All Fall Down: A Novel (36 page)

“How did Ed find his bottom?” Shannon asked. “Where did Ed find his bottom?”

“He was in San Francisco, giving blow jobs for drug money,” said Lena.

“As one does,” I murmured, and thought, again, how different I was from the drunks and druggies who populated this establishment, and how every anecdote, every personal revelation, every Share, was just another argument in favor of my not being here.
Stick it out,
I told myself.

“Hey,” I said. “Did you guys see the movie
Pitch Perfect
? or
Mamma Mia
? Think there’s anything there? Or, wait! Here’s one for Michelle: If you change your mind, I’m the first in line . . . I’m the one you’ll see . . . No one gets around me!”

“Gonna make some rules to break, have you pee in my cup,” sang a Xanax addict named Samantha, who’d wandered over to our table, drawn by the singing. “Gonna turn my flashlight on, gonna wake you up.”

“I think,” said a girl named Rebecca, who was so quiet that the most I’d heard her do was announce her name in Share, “that we should do a skit about applying to work here. Like, ‘Do you have a heartbeat?’ ”

“Have you been to college?” asked Mary. “No? Do you know what college is?”

“This is never going to happen,” said Lena.

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because!” She rolled her eyes. “Do you honestly think they’re going to sit here and let us make fun of them? They’re stupid, but they’re not complete idiots.”

“So we don’t tell them,” I said. “We’ll just spread the word quietly. We’ll tell everyone that we’re holding a talent show in the cafeteria during Meditation after lunch on Saturday.” And then, I thought, when the staffers inevitably got wind of what was going on and hurried to shut it down, I’d stroll out to the parking lot, cool as Captain von Trapp facing down the Nazis, and let Dave drive me to Ellie’s party.

“A
re you feeling all right?” my new therapist, Kirsten, asked. I nodded, even though I could barely breathe, and I hadn’t been able to eat even a bite of pineapple or a single strawberry for breakfast. Three days ago, she’d asked me who to invite for my family session, the sit-down all the inmates had to endure before Meadowcrest released them from its clutches. I’d put Dave’s name and my mother’s on the list. “Do you want me to get in touch?” Kirsten had asked, and I’d nodded, knowing I wouldn’t be able to handle it if Dave turned me down. Which he did. “He didn’t say why,” Kirsten reported. She was Bernice’s opposite in almost every way—tall and young and white and willowy, with thin silver rings on her fingers and pencil skirts and sensible heels that were supposed to make her look grown-up but instead made her look like a teenager who was trying too hard. “Don’t read too much into it. It doesn’t mean he doesn’t want to be involved in your treatment.”

“Or my life,” I’d murmured, and spent the next two nights of sleeplessness fretting that he’d have divorce papers ready for me as soon as I set foot out of Meadowcrest.

“All it means is that he can’t attend today’s session.”

But why wouldn’t he make it a priority, canceling whatever other interviews or conferences he had planned? What could be more important than helping me?

My mother had agreed to come. At the appointed hour, I’d gotten up and gotten dressed, letting Aubrey help with my hair and makeup. Shannon lent me a cashmere cardigan, and a belt to keep my jeans up—in spite of the starchy food, I’d actually lost weight, mostly because I was too distraught to eat. Mary pulled out her rosary beads and told me she’d be in chapel, praying for me, and even Lena muttered a gruff “Good luck.”

I sat in a chair in Kirsten’s office, legs crossed, trying not to shake visibly as the door opened and my mother, impeccable in the St. John knit suit that I recognized as the one she’d worn to her grand-niece Maddie’s bat mitzvah, walked into the room. She’d gotten her hair styled and set, every trace of gray removed, and it hung in a mass of curling-iron ringlets, each one the same. She’d left it long, even after she’d turned forty, and fifty, and sixty. “Men like to see a woman take her hair down,” she’d told me, even as her own hair got increasingly brittle and thin, with its shine and color coming from a bottle. Her makeup was its typical mask, the same stuff she’d probably been wearing the same way since the 1970s, liquid black eyeliner flicked up at the corner of each lid to make cat eyes, foundation blended all the way down her jawline to her neck, and her preferred Lipglass lipgloss for that lacquered, new-car finish.

