“Good girl,” he’d say, sneaking Bingo a bit of chicken skin, then tipping his chair back and sighing. I had radically reduced the guest list, but I’d kept the menu the same: roast chicken stuffed with herbs and lemon and garlic, a salad dressed with pomegranate-seed vinaigrette, potato latkes, and a store-bought dessert—cream puffs from Whole Foods and chocolate sauce that Ellie and I had made together.
“She has a JAUNTY WALK,” said Ellie, imitating Bingo’s brisk stride down the street. “And at night she sleeps CURLED IN A CRULLER in Mommy’s bed.”
“I bet Mom likes that,” he said. His eyes didn’t meet mine. I would like you better, I thought at him.
“Hey, El, let’s show Daddy how we clear the table.”
“Daddy knows that I can do that.” She pouted, but she got up and carefully, using two hands, carried every plate and platter from the table to the sink.
We played Sorry! after dinner—oh, irony! I tried to breathe through my discomfort, the restlessness, tried to sit with my feelings, like Bernice advised, and ignore the questions running laps in my brain. Will he stay? Or at least come and kiss me? Does he love me a little? Is there anything left at all?
Dave stayed as I coaxed Ellie into, then out of, her tub, combing and braiding her hair, getting her into her pajamas and reading her This Is Not My Hat. After I closed her bedroom door, Bingo bounded down the hallway to assume her position, curled on top of my pillow. Her tail thumped against the comforter as she watched us with her bright brown eyes.
“B-I-N-G-O,” Dave sang. We were in the narrow hallway, practically touching. “You seem well.” He reached out, took a strand of my hair between his fingers, and tucked it, tenderly, behind my ear. Then his body was right up against mine, his chest warm and firm, shoulders solid in my hands. “I know they said no changes for the first year, but we’ve both done this a bunch of times already . . .”
I laughed, walking backward, as he maneuvered me onto the bed . . . and, later, I cried when, with my head on his chest and our bare legs entwined, he got choked up as he said, “Allison, there was never anybody else. It was always only you.”
“I promise . . .” I started to say. I wanted to promise him that I’d never hurt him again, never go off the rails, never give him cause to worry again . . . but those were promises I couldn’t make. One minute, one hour, one day at a time. “I never stopped loving you,” I said . . . and that was the absolute truth.
We didn’t move back in together. Part of me wanted it desperately, and part of me worried that we were disrupting Ellie’s stable environment—some mornings Dave was in bed with me, some mornings he was at his own place, and some nights Ellie stayed there with him—but she seemed to be thriving, to be growing out of the awful yelling and stubbornness.
As for Dave and me, I often thought that we were, as coaches and sportswriters liked to say, in a rebuilding year. Not married, exactly, but not un-married. It was almost as though we were courting each other again, slowly revealing ourselves to each other. My mom or our sitter, Katrina, would come for the night, and we’d go to a concert, or out to dinner, or we’d take Bingo to the dog park where, on warm spring nights, they showed old movies, projecting the picture against a bedsheet strung between two pine trees.
“Ellie’s getting big,” Dave said on one of those nights. I’d been looking at the picnics other people had packed: fried chicken and biscuits and canned peaches; egg-salad sandwiches on thick-sliced whole-wheat bread; chunks of pineapple and strawberries in a fruit salad . . . and wine. Beer. Sweating thermoses of cocktails, lemon drops and Pimm’s cups.
“She is,” I had agreed. Every day she looked a little taller, her hair longer, or she’d bust out some new bit of vocabulary or surprisingly apt observation about the world. Sometimes at night she’d cry that her legs hurt. Growing pains, Dr. McCarthy had told us.
Sometimes I felt like I was having them, too. It made me think of something else I’d heard in a meeting, about how Alcoholics Anonymous can help people with their feelings. “And it’s true,” the speaker had said. He had a jovial grin underneath his walrus mustache. “I feel anger better, I feel sadness better, I feel disappointment better . . .”
