My Year with Eleanor (10 page)

Our mood was still subdued when he kissed me good-bye the next morning to catch an early ferry. Two hours later I strapped myself in to my second undersize plane of the weekend. As the wheels lifted off, I thought about the long pause Matt took after the question,
Are you two getting married?
That drunken Irishman had given me an opening, and I should have taken it. Perhaps not right then over the salad course, but maybe later in our hotel room. I couldn't have planned a better opportunity to face my fear of The Marriage Talk. That was the fear I should have tackled yesterday, not hijacking a bridal suite for a quickie. But I was too afraid of what Matt was going to say. I was afraid of that pause and what it meant. All of a sudden I missed Matt terribly. I looked out the window and watched until we were so far away that the island was no longer charming, just a brown lump in the sea, ugly and unrecognizable.

Chapter Six

The encouraging thing is that every time you meet a situation, though you may think at the time it is an impossibility and you go through the tortures of the damned, once you have met it and lived through it you find that forever after you are freer than you ever were before. . . . You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, “I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.”

—ELEANOR ROOSEVELT

A
t the end of the day, I still hated flying. The flight to Nantucket had done nothing to quell my fear of air travel. By the time our little plane touched down on the mainland, I knew I had to learn to fly. Just being a passenger on a flight hadn't felt like enough to fully face my fear. I needed to be in the pilot's seat, to see what it felt like to be in charge of my own fate while tens of thousands of feet above ground.

Another reason to give flying its due was because Eleanor had adored it. She flew more passenger miles in the 1920s and 1930s than any woman in the world, prompting
Good Housekeeping
to dub her “our flying First Lady.” It was harder for Franklin to travel because of his paralysis, so she flew all over the world on his behalf, at a time when most Americans still considered air travel unsafe. She flew on a government-issued C-87A aircraft called
Guess Where II
. It was originally intended for Franklin until it came to light that C-87As had a weakness for crashing and catching on fire. So the Secret Service approved it for Eleanor's use instead.

In April 1933, Amelia Earhart attended a black-tie dinner at the White House. Eleanor had never flown at night and listened, enraptured, as Amelia described what it was like to look down and see all of Washington, D.C., twinkling below you. On a lark, Amelia suggested that she and Eleanor fly to Baltimore and back that very night. Within an hour the women were airborne, still wearing their evening dresses, gloves, and heels. Even I, hater of flying, was charmed by this story—two plucky dames ditching their boring dinner party to go joyriding in formal wear. The press had gathered at the airport by the time they landed.

“How do you feel being piloted by a woman?” a reporter asked Eleanor.

“Absolutely safe,” she replied. “I'd give a lot to do it myself.” Amelia offered to give Eleanor lessons, and the First Lady went so far as to receive her student pilot's license, but Franklin discouraged her from pursuing it.

“I know how Eleanor drives a car,” he reportedly said. “Imagine her flying an airplane.”

If I could get my pilot's license, I could finish what Eleanor started! But getting a pilot's license, I soon discovered, cost between $7,000 and $10,000 and required a minimum of forty hours of flight training with an instructor. There had to be another way. Then I remembered a conversation I'd had with an investment banker friend at a party a few years ago. He'd told me that he'd had a few too many at the company banquet and bid on fighter pilot lessons in a silent auction. He and a friend had gone dogfighting earlier that afternoon.

“It's a civilian dogfighting school where regular people get to play fighter pilot for a day,” he'd explained.

“Like a computer simulation?” I'd asked hopefully.

“Naw, dude, you're actually up in a plane at five thousand feet. The instructor is there to take off and land, but otherwise you're flying that motherfucker! We were doing all these crazy-ass tricks!” He mimed flying an airplane, spilling a bit of his drink. “At one point I almost blacked out from the g-forces! It was awesome!”

It sounded awful, which was exactly why I felt compelled to do it. I e-mailed him and got the phone number of the company, Air Combat USA. When I called, I found out that the next available opening was a month away. It was no bargain, but it was certainly more affordable than getting a pilot's license. I gave them my credit card number before I could came to my senses. The operator took down my information, explaining the strict financial penalty they would unleash upon my MasterCard should I cancel.

