries to know that I needed to put them in place (plus, she hadn’t had an accident in months, but I didn’t want to take chances with my new mattress). She was my daughter, not my friend, or my comfort, or my confidante . . . and so, as much as I would have liked the feeling of another warm body in my bed, or the sweet smile she wore when she woke up (in the handful of seconds before remembering that the world and most of the people in it displeased her), I made sure she at least began each night in her own room.

  So it was just me in the bedroom when Bingo inched her way out from underneath the bed and peered up at me. Her tail drooped. Her expression seemed despondent. I wondered if she missed her pups, or if she even remembered she’d had them—I knew so little about dogs!

  “What is it?” I asked, putting down A Woman’s Guide to the Twelve Steps.

  Silence.

  “Do you want to go out?” I guessed.

  Nothing. I took her downstairs, clipped her to her leash, walked her down the steps, and stood at the edge of the sidewalk while she did her business. Upstairs, instead of going back underneath the bed, she stood at the edge and looked at me.

  “Oh, okay,” I said, and patted the mattress. Before the second word was out of my mouth, Bingo had hopped nimbly onto the bed and was settling down against me, folding herself into the space behind my bent knees as I lay curled up on my side.

  “You’re going to sleep there?” No answer. I pulled the comforte
r up over both of us and closed my eyes. Thank you, God, for Bingo. Thank you for Ellie. Thank you for such beautiful weather. Thank you for helping me not take pills today. It wasn’t much of a prayer, but it was the best I could do.

  • • •

  Each year since we’d moved to Haverford, I’d hosted a Chanukah Happening (on the invitations, I’d spell it Chappening). Dozens of kids, parents, colleagues, and relatives and friends would fill our house, some bearing gifts for Ellie, or boxes of chocolates, or, more likely, bottles of wine. I would serve roast chickens, a giant green salad, and a table full of desserts the guests had brought. In the living room, kids would spin dreidels, and guests would be participating in the latke cook-off in the kitchen. We’d have straight potato pancakes, sweet-potato latkes, latkes with zucchini and shreds of carrots, latkes made with flour or potato starch or, once, tapioca. Barry would contribute sufganiyot, the sweet filled doughnuts that were also traditional Chanukah fare, and, for weeks, the kitchen would smell like a deep fryer and my hair and skin would feel lightly coated with grease.

  There would be beer and wine at those parties . . . and, as the crowd got bigger and the preparations more elaborate, I’d taken more and more pills to get myself through it, to deal with the tension of whether Dave was helping me or even talking to me, pills to cope with my mom, who would show up with an eight-pound brisket and demand the use of an oven.

  This year, my Chanukah Happening was limited to four people: me and Ellie, Dave and my mom. And Bingo, of course, who sat on the floor, eyes bright, tail wagging, watching the proceedings avidly, hoping that someone would drop something. Dave, I noticed, would discreetly slip her scraps, which meant that Bingo followed him around like a balloon that had been tethered to his ankle.