Life on life’s terms. It was an absolute bitch. There was no more tuning out or glossing over, no more using opiates as spackle to fill in the cracks and broken bits. It was all there, raw and unlovely: the little sighs and groans Dave made, seemingly without hearing them, when he ate his cereal or made the bed; the way Ellie had to be reminded, sometimes more than twice, to flush the toilet after she used it; the glistening ovals of mucus that lined the city sidewalk. Some nights, I missed my father and regretted my mother’s half-assed, mostly absent-minded parenting, and there was no pill to help with it. Some nights I couldn’t sleep . . . so I would lie in my bed, alone or with Dave, and stare up into the darkness and try not to beat myself up. We will not regret the past, nor wish to shut the door on it, The Big Book said . . . so I would try to be grateful that I’d stopped when I had instead of berating myself for letting things get as bad as they’d gotten. I had learned what I’d needed to learn, and I knew now that I was, however flawed and imperfect, however broken, undeniably a grown-up.
• • •
Then, one day, my cell phone rang, and I heard a familiar voice on the other end.
“It’s a blast from your past!” said the voice, before dissolving into sniffles.
“Aubrey!” I hadn’t heard from her since she’d left Meadowcrest. Mary and I e-mailed, and Shannon and I met for coffee once a month. Lena and Marissa had both disappeared, whether back into addiction or into new lives in recovery, I couldn’t guess. I worried about them sometimes, but Aubrey was the one I worried about most. I’d text or call her every so often, but I had never heard back. A dozen times I’d started to type her name into Google, and a dozen times I’d made myself stop. If she wants me to know how she’s doing, she’ll get in touch. Otherwise it’s snooping, I decided. Now, here she was, her voice quivering, and me clutching the phone, realizing only in that moment that I’d half believed she was dead.
“How are you?”
“I’m . . .” She gave her familiar little laugh. “I’m not so good, actually.”
By now, I knew what questions to ask. Better still, I knew how to just be quiet and listen. “What’s going on?”
“I’ve been using for . . . oh, God, months now. I was doing good at first. Then Justin started coming around his mom’s house, where I was staying with Cody . . .”
I turned away so that Ellie, engrossed in an episode of Sam & Cat, wouldn’t see my face. Justin. The fucking no-good boyfriend.
“And, you know, he made it sound like it was going to be all different this time. Like we’d keep it under control. And I thought I could, you know, because I’d been clean for a while.” She started to cry. I got the rest of the story in disjointed bursts—she’d gotten kicked out of her boyfriend’s parents’ house, then her mother had taken Cody and refused to let Aubrey see him until she got clean. She described couch-surfing, spending two weeks in a shelter, and then, finally, asked the question I knew was coming: “Can I crash with you for a little while?” Her voice was tiny, barely a whisper. “I could help out . . . babysit . . . I’m good with kids . . . I wouldn’t ask, except I don’t have anywhere else to go.”
Oh, Aubrey, I thought. Aubrey, who was still more or less a kid herself. Boundaries, I told myself, even though I wanted nothing more than to tell her to come, to tell her that the trundle bed had fresh sheets, that Ellie would be delighted to meet her, that I would help her get well. Except I couldn’t. I knew my own limits, knew how close I was to my own relapse. “I can’t do that,” I said. “But I can take you to a meeting. I can hook you up with Bernice. I can help you find a place to stay.”
“You sound good,” she said. Was she high? I couldn’t tell. “I’m glad. I knew you’d do good when you got out of there.”
“Aubrey, listen to me. There’s a five-thirty meeting
today at Fourth and Pine. That’s my home group. They’re really nice. They’d love to meet you. You come there, and I will meet you, and I’m going to call Bernice, and we’ll find you a place.”
“Ooo-kay.” Definitely slurry.
“Five-thirty. Fourth and Pine.” I made her say it back to me twice. Then I hung up the phone, and texted her the address, just to be sure, and started pacing, watching the door, waiting for my mother to show up for her regular Tuesday visit. Normally she was there at five at the latest, and I’d have time to grab a coffee if I wanted one before the meeting began, but that night, of course, she was running late.
“Mommy, stop WALKING,” said Ellie . . . and then, in an unprecedented move, she actually turned the TV off without being asked or prompted, and looked at me. “What are you so WORRYING about?”
