My Year with Eleanor

by Noelle Hancock

  I rinsed off, taking care not to aim the hose above my neck where it would surely blow the eyelashes and eyebrows right off my face. Weakly, I made my way over to an empty space on the boat deck and lay down, warm in my wetsuit in the summer sun.

  “You okay over there?” Gus finally called out in a tone that implied he no longer thought me hard-core.

  I nodded without opening my eyes.

  “In that case, Les, you go down with Bill.”

  I sensed Bill was standing over me. Or, more accurately, I felt him dripping on me.

  “Really, are you okay, Noelle?” Bill almost always called me Hancock; hearing him say my first name was jarring. “Do you want me to stay with you?” he asked. I was instantly moved that he’d come all this way and then offered to give up his shark dives for me.

  “I’m fine. See?” I sat up, as proof of my okayness. “Now get back down there!”

  He turned and made his way back to the cage, taking slow, exaggerated steps to avoid tripping. “If you have any last-minute advice on how to avoid drowning, I’m all ears,” he called over his shoulder. “Seriously, my ears are huge!”

  I rolled my eyes and smiled. “Just watch those girly curls of yours around that cable.”

  Eleanor didn’t learn to swim until she was a mother and wanted to be able to watch over her children when they were in the water. So, in the winter of 1924, Eleanor took lessons at the YWCA pool in New York and learned to swim at the age of forty. Diving took longer—until the summer of 1939, in fact, when she was fifty-six years old and took lessons from Dorothy Dow, a junior member of her White House staff.

  “Finally she could dive,” Dow wrote, “not only from the side of the pool but from the diving board as well. She was anxious to perform for the President, as he said he didn’t believe she could do it. . . . So, Mrs. R. walked out on the board, got all set in the proper form and went in flat as could be. She could have been heard down at Poughkeepsie! I thought the President would explode laughing, and his hand came down on my shoulder so hard I almost fell over. Mrs. R. came up red in the face, with a really grim expression, said nothing, walked out on the board again, and did a perfect dive.”

  Les was laughing when he and Bill surfaced twenty minutes later. “You could’ve gotten your hand bitten off!” he said between gasps.

  Bill looked sheepish as he told us what happened. They’d been down for a few minutes when they were greeted by an eight-foot blue shark. Bill wanted a picture of himself giving the shark a high five. He motioned for Les to get his camera in position; then he reached through the bars, grabbing onto the fin. Bill barely managed to yank his hand back into the cage as the blue turned its head and snapped at him.

  “Do you want to dive again?” Gus asked me.

  “No, I’m good,” I said quickly. Before I lowered my eyes, I saw the disappointment on Gus’s face.

  On the ride home, everyone lapsed into that exhausted silence that signals the end of a vacation. Bill and I sat beside each other on the deck, knocking together companionably whenever the boat hit a big wave. Every time I thought of myself refusing to get back in the cage, I felt a flash of irritation. Bill’s bravado only made me feel like more of a failure. He’d also been in the cage when we were trapped underneath the boat. But it hadn’t stopped him from going back down. I’d had my second chance, but unlike Eleanor and Bill, I hadn’t tried again. I’d had my first setback and I’d given up.

  “How do you do it?” I asked. “How can you be so daring about everything?”

  Bill shrugged. “I’m not so brave.”

  “You’re just trying to make me feel better.”

  “I’ve never hit on a woman sober.”

  “What?”

  “I’m thirty-three years old and don’t have the stones to ask a woman out unless I’m drunk,” he said. “So you see? We’re all afraid of something.”

  “Except me.” I chuckled. “I’m afraid of everything.”

  Bill’s face darkened. “What’s happened to you, Hancock?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When you were our intern, you’d come into the office every morning and entertain us with a new story about some wild thing you’d done the night before. Like the time you were on your way home and some girl on the subway started talking smack to you? But you talked smack right back and held your ground. Even when she pulled out a knife!”

  “Well, that was totally stupid.”

  “Where is that Noelle?” he asked impatiently. “Because I want her back. This self-deprecating shtick you’ve been working for the last few years is getting really old.”

  I was surprisingly stung by his words. I’d changed. You’d think that because I already suspected this to be true, his confirmation wouldn’t be that painful to hear. But there’s still hope within suspicion, a chance that your problem exists only in your imagination. To have it confirmed and articulated by someone else meant it was real.

  For a long time, I stared out at the ocean. It made me think of Matt. Since he was a child Matt had spent every summer at his parents’ beach house in the Hamptons, frolicking through these rough Atlantic waters. The first time Matt coaxed me into the water was also the last time. I was used to the Gulf of Mexico, where the waves don’t go over two feet unless there’s a hurricane. But Atlantic waves attack in a group assault, knocking down unsuspecting victims for a thorough beating. The effect is similar to being mugged. And when you finally stagger to your feet, you’ll often find yourself without a bathing suit bottom. Over and over, I was knocked down, rolled, and came up sputtering.

  “You have to dive under the wave,” Matt instructed. “Like the surfers do.”

  “I was under the wave, Matt. I was under about eight of them simultaneously, in fact.”

