“Because the Plexiglas made it look like they were going to fall.”
“Kittens and puppies also refused to cross the glass,” he said. “Then they brought in some baby ducks. Guess what? The ducks walked across without a quack of protest. Now why weren’t the baby ducks afraid?”
“Because they have wings?” I venture.
“Exactly.”
I think about this for a moment. “But if a fear is instinctual, aren’t we just . . . stuck with it?”
“If we can experience a seemingly risky situation over and over, without harmful consequences, we can train our brains to be less afraid.”
“So you grow your own wings, basically.”
“Exactly.”
After I limped my way back from the trapeze rig, Chris kindly lent me his cold water bottle, which was lying horizontally across my swelling toes. My cheeks were flushed with excitement over what I’d accomplished, but I was also more scared than I’d been at the beginning of class. Before my turn on the trapeze, there had still been a chance it wouldn’t be scary, but now I had confirmation. Now I knew exactly how fast and high it was going to feel. But I also knew that while it was brave to do something you think is going to be scary, it was braver to do something you know is going to be scary. And to have faith that, eventually, it will start to be less scary.
This actually turned out to be true. After I had performed the knee hang and backflip combo three more times, my heart rate had slowed considerably. After the fourth turn, my hands stopped shaking. Right before our final turn, I noted with trepidation that a stocky Latino gentleman was sitting on the second trapeze at the other end of the rig. At which point Ted announced that it was time for us to do “the catch.”
“You’ll swing out and hang by your knees just like before. But this time, when you put your arms out, my man Pepe here”—the man on the second trapeze, now hanging by his knees, gave a friendly upside-down wave—“will catch your hands. Then you’ll let go with your legs and he’ll swing you out across the net.”
A nervous tingling simmered in my stomach. I didn’t understand the mechanics of this operation. What if he grabbed my hands but I didn’t release my knees in time? I pictured myself ripping in half—my arms and torso carried off by Pepe while my legs and knees, still hooked over the bar, swung back toward Hank.
“I don’t know if I can do this,” I whispered. Jessica looked equally uncertain.
“I don’t know if I can hold hands with someone named Pepe,” Chris said.
The gymnast was the first to go. Because she was more advanced, Ted had given her a more complicated stunt to perform. Instead of doing a knee hang, she did a perfect upside-down split. I held my breath as she took her hands off the bar and reached confidently for Pepe.
“Oooh, aren’t we special?” Jessica grumbled as the girl backflipped onto the net. “Sure, she can do tricks, but can she menstruate?”
As I climbed the frail ladder a final time, my terror had downshifted to mere apprehension. It helped that the sun had gone and the rig was now illuminated by spotlights. The effect was festive, like a real circus, but more important, my world had been made smaller, less overwhelming. Instead of looking around, fretting over how high I was, I could only see what was right in front of me. I focused on each individual ladder rung, the meditative rhythm of my hands, and made it quickly to the top this time. When I pulled myself up onto the platform, Hank looked impressed.
“We’ll make a flyer out of you yet.” He grinned and I grinned back. I took the trapeze from his hand. On the other trapeze, Pepe was hanging by his knees, building up momentum. I tried not to imagine accidentally crashing into him. Instead, I assumed the position, leaning back, toes hanging over the edge of the platform.
“Ready!”
I bent my knees in anticipation. The tension was almost unbearable in its very in-betweenness. It was the pause at the top of the roller coaster when it’s no longer going up but not yet going down. It was the moment after the track runners have taken their marks, but just before the horn blares. It was a moment between moments, defined by what’s happened before it and what is about to happen. It was nothing, but it was everything.
“HEP!”
I sliced through the air, enjoying the sensation of it whooshing past my ears.
“Hook your knees, Noelle!” Ted’s voice called from below. Using the last of my abdominal strength, I drew my legs to my chest and hooked them over the bar. Back arching! Arms extending! Here was Pepe! His meaty hands clamped firmly onto mine. I straightened my legs and my knees released the bar quite naturally. Now I was no longer upside down but soaring toward the twinkling New York skyline. I’d never been one of those people who described cityscapes as beautiful, but it was dazzling. Millions of tiny windows glowed crisply in the darkness. The class cheered—no one louder than Chris and Jessica—and someone let out a whistle. I flopped down onto the net and staggered toward the edge, grinning goofily. I felt the stirrings of something I hadn’t felt in a while: pride. Not the pride that comes from a salary bump or a promotion, but the kind that comes when you’ve pleasantly surprised yourself. At the end of class we said our good-byes (Hank actually gave me a high five) and gathered our belongings.