The next weeks were filled with dread. Fighter piloting loomed in the distance, ugly and terrible, above all the other challenges. When the flying lesson was days away, I thumbed, warily, through the packet of information Air Combat sent. I read the letter of instruction:

Your mission is scheduled to begin at 1300 hours. Please report for duty 15 minutes early to allow time to suit up in your flight suit and pick out your helmet and parachute.

At first I found the military talk sort of endearing. Then I reread the second sentence. Wait, are they letting me pick out my parachute? That's putting a little too much trust in your customer, isn't it? I don't even think they let you pick your own lobster out of the tank at Red Lobster anymore. There was a promotional DVD, which I popped into my computer. The narrator had a voice for infomercials, the ones selling powerful cleaning agents. The video opened at an airport with shots of extraordinarily ordinary-looking people arriving on the scene wearing jean shorts and T-shirts with the sleeves ripped off. Then they were zipping themselves into jumpsuits and climbing into planes with Air Combat instructors. In his loud-but-not-loud voice, the narrator said:
“You're probably thinking, ‘Wait a second! I've never done this before! I don't even know how to fly!' That's the beauty of what we do. No experience is necessary. You just show up and we handle the rest.”

The planes were taking off and we'd moved on to the flying portion of the video and oh no oh no OH HELL NO Lord Jehovah someone hold me like a baby, for I was scared. It was worse than I'd imagined. I yelped, hands flying over my mouth, watching a plane dropping through the sky looking as if it had lost power. Then the shot cut to two planes, noses pointed straight up in the air, in a side-by-side vertical climb. All the while, that voice in the background:
“Experience the rush of air-to-air combat!”

Some of the video was shot inside the plane while other parts were outside as the planes filmed each other. These were the worst bits. There was an aerial shot of a plane blasting across the screen completely upside down. Another peeled off into a couple of barrel rolls, rotating wing over wing. One plane went into a backflip as an evasive measure but still got “shot down,” fake smoke trailing out of the back.

But that wasn't all! In the final minute, we were treated to a sequence that ended with a plane in a nosedive hurtling toward the earth, spinning, spinning . . . Then the planes were landing. An instructor and customer shared a team-building high five. The narrator concluded:
“Give us a few hours and we'll bring out the fighter pilot in you! Do you think you have the right stuff?”

I didn't. I had the wrong stuff. The
wrong stuff
! I returned the DVD to its sleeve, which had the company's motto printed across the top:
Everything is real . . . except the bullets!
This was not for people of reason.

“There's no way I'm going to be able to do this,” I announced to Dr. Bob on the eve of my “mission.”

“Have you ever noticed that some people love roller coasters while others are terrified of them?”

“Sure.” I loved him for not saying, “Of course you can do this!” That's what everyone thinks they're supposed to say to show their support during moments of self-doubt. The problem is, you don't believe them. It comes off as a patronizing, naive platitude. On top of that, they are telling you that you are wrong, which I always find irritating.

“Your body can't tell the difference between fear and excitement. It reacts the same way to both—racing heartbeat, butterflies, perspiration. It's your mind that decides whether the situation is something to be nervous or excited about. What you need to do is turn fear into excitement.”

Oh, is that all? “How?”

“Change your perspective of the situation. Change the narrative of your thoughts. Instead of thinking ‘I'm so scared!' tell yourself, ‘I'm so excited!' ”

I eyed him dubiously. “And if that doesn't work?”

“Then try getting mad. One theory about anxiety is that it's opposed by other emotions, such as aggression, which can be used to cancel it out,” he said. “Get into combat mode. Don't be a worrier, be a
warrior
! Imagine yourself as a flying predator going after the enemy.
Grrrr!
” He actually growled.

“I can barely handle being a
passenger
on a plane being piloted by a licensed professional. Even the slightest bit of turbulence freaks me out.”

“What do you do during turbulence?”

“I grab on to the seat cushion and hold on tight.” I was already gripping one of the arms of his sofa just thinking about turbulence.

“Which gives you the illusion of control in a situation where you've relinquished all control to the pilot. Doing it makes you feel safer.”

“Isn't that a good thing?”

“When the plane doesn't crash, you believe on some level that grabbing the seat cushion is what saved you. Then you have to grab the seat cushion every time you feel turbulence.”

“So I grab the seat during turbulence. What's the big deal?”

