Jennifer Weiner - All Fall Down: A Novel

“Allison W.,” he said. His voice was so kind.

I sat in front of his desk and bent my head. Then I said the words I’d already said, in Group and Share and the AA meetings, where I’d sat off to the side and scribbled lyrics in my notebook. “I think I’m really in trouble,” I whispered. “I think I’m an addict. I need help.”

“Okay,” he said. His hand on my shoulder was gentle. “The good news is, you’ve come to the right place.”

“How about these clementines?” The clerk at the Whole Foods on South Street—a white guy of maybe twenty with mild blue eyes, a wide, untroubled brow, and dreadlocks down to his waist—gave me a gentle, Namaste kind of smile. He spoke softly and slowly, with great deliberation. It was maddening. This guy wouldn’t have lasted a day in the suburbs, but in Center City, where the Whole Foods was next to a yoga studio, infuriating slowness was the rule. “Should we leave them in the box? Or take them out of the box and put the fruit in a bag?”

“Fruit in a bag, please.” I was only buying a dozen things—a turkey breast to grill for dinner, the miniature oranges that Ellie loved in her school lunches, a twenty-dollar maple-scented candle that was way too expensive but that I’d found impossible to resist—but I could already tell that I was going to be checking out for a while. Use it as a chance to practice patience, Bernice’s voice said in my head. When I’d left Meadowcrest, I’d joined Bernice’s outpatient group, and her voice had taken up residence in my brain. I tried not to sigh, and actually managed a smile as the clerk first rummaged in his drawer, then patted down his pockets, and finally called over a manager, who called over a second manager, who located a pair of scissors to snip through the netting.

“Oh, dear. It looks like a few of these are moldy,” said the clerk as the miniature oranges tumbled from their wooden crate into a plastic bag.

“Mommy, I do not want MOLDY CLEMENTINES,” Ellie announced.

“Do you want to get another box?” the clerk asked. Behind me, the woman with the Phil&Teds stroller and the black woolen peacoat gave a small but audible groan. Send her peace. That wasn’t Bernice; that was the voice of my new yoga instructor, Loyal. Peace, I thought. Old Allison would have scoffed at the dopey sayings, at the idea that the checkout line at the supermarket offered a chance to practice anything at all (not to mention at the notion of someone named Loyal). New Allison took advice wherever she could get it—at meetings, from magazines, from Oprah’s Super Soul Sundays, and from Celestial Seasonings tea bags.

“That’s okay,” I told the clerk. “How about just separate out the moldy ones? You can toss those, and we’ll take the good ones home.”

He looked at me, concern furrowing his brow. “Are you sure? You can just go get another box. It’s no trouble at all.”

“It’s fine.”

“Ooookay.” Clearly, it might have been fine for me, but it was deeply troubling for him. “Now, how about the turkey? Would you like that in a separate bag?”

“Please.” I held up the shopping bags I’d brought. The clerk blinked, like he’d never seen or imagined such a thing.

“So . . . use that one?”

“Oh my God,” murmured the woman in the peacoat. Ellie, meanwhile, had crouched down, the better to inspect the beeswax lip balms.

“Mommy, is this MAKEUP?”

“Kind of. Not exactly.”

“Well, can I HAVE it?”

“No, honey, we have stuff like that at home. You can use what we’ve got. We’ll shop the closet!”

“But that will have your SPITTY STUFF ALL OVER IT!”

I squatted down, feeling my body protest. My hips creaked; my back twinged. I’d done an hour of hot yoga that morning and had a run planned for tomorrow. How’d you do it? they asked in AA and NA meetings, when you went up front to collect your chip—for your first twenty-four hours of sobriety, then for thirty days, sixty days, ninety days, six months, nine months, a year, and on from there. One day at a time was the rote answer, the line you had to say, but each time I’d collected a chip I’d made sure to say that exercise was part of my recovery. It was a chance to get completely out of my head, forty minutes when all I could do was take the next step, find the next pose, manage the next inhalation. No matter how crappy or sad I felt, how locked in my own head, in my own unhappy run of thoughts, I would force myself up and out of bed, into the clothes I’d laid out the night before, and I would make myself go through my paces like I was swallowing a dose of some noxious medicine that I knew it was critical to get down.

Some mornings Ellie would join me for a walk down Pine Street, all the way to the Delaware River, or we’d do workout routines in the basement of the row house where I’d rented an apartment back in Philadelphia. Dave had found his own place, just a few blocks away. He’d kept the fancy treadmill; I’d found one on Craigslist, along with hand weights and a step bench. Together, Ellie and I had downloaded free fitness videos, and gotten various ten-, fifteen-, and twenty-minute workouts from magazines. We would do jump squats and mountain climbers. We’d lunge our way back and forth across the basement, and do planks and push-ups, V-sits and donkey kicks, all while playing word games. I’d start with a letter of the alphabet; Ellie would give me a classmate at her new public school whose name began with that letter . . . and then, typically, a rundown as to why she didn’t like that particular kid. (“D is for Dylan, who is nice sometimes but would not let me have the window seat on the bus when we went to the art museum.”)

In the grocery store, I looked Ellie in the eye. “Ellie. Remember how we talked about using a respectful inside voice?”

She pursed her lips. “Yes, except I wanted a COOKIE and you said NO COOKIE.”

“I said no cookie until after dinner.”

“And now I want lipstick and you are saying NO and ALL YOU EVER SAY IS NO.”

“Oh, honey.” I held my arms open. After a minute, Ellie let me hug her. “I know things feel hard sometimes. But there’s good stuff, too.”

“Ma’am?”