  As I was saying this, another wave plowed into me, dragging me across a bed of crushed seashells. When I stood up, I had two bloody knees. I promptly threw my hands in the air in a leave-taking gesture.

  “And that’s it for me!” I told the waves. “Thanks so much! You guys have been great.”

  “Awww, don’t leave,” Matt begged.

  Making my way toward shore, I called out, “I’m going to lie in the sun with the normal people who prefer to kill themselves slowly.”

  “He’s right, you know,” Dr. Bob said later when I told him the story. “The problem is in your approach, bracing yourself and trying to hold your ground where the waves are strongest. When you dive under the wave, it rolls over you, and you come up on the other side. Eventually you’re out there happily bobbing up and down, moving with the waves instead of against them. The same thing is true for scary situations.” Dr. Bob inched forward in his chair, like he was about to tell me something vital. “Rather than tensing up and trying to stand your ground when the scary situations come at you, you should dive into them. Roll with them rather than struggle against them. It’s rough at first, but once you put yourself out there, it’s much easier to ride the ups and downs. And it’s far more enjoyable than spending your life sitting on the beach and watching.”

  I thought about Dr. Bob’s wave metaphor as our boat pulled toward the dock. Although I was proud of my successful shark dive the day before, I hadn’t achieved the same sense of accomplishment I’d had with the last big challenge. During the apex of my last swing on the trapeze, I’d experienced a joyousness that I never would’ve felt had I not gone up there. My shark encounters, on the other hand, had been full of terror and panic that hadn’t stopped until they were over. Not all fears are worth chasing, I realized. What had I really gotten out of this? Sure, I’d lived and I’d have a good story to tell, but shouldn’t life be about more than just survival and bragging rights? Shouldn’t it be about growth? Being afraid of sharks was like being afraid of fire. There was no psychological upside to overcoming one’s fear of sharks. We’re supposed to be afraid of them—they’re monsters!
From now on I’d choose my challenges more carefully. As I stepped off the boat onto the dock, I calculated how many days I had left on the experiment: more than three hundred days. That’s a lot of tomorrows.

  Chapter Four

  Do the things that interest you and do them with all your heart. Don’t be concerned about whether people are watching you or criticizing you. The chances are that they aren’t paying any attention to you.

  —ELEANOR ROOSEVELT

  “I just came away from the weekend wishing I was more like my friend Bill,” I said wistfully.

  “And what qualities does Bill have that you admire?” Dr. Bob asked.

  “Well, the man has almost no fear. And he’s just . . . goofy.”

  “When was the last time you did something truly goofy?” I opened my mouth to reply and he added, “While not under the influence of alcohol.”

  I closed my mouth and reconsidered the question. “Probably right before college. Yes, definitely, the Yale video.”

  “Video?” he repeated, confused.

  Of all the colleges I applied to, Yale was the last to respond. I’d already been rejected from Duke and Georgetown, which sent terse letters regretting to inform me of my subpar credentials but wishing me luck at a school with lower standards. So I was bowled over when Yale wait-listed me. Immediately I unleashed an aggressive letter-writing campaign upon the admissions office. Every other day for three weeks, I mailed a letter detailing why Yale would be making a terrible mistake if I wasn’t admitted. Then I got creative. I’d always loved the Dr. Seuss book Oh, the Places You’ll Go! So I wrote my own version called Oh, the Places I’ll Go!, rewriting the words so that the poem was about me getting into Yale. An example of one stanza:

  There are other schools I’ve looked over with care,

  but I’ve made my decision: I don’t wanna go there.

  My university? It must be the best.

  Positively, absolutely, it must top all the rest!

  A place like Yale where my thoughts can be grown,

  guided and nurtured, but still be my own.

  I won’t lag behind,

  No, I’ve got the speed.

  Give me the chance

  and I’ll take the lead!

  Then I acted out the poem on video. The film was shot with the help of a few friends and the special effects amounted to my mother holding a sprinkler over my head to emulate a storm system, but the trampoline sequence more than made up for it. A week after I sent in the video, I received a call from an admissions officer.

  “Anyone who puts forth that kind of effort to get what she wants is clearly going places,” he said. “Welcome to Yale University.”

  While I recounted this Dr. Bob was leaning back in his chair, laughing. “What a fan-tas-tic story!” he said with obvious delight. “That took balls, girl!”

  I felt a twinge of jealousy for my former self, which I hadn’t even realized was possible. “Yeah, I had more nerve back then.”

  These days I only thought about doing goofy things. Sometimes during serious situations—church sermons, job interviews, even sessions with Dr. Bob—I’d torture myself by imagining doing something completely stupid like standing up and shouting, “Oooga Boooga Pee Paw!” while shaking my hips and beating on my chest like King Kong. Then I’d struggle to keep a straight face and the smile out of my voice when it was my turn to talk.

  Dr. Bob asked, “Where did you learn to stop being silly? When did you start taking yourself so seriously?”

  “Actually I think it started at Yale. I just”—I paused and searched for the right words—“folded inward somehow. It was so intense, you know? Everyone had to be number one at everything. Students didn’t just play the violin. They played Carnegie Hall at age twelve. I knew I couldn’t compete, so I stopped putting myself out there.”