“It's what we call a safety behavior, like tensing up, holding your breath, praying, something we use to try to control the situation when we're scared, even if we can't control it. At best, these behaviors become superstitions. At worst, they can lead to substance abuse if you start believing that you need a few drinks or pills to get through a party. They disempower you by reinforcing the idea that you can't handle a situation.”

“But I
actually can't
handle the situation that's going to be happening tomorrow! I don't know how to fly a plane!”

“Well, I'm no aviation expert, but you know what advice I would give to a first-time pilot?”

“What's that?”

“If you run into any turbulence, don't grab your seat cushion.”

Later that night I watched
Top Gun,
bare feet propped up on the coffee table bouncing in rhythm to the cheesy awesomeness of Kenny Loggins's opening song, “Highway to the Danger Zone.” The movie had aired a few weeks ago on TNT, and I'd recorded it specifically to watch tonight, for firing-up purposes. Instead I watched Goose eject into the canopy and break his neck, and I kept rewinding, watching him retake his seat in the plane, only to suffer his fate all over again.

The next morning Matt was driving me down the Long Island Expressway to Air Combat, which was based out of a small airport an hour and a half away. We were running late because I had done everything I could that morning to delay us, down to taking the full dentist-recommended three minutes to brush my teeth. I hadn't known it was possible to drive with a swagger until I'd met Matt. He eased his way around cars with the same confidence he used when striding across crowded rooms, knowing people would yield to him and automatically move to the side, which they did. Most of the time.

We'd just moved into the far left lane, only to be cut off by someone driving ten miles per hour slower than the speed limit. “Look at this douchebag,” Matt said indignantly, thrusting a hand in the air at the driver in front of us as if slapping him upside the head. “I'm trying to get my girl out to her flying lesson and he's in the passing lane!”

I twisted my body in my seat toward Matt and suggested brightly, “Maybe we should go to Central Park instead! It's such a beautiful day, after all. Shall we turn the car around?”

“Sorry,” he said. “I will not be party to any kind of wussery.”

Scowling, I turned straight ahead and sank back into my seat in a huff. “Says the man who's afraid of heights! If I'm such a wuss, why don't you do it?”

“I would if it weren't so expensive. I'm not afraid of flying, I'm afraid of falling.”

“Most fears are over in five minutes. I have to fly this plane for an hour and—wait, why are you laughing?”

“I'm sorry, it's just kind of funny. Most of your fears are about letting go of your inner control freak. Now you're doing something where you get to be in total control, but you don't like that, either.”

“Listen, I wouldn't trust a first-time pilot no matter who it was,” I argued. “For the same reason that I wouldn't trust a first-time brain surgeon to operate on me.”

My phone rang. The caller ID screen said:
Mom
. She'd been driving me crazy about this, calling with more frequency as the date drew near. I picked up and before she could utter a word, I said, “Seriously, Mom, I cannot talk to you right now. I am trying very hard not to freak out and you are going to
freak me out
. I'm teetering on the edge here, Mom. Do you understand?
Teetering!
”

“You can still back out,” she whimpered. I heard the muffled taps of her acrylic nails as she anxiously clutched at her phone. “You don't have to do this.” Though a few minutes before I had been trying to talk myself out of this, her trying to talk me out of it somehow strengthened my resolve.

“I
do
have to do this! I made a promise. To myself. To Eleanor. To the universe. I'll call you when it's over.” I hung up.

“That wasn't very nice,” Matt observed.

“I know,” I grunted. I'd regretted it even as I'd said it, yet I hadn't been able to stop myself. “But I can't deal. It's like getting a call from my own subconscious.”

My mother was a worrier. After I'd gotten my driver's license, every time I'd left the house, my mom would say, “Watch out on the road. There are a lot of crazy drivers out there.” Even now she rarely let me drive my little sister anywhere, afraid that if there was an accident she'd lose us both.
You can never be too careful
had been a common refrain when I was growing up. You could, actually. According to Dr. Bob, overprotective parents, in their attempt to raise conscientious children, were constantly sending the message that the world is full of dangers that will surely get you as soon as you let your guard down. Kids became trained to find risk in every new experience. My mom had drilled these warnings into my head when I was growing up; after I left home, her voice had become the voice in my head.