“Now can we go get drinks?” Jessica asked.
“Absolutely. I’m buying,” I said.
As the three of us limped out the gate on sore legs, Chris asked, “So you’re really going to do three hundred sixty-five different scary things this year?”
I shook my head. “No, the quote only said that I have to do one scary thing every day. It doesn’t have to be a new thing each time. If we learned anything today, it’s that just because you’ve done something frightening once doesn’t mean it’s suddenly not scary anymore.”
“Still,” Jessica said doubtfully, “scaring the crap out of yourself every day? I don’t know if I could make it a whole year.”
When she said this, a new thought started nagging at me. I’d been so focused on making it through this one day that I hadn’t considered how it would feel to do this day after day after day after day. Looking at my cell phone, I realized it was already 10:00 P.M. Just nine short hours before I’d have to wake up and face my fears all over again. I swallowed but said nothing. I wasn’t sure I’d make it either.
Chapter Three
Looking back I see that I was always afraid of something: of the dark, of displeasing people, of failure. Anything I accomplished had to be done across a barrier of fear.
—ELEANOR ROOSEVELT
“So it seems my Ivy League–educated daughter has run away and joined the circus?” The voice on the phone was joking but concerned.
I groaned inwardly. “Hi, Dad.” I knew I shouldn’t have e-mailed him the pictures from my trapeze class. This was a man whose favorite coffee mug read: Sometimes the road less traveled is less traveled for a reason. But my parents had been so skeptical about the entire Year of Fear project. I thought the absurdity of the trapeze class might warm them to the idea.
There was a fluttering in the background and I knew my dad was flipping through the Wall Street Journal, which he’s read front to back every day for the last twenty-five years. (When he found out what paper Matt wrote for, my dad sniffed, “Well, I hope he’s not one of those elitist liberal kooks. That paper’s full of them. See, what I like about the Journal is that they’re not biased.”)
“Did I catch you at a bad time?” he drawled. “Busy trainin’ for the ice capades?”
“I’ll have you know, I’m at a coffee shop, working on a freelance article for a magazine.”
“Have you thought any more about law school?” he asked. Leave it to Dad to dive right in. “Now that’s job security right there. You could make $300 an hour writing wills.”
“And then I would die of boredom, which would have an agreeable symmetry.” With my free hand, I started massagin
g my temples to ward off the headache that always followed this debate. My dad was a businessman, specializing in fiber optics, whatever that means. When I was a kid, he was always dragging me to the office to groom me for corporate life. I’d usually pass the hours Xeroxing my face. Once he’d realized I wasn’t destined for business, he latched onto the idea that I should be a lawyer and hadn’t let go for two decades.
“Well, I think you should consider moving out of that city and coming home to Texas.” My parents viewed my living in New York as if I was studying abroad or on some kind of caper. I sensed they were awaiting my return to “real life.”
“New York is my home,” I said firmly.
“Well, it’s an awfully expensive place to live when you don’t have a full-time job. How much are you payin’ for that apartment these days?”
“Bye, Dad!”
I laid my head down on my keyboard and banged it a few times, causing jfkdjfkdjflkdjfdlkjfdlksjfdlsjf to jump onto the screen. When I went to delete it, I saw that I had an e-mail from my friend Bill. It contained only one line: Want to rage in the cage with me this weekend?
“Excuse me?” I wrote back. “Are you challenging me to a steel cage match?”
“Close,” he replied. “I’m going shark cage diving this weekend. Sharks are on your list of fears to conquer, right?”
I hesitated. Sharks are a long-held fear of mine stemming from a 1986 home screening of Jaws. The ocean, I’d suddenly learned, was full of beasts that killed indiscriminately and with musical accompaniment. Warily, I clicked on the link Bill sent me. It was a website for a shark cage diving company called Happy Manatee Charters. It was hosting a two-day expedition this very weekend. The boat left on Friday morning and returned late Saturday afternoon.