  “And after college?”

  “I went to work for a newspaper. The staff prided themselves on being intellectuals. People who didn’t take themselves seriously weren’t taken seriously by others. Whenever I goofed off, they’d roll their eyes. So I stopped, and that part of me never really came back.”

  Dr. Bob nodded thoughtfully. “Goofiness is threatening to people who want to be in control of themselves all the time, who want to be serious. What stops us from acting goofy is our fear of being evaluated. But silliness can be empowering. I think you need to stop being afraid to be goofy.”

  I considered, right now in this moment, doing the Ooga Booga dance; but I suspected he wouldn’t see this as goofiness, but as a sign I needed a referral to a neurologist. Instead I asked, “How do I do that?”

  “By practicing doing goofy things.” Grinning, he held his hands out to each side and I feared he was going to make jazz hands. He did. “Hey, it works for me. I’m a goofy therapist!”

  The next day I signed up for a tap dancing course. In terms of goofiness, it’s hard to top a group of adults wearing Mary Janes hopping around and performing elaborate routines for a nonexistent audience. One of the routines involved a phenomenally absurd knee-slapping move, then walking across the room in an exaggerated manner while waving, bringing to mind one of those cartoon frogs pumping a top hat and cane. I also put on a Santa costume left over from college and wore it around during the day. But even as I tried to distract myself with other goofy tasks, a sense of dread lurked in the pit of my stomach. There was no getting around the inevitable.

  I was going to have to karaoke.

  Most people start out as goofy children and grow more serious with age. Eleanor went the opposite route. One of my favorite stories about her is from a memoir by novelist Fannie Hurst. In Anatomy of Me, Fannie described her visit to the White House in 1933. After lunch Fannie accompanied Eleanor to the hospital, where one of her sons was recuperating after an appendectomy. Next they attended an opening of a Picasso exhibit, where Eleanor gave a speech. Then the duo returned to the White House to host a delegation of about forty educators from the Philippines and meet with an African American Baptist minister from Atlanta. After a quick change of clothes, they went out to dinner with a Roosevelt family friend. At eleven o’clock, Eleanor and Fannie returned to the White House to see the first screening of a “talking picture” from a projector that Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had recently installed for the president. Well after midnight, Fannie crawled into bed in the Lincoln bedroom, “deciding for once to retire without even removing my makeup.” Then came a knock at the door.

  “Come in,” Fannie said uncertainly . . .

  Eleanor strode in wearing a black bathing suit, a towel draped over one arm. “Remember when I promised . . . to show you my yoga exercises?” she asked, spreading the towel on the floor. Then, to Fannie’s surprise, the forty-nine-year-old First Lady “stood on her head, straight as a column, feet up in the air.”

  “You just have to go up there and have fun, baby!” Matt said a few days later, ushering me into a shadowy karaoke bar. Earlier in the week Matt had asked his friend Jesse—a theater critic and passionate karaoker—to recommend a place.

  “Actually, I’m karaokeing this weekend with some friends I know through work,” Jesse had told Matt. “They’re big drama queens, but I’m sure they’d love to have you along!” Jesse’s work friends, it turned out, included several real-life cabaret singers.

  “I can’t believe that for my return to karaoke, you brought a bunch of professional singers,” I grumbled at Matt as our group settled in around a few purple velour banquettes.

  “I thought he was calling them drama queens because they were high maintenance!” he said defensively. “Besides, how good can they be if they’re doing karaoke?”

  “How good can they be?” I repeated. “That guy over there was actually in Cabaret!”

  Matt was one of those people who excelled at everything he tried. Usually I tried to avoid people like that, but this flaw was revealed to me slowl
y over the course of our relationship: The picture at his parents’ house of him in high school winning the Manhattan 800-meter championship for the second year in a row. The time his college roommate asked, “Matt, what was your thesis about again? It won an award, right?” The day he took me sailing. The night we played pool and he ran the table. By the time he won a Pulitzer Prize—as part of a team of reporters, but still—I was onto him, but already in love with him. In addition to all this, he played guitar in a band and had a terrific singing voice.

  Rather than argue with Matt any further, I turned my attention from him and took note of the emergency exits. It was surprisingly tony for a karaoke bar, a neon-lights-and-martinis kind of place. At least the stage wasn’t very high, just a raised platform about a foot off the ground.

  Dr. Bob once told me that all our fears—no matter how irrational they may seem to us today—are in some sense survival based. These impulses helped our ancestors avoid all sorts of unfortunate consequences. Claustrophobia, for instance, is related to our ancestors’ vulnerability to predators while trapped in tight quarters. But in a civilized setting, the same impulses appear somewhat neurotic. In ancient times, the primitive urge to remove yourself from danger was critical to survival. In modern life, it makes you look like a flake. You duck out of an awkward social gathering with a lame excuse. If you don’t feel prepared for an important exam, you fake an illness to get out of it. By obeying this instinct, you missed out on an important lesson, which was that you did have the ability to learn how to handle difficulty.