“I’m not worrying,” I said automatically.
“Then why are you WALKING and WALKING?” She looked at me carefully, eyes narrowed, hair gathered in a ponytail that hung halfway down her back, pants displaying a good inch of her ankles. I’d need to go shopping again.
“I guess maybe I am a little worried.” I sat down by the window, and Bingo sprang into my lap, wriggling around until her belly was exposed for a scratch. When Ronnie finally strolled into view I grabbed my bag and half trotted past Ellie.
“There’s someone—a girl I knew from rehab . . .” I looked at the clock on the cable box. “I’ll explain when I’m back, but I’ve got to go . . .”
I hurried around the corner, my keys in my hand, my purse over my shoulder, a dollar in my pocket for when they passed the basket around, my phone tucked into my bra, set on vibrate, so I’d feel it if Aubrey texted back. It was a gorgeous late afternoon, the clear, sunny sky and brilliant leaves all promising new beginnings, fresh starts. A young woman carrying a paper parasol walked with her Boston terrier on a red leash. An older couple on bicycles passed me. I watched them riding away and thought about all the normal people in the world, just going around, doing their business, living their lives, buying food and cooking meals, watching TV shows and movies, fighting and falling in love, without even the thought of a drink or a drug to make the good times even better and the bad times less awful.
Don’t be like me, my mother had told me, when I’d gotten out. Don’t waste your life hiding. But still, even with so many of the rewards of sobriety making themselves known, it was hard not to crave oblivion and numbness, a pill that could keep my feelings safely at bay. Sometimes, I wondered how I’d gotten started with the drugs . . . and sometimes I wondered why everyone in the world wasn’t taking them, and how I’d found the strength, somehow, to resist, even just for that day.
There was a coffee shop around the corner from where the AA meetings were held. I stuck my head in, looking for Aubrey, recognizing people at a few of the tables: the fiftyish man in a plaid shirt and glasses who’d talked about dealing with both addiction and mental illness; the woman with a buzz cut and black army boots who’d described passing out in the SEPTA station and lying on the concrete, watching rats running up and down the tracks until the cops bundled her into a cruiser; the man who dressed like a cowboy and kept his long gray hair in a ponytail tied with a rawhide loop and talked endlessly about his girlfriend who’d redecorated while he’d been in rehab, and the contractor who had unscrewed the chandelier from his dining room and stolen it, and how he was going to get that chandelier back. Sometimes I went to meetings willingly, knowing that they helped, and some nights the only thing keeping me from staying home on the couch was the promise of a chandelier update or the latest installment in the long-running saga of Leonard vs. the Titty Bars.
“What can I get for you?” asked the barista, a man who couldn’t have been older than twenty-five, with thick black eyebrows and an easy smile.
I ordered an iced mocha and checked my phone again. When they called my name, I wrapped a brown paper napkin around the plastic cup. It was five-twenty. I walked around the corner to the church. In the basement with scuffed white walls and hardwood floors, fifty chairs were set up, with a group of people settling into the front rows. Once, early on, I’d made the mistake of trying to sit in the back, and the others from Bernice’s group had almost collapsed laughing. Denial Aisle! Relapse Row! they’d shouted, as Sheila had ushered me front and center.
No Aubrey yet, but I could see Johnette and Martin, and both Brians from my group. Gregory was there, fussing with the crease of his jeans, and Alice sat next to him, with a tote bag full of knitting in her lap. “We saved you a seat,” said Sheila, and tapped the empty metal chair that stood in the center of the front row. I held my cup, feeling the cool of it against my palm, and I took my place among them.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful to have the support of the hands-down absolute best agent and editor in the business. Joanna Pulcini and Greer Hendricks have held my hand, helped me up, offered praise and constructive criticism, and have always been willing to listen and to read yet another draft. I’m the luckiest writer in the world to have these two women as colleagues and friends.
Judith Curr, publisher of Atria Books, and Carolyn Reidy, CEO and president of Simon & Schuster, are powerhouses and role models, and I’m lucky to work with them, as well as the team at Atria: Lisa Sciambra, Ben Lee, Lisa Keim, Hillary Tisman, Elisa Shokoff, LeeAnna Woodcock, and Kitt Reckord.
