All Fall Down(77)
Author: Jennifer Weiner

“No, thank you,” I whispered, as wild-eyed Kenny repeated, in a droning whine, “She saw us.”

“She didn’t see a thing.” The woman’s eyes looked like spinning pinwheels, her pupils tiny pinpricks of black in the blue of her irises. “How about a lollipop, pretty little miss?”

“I have to go now,” I whispered, and ran past them, out the door. I knew which way the beach was—there was only one street to cross, then I’d be there—but, somehow, I must have gone the wrong way, because when I stopped running I couldn’t see the water, and the street was completely unfamiliar. BAR AND GRILLE, read one sign. I heard the sound of an American flag, hanging at the corner, snapping in the breeze. There were people on the street, but not tourists, not people like me and my parents, in swimsuits and sun hats, carrying coolers and portable radios and folding chairs. All I saw were a few men dressed like Kenny, men with dark glasses and bent heads and a palpable aura of strangeness, of off-ness, around them, going in and out of the BAR AND GRILLE. I stood on the corner in my pink rubber flip-flops and my white terry-cloth cover-up. I’d dropped my change purse at some point during my flight.

Eventually, a man in a blue bathing suit, with a coating of white zinc on his nose, found me standing on the street corner, crying. “Little girl, are you lost?” I’d told him my name and that I lived in Cherry Hill but was staying in Avalon, and he’d walked me back to the beach, just two blocks away, where I found my parents at the lifeguard station. “Where did you go?” my mother asked, her voice shaking as she scooped me into her arms. My father gave me a lecture about staying where I could see them and not ever, ever scaring my mother like that. “You know how sensitive she is,” he’d said, and I’d nodded, crying wordlessly, meaning to explain that I’d wanted to go shopping, to get presents, to surprise them, but I never caught my breath enough to form the words, and they never asked where I’d gone, or why. They’d taken me back to the blanket and given me lemonade. My sobs tapered off into hiccups, and, eventually, I’d fallen asleep in the wedge of shade under our umbrella, and had to be woken up so they could walk me back to the cottage for lunch. By the afternoon, I’d all but forgotten about my adventure . . . but as I got older, I’d remembered, and I would spend hours trying to figure out what the couple, he with the baseball shirt, she with the shopping basket and the southern accent, had been doing that they’d worried I had seen. Had they robbed the place? Shoplifted a bottle? Were they paranoid because of something they’d smoked or swallowed, jumping at shadows, scaring little girls for no reason? I never knew . . . but the sense of that morning had never left me, the idea that everything could change with just one wrong turn. There was a parallel universe that ran alongside the normal world, and if you went through the wrong door, or turned left instead of right, ran up the street instead of down it, you could accidentally push the curtain aside and end up in that other place, where everything was different and everything was wrong.

That was how I felt, waking up that first morning in a single bed in a small, dingy room at Meadowcrest. “Oh, shit, not here,” I’d said when Dave had pulled off the road and I’d seen the signs that read MEADOWCREST: PUTTING FAMILIES FIRST. There were at least half a dozen billboards with the same slogan along I-95 on the way from Center City to the airport, with a picture of a white guy with a superhero’s jawline holding a beaming toddler in his arms. Dave and I had joked about it, wondering if the guy had been told he’d be posing for an ad for beer or Cialis, and the ribbing his buddies must have given him when he’d turned out to be the face of addiction.

Tight-lipped, without smiling, Dave had said, “They had a bed.”

“I want to go to Malibu. Seriously. If I’m going to do this, I might as well do it right.” I still felt awful—sick and weak and nauseous, and gutted from the shame—but I had lifted my chin, trying to look imperious with my ratty hair and my dirty clothes and Ellie’s Princess Jasmine fleece blanket wrapped around my shoulders. “Take me to the place where Liza Minnelli’s on the board of directors.”

Dave said nothing to me as he pulled the car up to the guard’s stand. “Allison Weiss. She’s checking in.”

“I’m checking in!” I sang, trying to remember the lyrics of the Simpsons rehab anthem. “No more pot or Demerol. No more drugs or alcohol! No more stinking fun at all . . !” I glanced sideways, wondering if Dave remembered how, when we’d started dating, we’d call each other and watch The Simpsons together, him in his apartment, me in mine, and how we’d speculate, during commercials, about whether the severely nerdy bow-tied weather guy on the NBC station got laid nonstop.