My Year with Eleanor (3 page)

I went into Microsoft Word and opened up the blank document: “My One-Year Plan.” Finally I knew where to begin. I started with the things Dr. Bob and I had talked about. The bowling and the karaoke . . . what was I really afraid of there? I wrote down, “Public humiliation. Failure.” Then I thought about other things I'd been avoiding lately. My friends. Meeting new people. Public speaking.

“Rejection,” I typed. Talking to my boyfriend about the future. “That Matt will leave me and I'll be alone.” I paused and reread that line again, jarred by an anxiety I hadn't previously admitted to myself. “Leaving this world with nothing to show for it but excessive knowledge of celebrity scandals.” Thinking of my lifelong fear of an untimely death, I wrote, “Leaving this world before I'm ready.”

Words were pouring out now, the cursor gliding easily across the screen as I attempted to list every fear I'd ever had, everything I'd backed down from or taken pains to avoid. When I finally stopped writing ten minutes later, I was astounded at the amount of sheer wussiness before me. The things I had listed ranged from physical fears (heights, flying, crashing into things) to more emotional fears (public speaking, criticism, confrontation, regret, disapproval) to the slightly ridiculous (sharks, sober dancing, the time I lied and told my dad I voted for McCain).

As I looked at the list, I saw how this could actually work. I really could confront a fear each day. Some of them could be grand gestures, like jumping off a cliff or skydiving; others could be small things, like telling someone what I really thought of them. Fear is relative. To some people, stepping on a stage is no big deal, but for me, the mere thought made my heart race. If something gave me butterflies or an inclination to flee, then it was worth trying. Just as I was about to pull up a calendar page on my computer and plot out my life for the next 365 days, I remembered something else that Eleanor said. I grabbed a book and flipped around until I found it: “You cannot use your time to the best advantage if you do not make some sort of plan,” Eleanor wrote. But she cautioned, “I find that life is much more satisfactory when it forms some kind of pattern, though
I do not believe in too rigid a pattern
.”

She's telling me not to go overboard, I thought. If you make this plan too rigid, then you're leaving no room for spontaneity, for facing the small, everyday things that come up unexpectedly. If I planned everything out, I wouldn't be facing
all
my fears, because in the last few years, I'd developed an aversion to spontaneity. I returned to my document and added one more line to the bottom of the list: “Fear of the unknown and unplanned.”

Satisfied that I finally had, if not a plan exactly, at least a direction for my immediate future, I changed the document name to “My Year of Fear” and urged the cursor to the top of the screen. I clicked with more confidence than I'd had in months. A short message appeared across the screen: saved.

Chapter Two

Nothing alive can stand still, it goes forward or back. Life is interesting only as long as it is a process of growth; or, to put it another way, we can only grow as long as we are interested.

—ELEANOR ROOSEVELT

I
felt hopeful for the first time in months. I also had a birthday to plan. A few days after making the list, I was stretched out on the couch reading an Eleanor book, but my mind kept drifting to my upcoming twenty-ninth birthday. Because Matt would be at work in Albany, he was taking me out to a nice dinner the next weekend. So it would just be me and my few remaining close friends. This still left the question of the celebration. Since my birthday was the first official day of my Year of Fear, I wanted to combine the party with the scary activity. But what?

Part of me had hoped Eleanor might inspire some ideas, but there was no mention of birthdays as I thumbed through her biographies. Instead I found myself sucked in to the drama of her privileged but joyless childhood. Her parents' marriage was strained. Elliott drank heavily. When Eleanor was five, he caused a bit of a scandal when he fathered a child with one of the servants, who hired an attorney and threatened a $10,000 lawsuit. When Eleanor was eight, her twenty-nine-year-old mother died of diphtheria. Elliott was in a mental institution trying to overcome alcoholism, so Eleanor and her two brothers moved into their surly grandmother's Manhattan brownstone. Five months later, her brother Elliott Jr. also died of diphtheria. Elliott and Eleanor mostly kept in touch via letters; one day the letters stopped coming. Less than two years after her mother's death, Eleanor's father jumped out of a window and killed himself. She and her little brother remained with Grandmother Hall and her four boisterous adult children who still lived at home. Her eccentric aunts—Maude and the unfortunately named Pussie—and her playboy uncles, Vallie and Eddie, were known for their wild shenanigans and love affairs. One day while the group was vacationing at their summer home, Vallie and Eddie parked themselves at an upstairs window with a gun and took turns firing at family members sitting on the lawn. Grandmother Hall pronounced the household too rowdy for a girl of fifteen and sent Eleanor to the Allenswood Academy, a finishing school for girls just outside London.

The headmistress at Allenswood was a silver-haired woman named Madame Souvestre who was not to be trifled with. She was French and required the students to speak French at all times. She demanded independent thinking from her pupils. Students who turned in papers that merely summarized her lessons found their work literally torn to shreds in front of the class, the pieces thrown to the floor.

