My Year with Eleanor

by Noelle Hancock

  “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.

  “Ten pills of Xanax says she doesn’t jump,” Jessica stage-whispered to Chris.

  “You’re on,” Chris replied.

  “I heard that!” I called out.

  I crept up the ladder as slowly as possible while still being in motion. Seeing my white, disembodied hands clutching the rungs, I remembered something a surgeon had said in a documentary I once saw on TV. When reattaching a hand, the hardest part is not setting the bones or connecting the arteries—it’s fixing the nerves. Once severed, nerves are not easily restored. After surgery they grow back at a rate of one inch per month. It’s a long process. Sometimes they never come back and the hand will be forever paralyzed.

  Jessica had told me that the scariest part was going up the rickety ladder, but once I climbed onto the platform I knew that she was a damned liar. Since the rig was atop a five-story building, the trapeze seemed to reach unearthly heights. I stood up on quaking legs and immediately latched on to a nearby metal pipe that looked relatively secure. Waiting for me on the platform was Hank, the sixtysomething instructor who ruled his aerial fiefdom with a firm hand and a mustache normally reserved for sheriffs in 1940s westerns. After a curt “hello,” he briskly clipped the safety lines to my waist harness. I hoped he didn’t notice that the back of my tank top was soaked through with sweat.

  “Now then! Here you go!” he boomed, holding the trapeze in front of me. I didn’t reach for it. I could tell by his no-nonsense expression that he was going to try to shame me into grabbing it. “C’mon now, it’s just like stepping off a curb. You’re not afraid of stepping off a curb, are you?”

  I didn’t know what curbs were like in his neighborhood, but mine didn’t include thirty-foot drops and signing a waiver beforehand “in the event of death or accidental dismemberment.”

  I tugged suspiciously on one of the ropes attached to my safety harness. “Is there any danger of getting tangled up in these on the way down? Could I decapitate myself or something?”

  “It hasn’t happened yet,” he said, and I swear I detected a note of hope in his voice.

  I looked over my shoulder toward the ladder and sighed. The only thing scarier than jumping off this platform was the prospect of going down that ladder backward. I wondered if they’d made it rickety on purpose to prevent people like me from backing out. I decided that I’d be okay with remaining on this coffee-table-sized platform for the rest of my life. I’d make it work. I could get a job manning the platform like Hank. I could get every meal delivered. “I live on the top floor,” I’d tell the delivery guy.

  “Just think of it as stepping off a curb,” Hank repeated, less patiently this time.

  “A curb?” I snapped. “Where do you live—with the Jetsons?” Bons mots were my preferred defense mechanism, though I would use homicide in a pinch.

  Hank’s ongoing patter was becoming part of the background noise like the traffic. But there was no ignoring the basic truth that the longer I hesitated, the more loaded the moment became. For the rest of class, the students and instructors would view me in the context of this moment. Yet, I couldn’t seem to make myself move. Minutes were passing, which I could tell only because my eyes flickered to the ground every so often and each time, a different emotion was visible on the faces of my classmates staring up at me. Encouragement was replaced by pity, impatience, then irritation. Only Chris’s and Jessica’s expressions remained unchanged. They looked just as hopeful as they had fifteen minutes ago. And in the end, this was what compelled me to reach out for the trapeze again. To watch them lose faith in me would have been awful. You don’t necessarily have to jump, I told myself. You just have to lean far enough forward that you can’t go back. Gravity would do the rest.

  A relieved cheer went up from the class as my hand grabbed the metal. Having long forgotten the Academy Award simile, I was caught unawares by the heaviness of the trapeze. The fifteen-pound bar yanked me forward, and out of instinct I dropped it. It sailed forward and with nothing to grab on to I teetered on my tiptoes, windmilling my arms. Gravity did the rest, and I careened off the platform. Ted, who was on the ground controlling the safety lines, jerked on the cables so I fell only about four feet.

  “Quit moving your arms and legs!” he commanded. I went still and floated in midair, a marionette waiting for instructions. Ted reeled in the lines, and I rose up a foot at a time. When I was level with Hank again, he hauled me back onto the platform by the back of my waistband harness.

  He tsked and shook his head. “Are you ready to get serious now?”

  “I’m seriously ready to get down now.”

  He dragged the trapeze back to me using a giant hook that looked, appropriately, like the kind used to yank vaudevillian performers off the stage when they’d overstayed their welcome.

  “Just listen for the commands,” Hank reminded me. “When Ted says ‘ready,’ that’s your cue to bend your knees. When he says ‘hep,’ jump off the platform. Got it?”

  I gathered myself and nodded firmly. “Got it.”

  “Ready!” Ted yelled.

  I bent my knees.

  “HEP!”

  I didn’t move.

  “Do we need to go over this again?” Hank asked.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I just got spooked. I’m ready now.”

  Hank nodded at Ted again.

  “Ready! . . . HEP!”

  I took a bunny hop forward. I couldn’t describe what it was like to take that first swing out, mostly because my eyes were squeezed shut.

  “Open your eyes, open your eyes!” Ted shouted from the ground.

  When I forced open my eyelids, I saw that I was traveling faster than I’d anticipated. A lot faster. It was exhilarating and dreadful. As I hurtled forward, Ted screamed at me to hook my legs over the bar.

  “Your knees, your knees!” he shrieked.

  My ass, I thought, but surprisingly the backswing gave me enough momentum that I hooked them with ease.

  “Now let go with your hands!” Ted yelled when I reached the height of my arc.

  This was the part I’d been worried about since the beginning of class. I’d
been afraid that once I let go, I wouldn’t have the strength to pull myself up when it came time to grab the bar again. I’d just have to hang there. I’d be like those bears that break out of the forest, climb utility poles in suburban neighborhoods, and cling for dear life until they’re shot down with a tranquilizer dart.

  Gritting my teeth, I released my hands. The act of letting go—unfurling my body and falling back into nothingness—was slightly liberating, but also extremely unnerving.

  “Arch your back, arms out!”

  I held my arms out in front of me, Superman style. On the return swing, I glimpsed an upside-down Hank giving me the thumbs-up from the platform. Or maybe it was the thumbs-down? Before I could figure it out, it was time to grab the trapeze again. I curled toward the bar, and when my hands found the metal, I clamped my fingers down as tight as I could. Then I unfolded my legs so that I was hanging straight again.

  “C’mon, Noelle, it’s time for the dismount!” Ted called. As the trapeze charged forward a third and final time, I pulled my knees up to my chest, let go, and did a perfect backward flip into the net below. I also whacked my toes on the bar so hard that the scream is still echoing in the Catskills. But other than that, I did pretty well.

  A few days before, during my session with Dr. Bob, I asked him, “Why am I afraid of heights?”

  “Because you’re smart!” He laughed. “Take a look at people’s top fears: snakes, insects, rats, and heights. Evolution has programmed certain fears into our brains to keep us alive. Fifty thousand years ago, people steered clear of snakes, insects, and rats because they carried diseases. Our distant ancestors who were afraid of heights didn’t fall off cliffs.”

  “But I thought fears were learned?”

  He shook his head. “Some fears are learned, some we’re born with. Get this: There was a study where psychologists placed an infant on a table with a pane of Plexiglas in the center. Now, the baby could easily crawl across this Plexiglas—but almost all the kids refused. Why?”