All Fall Down: A Novel (3 page)

It wasn’t as though I couldn’t sympathize. I’d worked at the
Examiner
myself, as a web designer, before Ellie was born. I believed in newspapers’ mission, the importance of their role as
a watchdog, holding the powerful accountable, comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. But it wasn’t my fault that newspapers in general and the
Examiner
in particular were failing. I hadn’t changed the world so that everything was available online immediately if not sooner, and not even our grandparents waited for the morning paper to tell them what was what. I hadn’t rearranged things so that “if it bleeds, it leads” had become almost quaint. These days, the
Examiner
’s home page featured photographs of the Hot Singles Mingle party that desperate editors had thrown, or of the Critical Mass Naked Nine, where participants had biked, nude, down ten miles of Broad Street (coverage of that event, with the pictures artfully blurred, had become the most-read story of the year, easily topping coverage both of the election and of the corrupt city councilman who’d been arrested for tax fraud after a six-hour standoff that ended after he’d climbed to the top of City Hall and threatened to jump unless he was provided with a plane, a million dollars in unmarked bills, and two dozen cannoli from Potito’s). “A ‘Like’ button is not the end of the world,” I’d said, after it became clear that a sexy shower was not in my future. Then I’d gone back to my iPad, and he’d gone back to watching the game . . . except when I looked up I found him scowling at me as if I’d just tossed my device at his head.

“What?” I asked, startled.

“Nothing,” he said. Then he jumped up from the sofa, rolled his shoulders, shook out his arms, and cracked a few knuckles, loudly, like he was getting ready to enter a boxing ring. “It’s nothing.”

I’d tried to talk to him about what was wrong, hoping he’d realize that, as the one who’d gotten us into this mess—or at least this big house, this big life, with the snooty private-school parents and the shocking property-tax bills—he had an obligation
to help figure out how we were going to make it work. Over breakfast the week after the “Like” button rant, while Ellie dawdled at the sink, washing and rewashing her hands until every trace of syrup was gone, I’d quietly suggested couples therapy, telling him that lots of my friends were going (lie, but I did know at least one couple who had gone), and adding that the combined stress of a new town, a sensitive child, and a wife who’d gone from working twenty hours a week to what was supposed to be forty but was closer to sixty would put any couple on edge. His lip had curled. “You think I’m crazy?”

“Of course you’re not crazy,” I’d whispered back. “But it’s been crazy for both of us, and I just think . . .”

He got up from the table and stood there for a moment in his blue nylon running shorts and a T-shirt from a 10K he’d completed last fall. Dave was tall, broad-shouldered, and slim-hipped, with thick black hair, deep-set brown eyes, and a receding hairline he disguised by wearing baseball caps whenever he could. When we’d first started dating we would walk holding hands, and I’d try to catch glimpses of the two of us reflected in windows or bus-shelter glass, knowing how good we looked together. Dave was quiet, brooding, with a kind of stillness that made me want nothing more than to hear him laugh, and a goofy sense of humor you’d never guess he had just by looking at him.
Still waters run deep,
I’d thought. Later, I learned that silence did not necessarily guarantee depth. If you interrupted my husband in the middle of one of his quiet times, asked him what he was thinking about, and got him to tell you, some of the time the answer would concern the latest scandal at City Hall, or his attempts to confirm rumors about a congressional aide who’d forged his boss’s signature. Other times, the answer would involve his ongoing attempt to rank his five favorite 76ers.

Still, there was no one I wanted to be with more than Dave.
He knew me better than anyone, knew what kind of movies I liked, my favorite dishes at my favorite restaurants, how my mood could instantly be improved by the presence of a Le Bus brownie or a rerun of
Face/Off
on cable. Dave would talk me into jogging, knowing how good I’d feel when I was done, or he’d take Ellie out for doughnuts on a Saturday morning, letting me sleep until ten after a late night working.

He could be considerate, loving, and sweet. The morning I suggested therapy, he was none of those things. He went stalking down to the basement without a word of farewell. A minute later, the treadmill whirred to life. Dave was training for his first marathon, a goal I’d encouraged before I realized that the long runs each weekend meant I wouldn’t see him for four or five hours at a time on a Saturday or Sunday, and would have the pleasure of Ellie all to myself. While the treadmill churned away in the basement, I got to my feet, sighing, as the weight of the day settled around my shoulders.