I straightened up. The clerk was holding my maple candle and the jug of on-sale moisturizer I’d selected. “Do you want your non-food items in a separate bag?”

“Sure,” I said, and gave him a smile.

“You,” said the peacoat woman, “are a saint.”

I smiled at her. “Believe me, I’m not.” She was maybe five years younger than I was, her hair bundled in a careless ponytail at the nape of her neck, a diamond sparkling on her left hand. I wondered, as I always did when I met strangers these days, whether she was one of them or one of us; one of the earthlings, who could take or leave a glass of wine, or a joint, or a Vicodin or an Oxy; or one of the Martians, for whom, as the Basic Text said, one was too many and a thousand was never enough. You never can tell, Bernice said, and, from the people in my group, I knew it was true—pass any one of them on the street, and you’d have no idea that they were drunks and druggies. Well, maybe you’d guess about Brian, who had the word THUG tattooed on the fingers of his right hand, and life on the fingers of his left. But you’d never guess about Jeannie, a lawyer, who came to meetings in smart suits and leather boots, and who’d lost her license after blacking out and plowing her car into a statue of George Washington on New Year’s Day. Gregory looked like your run-of-the-mill fabulous gay guy, in his gorgeous made-to-measure shirts and hand-sewn shoes. Maybe you’d think that he liked to party on weekends, but you’d never imagine that he’d done three years in prison for drug trafficking. I wondered how I looked—to the clerk, now ringing up my yogurt in slow motion, to the young mother behind me, pushing her stroller back and forth in angry little jerks. Probably no different from the rest of the earthlings, with my hair in a bun, in my workout pants and zippered black sweatshirt. I still wore my wedding ring, and Dave still wore his. We’d never discussed it, which meant I didn’t know whether I was wearing the platinum band out of hope or nostalgia or just so creepy guys in the dairy aisle wouldn’t ask me for help in picking out heavy cream.

“Ma’am?” After what felt like another five minutes’ worth of wrangling—debit or credit? Cash back? Tens or twenties?—I gave Ellie the little bag with the candle and the moisturizer and slung the bigger one over my shoulder, along with my purse, and the two of us walked onto South Street. I’d drop her off with Dave, then go to the five-thirty meeting of what had become my home group, the AA meeting I attended every week. He’d grill the turkey, I’d make rice and asparagus to go with it when I got back, and the three of us would share dinner together before Ellie and I went home.

No big changes for the first year was what they told us at Meadowcrest, but Dave and I had had to downsize, moving to modest apartments in the city and putting the big house on the market, especially after it became clear that my job, at least for the first little while, would be staying sober, with blogging a very distant second. I had struggled with it mightily, complaining to Bernice that there was no box on the tax return that read “not taking pills.”

“I hate that this is what I do,” I told her and the other seven members of my outpatient group, the one I attended four mornings a week, two hours at a time. I was desperate for my world to return to the way it had been before I’d gone to rehab, before I’d started with the pills. “I want my life back. Does anyone else get that?” Fabulous Gregory had nodded. Brian had grunted. Jeannie had shrugged and said that her pre-sobriety life hadn’t been all that great.

“Tell us what you mean,” Bernice prompted.

“I mean,” I said, “I wake up. I take Ellie to school. I get some exercise. I come here for two hours. I go to AA meetings for another hour or two, and I don’t take pills, and I don’t take pills, and I don’t take pills.” I raised my hands, empty palms held open to the ceiling. “And that’s it. God, can you imagine if I had a college reunion coming up? ‘What are you up to these days, Allison?’ ‘Well, I don’t take pills.’ ‘And . . . that’s it?’ ‘Yeah, it’s pretty much a full-time gig.’ ”

“Why you so worried ’bout what other people gonna think?” Bernice could switch in and out of ghetto vernacular—or what she referred to as “the colorful patois of my youth”—with ease. When she was talking to me, she’d alternate between her brassiest round-the-way tones and her most overeducated and multisyllabic. “You really worried about what the tax man’s gonna think? Or some made-up person at some college reunion you don’t even have coming up?”

“I don’t know,” I muttered. “I just feel useless.”

“Useless,” said Bernice, “is better than using. And if you use . . .”

“You die,” the group chanted. I hung my head. I still wasn’t entirely convinced this was true, but I’d heard it enough, and seen enough evidence, to at least be open to the possibility. There would be no one more pill or just one drink for me. That way lay madness . . . or jails, institutions, and death, as the Basic Text liked to say.

The night of Ellie’s birthday party, when I’d gone back to Meadowcrest, I was humbled. More than that, I was scared. In that moment, in the bathroom, I’d seen a version of my life unfolding, a path where I faked and glad-handed my way through the rest of the twenty-eight days, and then went home and picked up my addiction right where I’d put it down. Soon, of course, the pills would get too expensive, and, probably, I’d be making less money, assuming I’d be able to work at all. Maybe it would take years, maybe just months, but, eventually, I would do what all the women I’d met had done, and trade the pricy Vicodin and Percocet and Oxy for heroin, which gave you twice the high at a quarter of the cost. I pictured myself dropping Ellie off at Stonefield in the morning, then driving my Prius to the Badlands, where even a straight white lady like me could buy whatever she wanted. Philadelphia Magazine had done a special report on the city’s ten worst drug corners and, of course, I had firsthand recommendations from the various Ashleys and Brittanys. And maybe I’d get away with it, for a little while. Or maybe I’d get into a car accident with a thousand dollars’ worth of H stuffed in my bra, like one of the Meadowcrest girls. Or I’d get arrested, dragged off to jail, and left to kick on a concrete floor with nothing but Tylenol 3, like an Amber had told us all about.