Anna Dorfman and Jeanne Lee keep my books looking good. Copyeditor extraordinaire Nancy Inglis saves me from myself at least once per page and forgives me all my sins, which include regularly confusing “like” and “as” and still not knowing when you spell out numbers versus when you just type the digits.
At Simon & Schuster UK, I’m grateful for the support of Suzanne Baboneau, Ian Chapman, and Jo Dickinson.
Nobody in the PR world does it better than Marcy Engelman, and I am so glad to have her in my corner, along with Emily Gambir and Bernice Marzan. Jessica Bartolo and her team at Greater Talent Network make my speaking engagements delightful.
Special thanks to Greer’s assistant, Sarah Cantin, and Joanna’s assistant Josephine Hill for their patience, enthusiasm, and attention to detail.
Thanks and love to the home team—my fantastic assistant Meghan Burnett, whose unflappable calm and unfailing good humor make my work life a joy. Terri Gottlieb cares for my girls, runs the kitchen, tends to the garden, and lets me head off to work with confidence that my daughters will be happy and my house will be standing when I return. Adam Bonin’s love and support goes above and beyond—he is a wonderful father and a great friend. Susan Abrams is the best BFF anyone could ever hope for. Lucy and Phoebe—you are my heart’s delight, and every day I am proud to be your mother.
Bill—you are my happy ending.
Finally, to everyone who visits my Facebook page, comes to one of my readings, indulges my tweets about The Bachelor, and waits patiently for my next book, my deepest thanks. None of this would be possible without you.
ALL FALL DOWN
JENNIFER WEINER
Reading Group Guide
To her family, friends, and colleagues, Allison Weiss leads a charmed life: she lives in a McMansion in a posh suburb of Philadelphia with her handsome husband, Dave, and adorable daughter, Ellie, and she has a fabulous job writing for the popular website Ladiesroom.com. But just as Allison’s blogging gig turns into a full-fledged career complete with TV appearances and newspaper attention, Dave’s high-profile book deal falls through and he becomes increasingly distant. Ellie begins acting out and Allison finds herself devoting all her spare time to her father, who has early-stage Alzheimer’s, and her seemingly helpless mother. To take the edge off, Allison reaches for the Altoids tin in her purse, which is filled with painkillers prescribed for a back injury, and convinces herself that her pill-popping habit isn’t any different than a glass of wine before bed.
Soon Allison is taking dozens of pills a day, hopping from doctor to doctor to obtain prescriptions for ailments both real and imaginary
. Her addiction intensifies when she learns how to anonymously order Oxycontin online; she spends thousands of dollars on pills, all the while hiding her drug use from everyone and putting those she loves in dangerous situations. When Dave discovers Allison’s addiction, she decides to play by the rules and go to rehab so she can come home to rejoin her family. But even after the pills are out of her system, Allison faces challenges and unexpected obstacles that force to her wonder if life will ever be the same again.
Written with Jennifer Weiner’s signature blend of humor and insight, All Fall Down tells with heart and compassion the story of one woman’s harrowing journey through addiction and back again.
Topics and Questions for Discussion
1. Why does Allison initially turn to painkillers as a way to solve her problems, or at least to make her feel better for a few hours? How do her answers to the magazine quiz she takes at Ellie’s doctor’s office make her feel, and how does she justify taking a pill in the car just moments after she completes the quiz? How would Allison’s story have been different if she had sought help immediately after taking the quiz?
2. From her work and her marriage to her role as primary caretaker for her daughter and parents, how do the pressures on Allison contribute to her addiction? Do you think that the pressures that Allison faces justify her addiction, or does she use the challenges in her life as an excuse to take more pills? How are the pressures facing Allison unique to her role as a mother and a wife, and what is the author saying about the pressures on women in society in general?
3. After Dave’s book deal falls through and Allison’s blogging becomes their primary source of income, how does their relationship change? Why do you think the author chose to have Allison write for a website specifically geared toward women and women’s issues?
All Fall Down: A Novel Page 34