“Ellie,” I said. Ellie was still standing at the sink, dreamily rubbing liquid soap into her hands. “You need to clear your plate and your glass.”

“But they’re too HEAVY! And the plate is all STICKY! And maybe it will DROP!” she complained, still in her Ariel nightgown, dragging her bare feet along the terra-cotta tiled floor until finally I snapped, “Ellie, just give me the plate and stop making such a production!”

Inevitably, she’d started to cry, dashing upstairs to her room, leaving soapy handprints along the banister. I loaded the dishwasher, wiped down the counters, and swept the kitchen floor. I put the milk and juice and butter back in the fridge and the flour and sugar back in the pantry. Then, before I went to Ellie to apologize and tell her that we should both try to use our inside voices, I’d taken a pill, my second Vicodin since I’d gotten
up. The day had stretched endlessly before me—weepy daughter, angry husband, piles of laundry, messy bedroom, a blog post to write, and probably dozens of angry commenters lined up to tell me I was a no-talent hack and a fat, stupid whore.
I need this,
I thought, letting the bitterness dissolve on my tongue. It had been, I remembered, not even nine a.m.

Have you ever felt like you should cut down on your drinking or drug use?

Feeling suddenly queasy, I lifted my head and looked around the waiting room again to see if anyone had noticed that I was taking this quiz seriously. Did I think about cutting down? Sure. Sometimes. More and more often I had the nagging feeling that things were getting out of control. Then I’d think,
Oh, please.
I had prescriptions for everything I took (and if Doctor A didn’t know what Doctor B was giving me, well, that wasn’t necessarily a problem—if it was, pharmacies would be set up to flag it, right?). The pills helped me manage everything I needed to manage.

Have other people criticized your drinking or drug use, or been annoyed by it?

I checked “No,” fast and emphatically, trying not to think about how nobody criticized my use because nobody knew about it. Dave knew I had a prescription for Vicodin—he’d been there the night I’d come hobbling home from the gym—but he had no idea how many times I’d gotten that prescription refilled, telling my doctor that I was doing my physical-therapy-prescribed exercises religiously (I wasn’t), but that I still needed something for the pain. Dave didn’t know how easy it was, if you were a woman with health insurance and an education, a woman who spoke and dressed and presented herself a certain way. Good manners and good grammar, in addition to an MRI that showed bulging
discs or an x-ray with impacted molars, could get you pretty much anything you wanted. With refills. Pain was impossible to see, hard to quantify, and I knew the words to use, the gestures to make, how to sit and stand as if every breath was agony. It was my little secret, and I intended to keep it that way.

“Eloise Weiss?” I looked up. A nurse stood in the doorway with Ellie’s chart in his hands.

Startled, I half jumped to my feet, and felt my back give a warning twinge, as if to remind me how I’d gotten into this mess. I wanted a pill. I’d had only one, that morning, six hours ago, and I wanted something, a dam against the rising anxiety about whether my marriage was foundering and if I was a good parent and when I’d find the time to finish the blog post that was due at six o’clock. I wanted to feel good, centered and calm and happy, able to appreciate what I had—my sunny kitchen, with orchids blooming on the windowsill; Ellie’s bedroom, for which I’d finally found the perfect pink chandelier. I wanted to slip into my medicated bubble, where I was safe, where I was happy, where nothing could hurt me.
As soon as this is over,
I told myself, and imagined sitting behind the wheel once the doctor had let us go and swallowing a white oval-shaped pill while Ellie fussed with her seat belt. With that picture firmly in mind, I reached out my hand for my daughter.

“No shots,” she said, her lower lip already starting to tremble.

“I don’t think so.”

“No SHOTS! You SAID! You PROMISED!” Heads turned in judgment, mothers probably thinking,
Thank God mine’s not like that.
Ellie crossed her arms over her chest and stood there, forty-three pounds of fury in a flowered Hanna Andersson dress, matching socks and cardigan, and zip-up leopard-print high-top sneakers. Her fine brown hair hung in braided pigtails, tied with
purple elastic bands, and she had a stretchy flowered headband wrapped, hippie-style, around her forehead.

The nurse gave me a smile that was both sympathetic and weary, as I half walked, half dragged my daughter off to the scales and blood-pressure cuffs. Eloise whined and balked and winced as she was weighed and measured. The nurse took her blood pressure and temperature. Then the two of us were left to wait in an exam room. “Put this on,” the nurse said, handing Ellie a cotton gown. Ellie pinched the gown between two fingertips. “It will ITCH,” she said, and started to cry.