“Why was your mind given you, but to think things out for yourself!” Madame Souvestre cried.

I paused in my reading, trying to imagine my life at a school like that. At my high school, students had sometimes brought their children to class. One time someone dropped a backpack on the floor and the gun inside went off, hitting someone in the leg. School administrators couldn't figure out how to ban guns, so they banned backpacks instead.

Surprisingly, Eleanor flourished under Madame Souvestre. She engaged in lively discussions on world affairs. She tried out for field hockey despite having never seen a game and made the first team. “I think that day was one of the proudest moments of my life,” she later said.

During school holidays, the headmistress invited her favorite student to accompany her on trips across Europe. Traveling with Madame Souvestre was “a revelation” for Eleanor. “She did all the things that in a vague way you had always felt you wanted to do.” They took unmarked paths and changed their schedule on a whim. During an evening train ride through Italy, Souvestre spontaneously grabbed their luggage and ordered Eleanor off the train. She wanted to walk on the beach and see the Mediterranean in the moonlight.

“Never again would I be the rigid little person I had been before,” Eleanor wrote of the experience. Her cousin Corinne barely recognized her when she entered Allenswood a few years after Eleanor. Her awkward, tentative cousin had blossomed into a confident young woman. “When I arrived she was ‘everything' at school,” Corinne said later. “She was beloved by everybody.” Eleanor left Allenswood after three years at her grandmother's insistence to make her debut in New York society. That was the end of her formal education, though she vowed to never stop learning.

“Each time you learn something new you must readjust the whole framework of your knowledge. . . .” she said. “And yet, for a great many people, this is a continuing problem because they appear to have an innate fear of change, no matter what form it takes: changed personal relationships, changed social or financial conditions. The new or unknown becomes in their minds something hostile, almost malignant.”

I have to learn something new.
I put the autobiography aside. When I was little, I was always trying new things: new types of math, school plays, whatever sport the gym teacher decided to torture us with that day. While not always a success—dodgeball, I remember, being a particularly low point—I still tried. We didn't have a choice. Back then we had teachers and parents making sure we challenged ourselves. Then I became an adult. The luxury of being an adult is you no longer have to do things that make you uncomfortable.

I dropped into my saggy armchair and brushed some birdseed off the armrest. The cage holding my parakeets, Jesus and Stuart, was next to the chair. When you live in a three-hundred-square-foot studio, everything is next to something. I leaned over my ottoman that doubled as a desk and fired up my computer. When my list of fears came onto the screen, I scanned it for ideas. Topping the list:
heights
. I did an Internet search of
heights
and
New York
. Forty-five million hits.

“Jesus!” I said out loud, then looked sideways at Jesus the parakeet. “Not you.”

When I turned back, I noticed the Eleanor biography I'd left on my couch. Thinking of Allenswood Academy, I tried adding
school
to the search. The first website that came up was Trapeze School New York. Inwardly, I felt myself pull back, my go-to emotional reaction when faced with something unfamiliar. The company's slogan was, appropriately enough: “Forget the fear, worry about the addiction.” I had to admit that it was perfect: a literal jumping-off point for my Year of Fear. I fought the urge to reach for a reason why I shouldn't do it. Instead, I picked up the phone and called Chris.

“So I've figured out what we're doing for my birthday.” I told him all about the trapeze school. “I'm going to ask Jessica, too.” Jessica is one of our closest friends, as well as the managing editor for Chris's website.

He gave a hollow laugh. “Can you call her when we're at work so I can watch? I need to see this.”

“Very funny.”

But Chris had a point. Jessica has the best body of anyone I know, but the last time she worked out was a few years ago when her local gym offered her a free trial. “That place may have actually been a prison gym,” she reported afterward. “Touching the equipment pretty much necessitates a postworkout chemical bath. Never again.”

She picked up before the second ring and I launched right in. “So for my birthday, I was thinking you, Chris, and I go to trapeze school.”

“Oh Lord. Seriously? What are we—a
Sex and the City
rerun or something?”

“What do you mean?”

“There was an episode where Carrie takes a trapeze class.”

“Okay, it'll be like that—but without the sex.”

“Is there a bar at least?”

I paused to consider the question. Technically there was a bar, you just happened to swing from it.

“Yes.”

Thus, on the evening of my twenty-ninth birthday, I arrived at Trapeze School New York flanked by two of my best—and most easily peer-pressured—friends. The school was an outdoor rig plunked on the roof of a five-story athletic complex on the shoreline of the Hudson River on the west side of Manhattan. It commanded a spectacular view of the city and the verdant fields below, full of people playing soccer and field hockey in the late afternoon sun.