But beyond the hair and makeup, there was something different—an alertness to her expression, a confidence as she moved across the room, like she knew she’d make it to the other side without requiring assistance, without bumping into anything or banging her shins on the coffee table. My whole life, my mother had been accident-prone. “Whoops,” I could remember
my father saying a thousand times, his hand on her elbow, guiding her away from something sharp, keeping her on her feet.

“What can I get you? Coffee? Water?” Kirsten asked.

“No, thank you,” she said. From her flared nostrils, the way she held her arms tightly against her body and clutched her bag at her side, I could tell that she’d noted the smell of institutional cleaners and cheap, processed food, the RCs with their troubled complexions, the heroin girls with their piercings and tattoos. Maybe she’d even glimpsed Michelle, whose size she would regard as a personal affront. A place full of fuckups, she’d think . . . and here was her daughter among them.

“Hi, Mom.” I wasn’t sure if I should hug her, and she didn’t make any move toward me. “How’s Ellie?”

“Oh, Ellie’s wonderful. She’s playing at Hank’s this morning.” A frown creased her glossy lips. “That boy is always sticky.”

“Hank has allergies.”

“I’m not sure that entirely explains it. Ellie misses you . . .” My mom’s voice trailed off. My eyes filled with tears.

“Why don’t you have a seat,” Kirsten told my mom, giving me a significant look. “And, Allison, remember. Of course you’re concerned about your daughter, but we’re here to focus on you.”

With that, my mother lifted her chin. “How are you?” she asked.

I shrugged. “Well, given the fact that I’m in rehab, not too bad.”

She flinched at the word “rehab.”

“You hadn’t noticed any changes in your daughter?” Kirsten asked. “Allison seemed the same to you?”

My mother doesn’t notice me at all,
I thought, as she took a seat and started working the clasp of her handbag, clicking it open, then shut. That wasn’t particularly charitable, or entirely
true—my mother noticed me; she just noticed my father much more—but I wasn’t in an especially generous or honest frame of mind. This was the most embarrassing thing I could imagine; worse than the time my mom had been called to school after I’d barfed up all those doughnuts after our birthday breakfast gone wrong, or the time they’d called her in fifth grade after my best friend, Sandy Strauss, and I got in trouble for telling the new girl, a kid whose southern accent was strange to our ears and who had the improbable name Scarlett, that we’d called in to Z-100 and won tickets to a Gofios concert and that she could come with us. Where was Scarlett now? I couldn’t recall her last name, but I could remember her narrow, rabbity face, her watery blue eyes that always looked like she’d just been crying.

“Allison?” I blinked to find Kirsten and my mother both looking at me. “I asked your mother if she’d noticed any changes in your behavior over the past year.”

“You have to remember that my father was diagnosed around that time. I think my mom—well, all of us, really—were focused on him.”

“That doesn’t mean I wasn’t paying attention to you,” my mother said a little sharply. She turned to Kirsten. “I did notice. Especially since I started staying with Allison and Dave. Her moods were . . . a little strange. Sometimes she’d seem sleepy . . . or cheerful, but with an edge to it. Like she could go from being so happy to crying in a minute.”

“I never cried,” I said.

“Allison,” said Kirsten, in her professionally soothing voice, “try to just listen, okay?”

I nodded. But I couldn’t believe that my mother would have the nerve to come in here and try to make it sound like I was the needy one.

Kirsten turned from me to my mother. “The way your daughter’s described it, she was under a tremendous amount of stress.” Kirsten bent, reading from the folder she held open in her lap. “She was working a lot, and taking care of her daughter, and helping you with your husband. He has Alzheimer’s, is that correct?”