“Come on,” I said, taking the gown, with its rough texture and offending tags, in my hand. “I bet if you just get your dress off, you’ll be okay.”

Still sniffling, Ellie bent gracefully at the waist—she’d gotten her ease in the physical world from her father, who ran and ice-skated and, unlike me, did not inhabit a universe where the furniture seemed to reposition itself just so I could trip over or bang into it. I watched as she eased each zipper on her high-tops down, slid her foot out of her right shoe, pulled off her pink sock, and laid it carefully on top of the sneaker. Off came the left shoe. Off came the left sock. I sat down in the plastic chair as Ellie moved on to her cardigan. I had never mistreated her while under the influence. I’d never yelled (well, not scary-yelling), or been rough, or told her that she needed to put on her goddamn clothes this century, because we couldn’t be late for school again, because I couldn’t sit through another lecture about Your Responsibilities to Stonefield: A Learning Community (calling it just a “school,” I supposed, would have failed to justify its outrageous tuition). It was the opposite. The pills calmed me down. They gave me a sense of peace. When I swallowed them, I felt like I could accomplish anything, whether it was writing a
post about the rising costs of fertility treatments or getting my daughter to school on time.

“Mom-MEE.” I looked at Ellie. Glory be, she’d gotten all the way down to her Disney Princess underpants. I held open the gown. She made a face. “Just try it,” I said. Finally, with the hauteur of a high-fashion model being forced to don polyester, she slipped her arms through the sleeves and permitted me to knot the ties in the back while she pinched the fabric between her fingertips, holding it ostentatiously away from her body, making sure the tag wouldn’t touch her. She retrieved my iPad and cued up
Les Miz.
I went back to my quiz.
Have you ever used more than you could afford?
Hardly. My doctors would write me prescriptions. My copay was fifteen dollars a bottle. But it was true that the bottles were no longer lasting as long as they were supposed to, and I spent what was beginning to feel like a lot of time figuring out how many pills I had left and which doctor I hadn’t called in a while and whether the pharmacist was looking at me strangely because I was picking up Vicodin two or three times a week.

Have you ever planned not to use that day but done it anyway?

Yes. I had thought about stopping. I had tried, a few times, and managed, for a few days . . . but during the last few not-today days, it was as if my brain and body had disconnected at some critical juncture. I’d be standing in my closet, in my T-shirt or the workout clothes I’d put on in the hope that wearing them would make me more inclined to exercise, thinking
No,
while watching my body from the outside, watching my hands uncap the bottle, watching my fingers select a pill.

Have you ever not been able to stop when you planned to?

“Mommy?” Ellie sat on the examining table, legs crossed, gown spread neatly in her lap. “Are you mad?” she asked. Her
lower lip was quivering. She looked like she was on the verge of tears. Then again, Eloise frequently appeared to be on the verge of tears. When she was a baby, a slammed car door or the telephone ringing could jolt her out of her nap and into a full-fledged shrieking meltdown. In her stroller, she’d cringe at street noises; a telephone ringing, a taxi honking. Even the unexpected rustling of tree branches overhead could make her flinch.

“No, honey. Why?”

“Your face looks all scrunchy.”

I made myself smile. I held out my arms and, after a moment’s hesitation, Ellie hopped off the table and sat on my lap, folding her upper body against mine. I breathed in her little-girl smell—a bit like cotton candy, like graham crackers and library books—and pressed my cheek against her soft hair, thinking that even though she was high-strung and thin-skinned, Ellie was also smart and funny and undeniably lovely, and that I would do whatever I could to maximize her chances of being happy. I wouldn’t be like my own mother, a circa 1978 party girl who hadn’t realized that the party was over, a woman who’d slapped three coats of quick-drying lacquer over herself at twenty-six—teased hair, cat-eye black liquid liner, a slick, lipglossed pout, and splashes of Giorgio perfume—and gotten so involved in her tennis group, her morning walk buddies, her mah-jongg ladies, her husband and his health that she had little time for, or interest in, her only child. I knew my mother loved me—at least, she said so—but when I was a girl at the dinner table, or out in the driveway, where I’d amuse myself by hitting a tennis ball against the side of the garage, my mother would look up from her inspection of her fingernails or her
People
magazine and gaze at me as if I were a guest at a hotel who should have checked out weeks before and was somehow, inexplicably, still hanging around.