“Ugh!” Jessica squinted at them and shook her head in disgust. “Look at all these healthy people! Forget the drug dens.
This
is the dark side of Manhattan.” Jessica and I met four years ago through a blog. She was the editor of a site where I occasionally freelanced. Our friendship had been a slow build. It started over e-mail, moved to texting, and then progressed to in-person appearances. But now not a day went by that we didn't talk.

She gathered her freshly highlighted brown hair into a ponytail and pulled it tight with grim resignation. The night before she'd called to report that the closest thing she had to workout pants were last season's leggings. They were meant to be worn under dresses and had a see-through crotch. “Do you think I can wear them anyway?” she'd asked. “I'm confident in the appearance of my vagina.” Luckily, someone at the office that morning happened to have an extra pair of yoga pants.

“Nice shirt, by the way,” I told Chris. He was wearing a body-hugging women's T-shirt reading:
BEAT ME WITH 10 POUNDS OF VOGUE.

He grinned. “Hey, the website said to wear fitted clothing.” He looked gawky, but Chris was more athletic than Jessica and me combined and squared to the power of infinity. Although I wasn't the worst player on my high school soccer team, I was the only one to accidentally score a goal for the opposing team. Chris, meanwhile, had grown up in Maine doing Maine things like hiking and snowshoeing. He spent a summer biking across the United States for Habitat for Humanity. He was on the crew team at his prep school and at Yale. He hadn't aged a day since we'd met ten years before working for the
Yale Daily News
: same meticulously clipped blond hair and high cheekbones set in a warm, appealing face.

As we latched on our safety belts, I gazed up warily at the trapeze rig. It looked like your average circus trapeze, except that the aluminum ladder leading up to the platform was startlingly rickety. Stretching beneath the entire monstrosity was a large net, which somehow provided no comfort. I pictured a cartoon version of myself falling through the net and barreling past the center of the earth to China, where I'd pop up in a bowl of chow mein to the surprise of a chopstick-wielding diner. For Matt's sake, I was glad he wasn't here. His fear of heights far outstripped mine. On our first Valentine's Day he'd taken me to the observation deck on the seventieth floor of Rockefeller Center. He'd stood behind me the whole time with his arms wrapped around me and months later confessed he'd been clutching me out of terror, not affection.

When I think of the flying trapeze, I think of the circus, so I'd arrived expecting a certain level of merriness. But trapeze school was conducted in a businesslike manner, the instructors bordering on brusque. Our ground instructor was a thirtysomething Adonis named Ted with abs like a cobblestone street. He taught us the proper way to handle the trapeze. When he yelled “ready,” we were to bend our knees; when he yelled “hep” (trapeze speak for “go!”), we were to take a tiny hop forward off the platform.

“The trapeze bar is always heavier than you'd think—like an Academy Award—so be sure to lean back when you grab it or it will pull you forward,” he said.

“Give him an Oscar for Best Achievement in Abdominals,” Jessica whispered.

Ted continued: “There won't be any practice runs where you just swing out and say ‘Wheeeeeee!' You're going to do a trick called a knee hang. On the first swing out we want you to pull your knees through your hands and hook them over the bar the way you did when you were kids on the playground. Then you will let go with your hands and—hanging by your knees upside down—stretch your arms out in front of you and make the Superman pose. On our command, you'll grab the bar again, unhook your knees, and hang straight. Then you'll do a backflip dismount and land on the net on your back.”

“Heh!” I let forth a short, disbelieving laugh and murmured to Jessica, “For the record, should something go wrong and I end up on a ventilator, pull the plug.”

“Keep me on life support,” she said. “I spend most of the day in a vegetative state anyway. Does it really matter if it's at the office or in a hospital bed?” She paused. “But if there's permanent damage to my face, do
not
resuscitate.”

Trapeze was a two-instructor operation. Ted and his award-winning abs worked the safety lines; a man named Hank ran the platform. There were seven other students in our class. Our order was determined by when we signed in. Happily, I'd signed in last. First up was a sixteen-year-old gymnast. She executed the knee hang flawlessly with pointed toes and fabulous extension. Everyone clapped except Jessica, who muttered under her breath, “Bitch, get your ass to the intermediate class. Like I don't feel bad enough about myself as it is?”

But when it was her turn, Jess easily performed her knee hang and backflip. I was surprised and not surprised. Jessica is a person of incongruities. Petite with a big personality. Sweet-looking face and a biting sense of humor. She's the most opinionated person I know but my least judgmental friend. A New York sense of style and a down-home Michigan accent. Chris's flip was less elegant, since he had longer limbs to contend with, but he did well on the trapeze too.

“Nicely done,” Jessica said when he retook his seat next to us.

Gesturing to the swings and harness, he replied, “It turns out, I've had enough gay sex to prepare me for this experience.”

When it was my turn, I dipped my hands into the basket of powdered chalk at the base of the ladder, per Ted's instructions. The chalk soaked up the sweat and kept your palms from slipping.