My mother nodded wordlessly. Tears slid down her cheeks. Now, I thought, we’d landed on the topic that would take up the rest of the session, the rest of the day, if that was possible. My father, comma, suffering of, and mother’s subsequent agony.

“Are you surprised that Allison ended up in a place like this?” Kirsten asked.

It got so quiet I could hear the clock ticking. Then, unbelievably, my mother shook her head. “No,” she said in a husky whisper. “No, I wouldn’t say I was surprised.”

I opened my mouth, feeling shocked. I wanted to remind her what a good girl I’d been, never skipping school, always turning in my homework, getting a job three weeks after I graduated from Franklin & Marshall, never embarrassing her, never being a burden. But it seemed the shocks were just getting started. My mother asked, “It runs in families, doesn’t it?”

Kirsten nodded. “We know from research that a child who has a parent with an addiction is eight times more likely to develop substance-abuse problems him- or herself.”

I braced myself. I knew what was coming from listening to the other women. Next I’d hear how my mother’s father had been a secret tippler, or how Grandma Sadie had gotten strung out on Mexican diet pills. My mother bent her head, crying harder. “I never meant to hurt her,” she wept. “If I could be here myself . . . if I could take this pain away . . .”

Kirsten passed my mother a box of tissues, an act that was strictly forbidden during normal therapy sessions, on the grounds
that being handed a box could derail someone’s epiphany.
Her issue, her tissue,
the group would chant. My mother grabbed a fistful and wiped her eyes.

“What do you mean, you never meant to hurt Allison?” Kirsten asked. When my mother didn’t answer, I said, “Yeah, I’d like to know what you’re talking about.”

“You don’t remember.” Her voice was dull. “Well, maybe you wouldn’t. You were just four.”

“Remember what? What happened when I was four?” She clicked her purse clasp open, then shut, and I remembered—of course I knew what had happened. The Accident.

“But that didn’t have anything to do with me,” I started to say. My mother, her eyes on Kirsten, started talking at the same time.

“I was in a car accident,” she said. “I was drunk. And Allison was in the car with me.”

My mouth dropped open. My mother kept talking.

“You had your seat belt on, but there were no car seats back then. When . . . when the car . . .” She gulped. “I drove into a telephone pole. You broke your arm.”

My body felt icy. “I don’t remember any of this,” I said, but something tickled at the back of my mind. A whining buzz, hands on my shoulder, a burning smell in the air, a man’s voice saying, “Hold still, and you’ll get a lolly when it’s done.”

My tongue felt thick as I tried to talk. “Did you get arrested?”

She shook her head. “Back then . . . back then it was different. But your father . . .” She buried her face in her hands. “He was so angry he took you away for a week.”

I didn’t remember that, either. “Where did we go?”

“Down the shore. It was the summertime. He must have rented a place, you know, that little cottage in Avalon where we’d go? It belonged to one of the partners at his firm. I never
asked, I never knew for sure, but I think he went there. And when he came back, he told me . . . t-told me that if I ever hurt you again, if I ever did anything to put you in danger, that he’d leave me, and he would never come back. He would take you away and I’d never see either one of you again.”

Puzzle pieces clicked into place in my mind. Keys slid into locks. Doors opened, revealing a different world behind them. “So you stopped driving.”

She nodded.

“But you didn’t stop drinking.”

Her eyes welled up again. “I couldn’t,” she whispered. “I tried, so many times. I wanted to. For you. For your father. I wanted to be a good mother, and a good wife, but I . . .” She shook her head. I shut my eyes, remembering scenes from my girlhood. Being seven or eight years old, having a friend sleep over, and telling her to whisper when we got up the next morning. “My mom sleeps late.” But she wasn’t incapacitated. By ten o’clock most mornings, she was at the tennis court . . . and, if she sipped white wine and seltzer all afternoon, I never saw her sloppy, or tipsy, or heard her slur or saw her stumble.

“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.