Since taking that first step off the trapeze board three weeks before, I’d taken on one fear a day, per my mission, but they’d been small victories, things that I would’ve let slide before, but not under the new Eleanor Roosevelt administration. I’d sent my salmon back at a sushi restaurant for being too fishy. I’d called up my credit card company and asked it to lower my interest rate, and after speaking to four different supervisors, they finally agreed. Matt and I had gone to a sold-out movie and were pleased to find, in the packed theater, one row that was completely empty except for a single college-aged guy sitting in the center. Apparently, he’d been sent ahead as a representative for less punctual friends because when we went to sit down, he called out smugly, “This entire row is saved, bro.” We turned to keep walking up the steps; then I stopped.
“Not anymore!” I declared. Over the guy’s sputtering protests, I plopped down in one of the forbidden seats, pulling Matt down into the seat next to me. Normally I would’ve slunk away and stewed about it for a while. It was nerve-racking but exhilarating.
I’d realized in the previous weeks that I needed to be practical about this experiment. If I was going to keep this up for a year, not every challenge could be as elaborate or expensive as trapeze lessons. Some fears had to be faced in small moments, whether preplanned or things that just came up during the day. When I started paying attention, I saw how often I avoided confrontation. I’d told myself this was a sign of maturity. After all, wasn’t it childish to make a fuss about trivial matters? Now I realized that at the heart of these situations was a fear of offending someone. But if I couldn’t stand up to people when there was little at stake, how would I summon the courage when it did matter? Standing your ground could be even scarier than standing on a two-story platform.
I didn’t feel ready to face sharks yet. There was only a month left of summer and I’d been hoping to put sharks off until next spring so I could work my way up to it. But maybe Bill’s e-mail was a sign that it was time for another big challenge. Besides, putting it off would be another instance of me avoiding confrontation. And to quote Eleanor, “What you don’t do can be a destructive force.”
Screw it. “I’m in,” I e-mailed back.
On Thursday afternoon, I boarded a three-hour train to Greenport, Long Island, where the boat, The Manatee, was scheduled to depart the following morning. Upon arrival, I checked into a cheap motel room and called Bill.
“There’s a beer bottle opener nailed to the bathroom wall in my motel room. Jealous?”
“That room obviously knows what you’re going to be facing tomorrow,” he said. “Sorry I can’t be there to help you put it to good use.”
Bill cohosted a nightly television talk show and couldn’t take off work Friday. So as soon as he was off the air, he’d jump in a rental car and meet our boat at Martha’s Vineyard late Friday night.
“It’ll be nice to see you, Hancock,” he said. “What’s it been—seven, eight months?” Wow, had it been that long? Like so many of my friendships lately, ours had been subsisting on e-mail and texts, a sort of friendship life support system.
Bill, in particular, had been totally behind the concept for a Year of Fear. He and I had met ten years before during my summer internship at Stuff magazine. He was the features editor, and as soon as I saw that he kept an inflatable alligator raft on the floor next to his desk, I thought, I need to be friends with this man.
“So are you prepared to die a horrible death tomorrow, Hancock?” he teased.
“Don’t remind me.” I groaned. “I can’t believe you actually do this stuff for fun.”
Actually I could believe it. He was a direct descendant of William Dawes Jr., who accompanied Paul Revere on his famous midnight ride. Fearlessness was practically in his DNA. This was a man who, in his late twenties, sneaked into a college and posed as a student for a week to see if it was as fun as he remembered. He finished the Walt Disney World marathon in Orlando. This wasn’t particularly unusual except that he did it in drag, changing every five miles into a different Disney princess costume.
When we sign off, Bill said, “I’ll see you on Saturday.” Then, pausing dramatically, he added, “Hopefully.” I hung up on his cackling, movie villain laughter.
This adventure seemed especially apropos considering water was one of Eleanor’s longest-running fears. It started when she was three years old, traveling by steamship to Europe with her parents. On the first day of the sail another boat got lost in the fog and collided with their ship, killing and injuring passengers. Elliott and Anna Roosevelt fled to a lifeboat while Eleanor stayed on deck. The plan was for the crew to drop her overboard and Elliott would catch her. “My father stood in a boat below me, and I was dangling over the side to be dropped into his arms,” Eleanor wrote. “I was terrified and shrieking and clung to those who were to drop me.” She screamed as she fell through the air and into Elliott’s waiting arms. Water and heights, unsurprisingly, fell out of Eleanor’s favor after this encounter. It didn’t help that Anna and Elliott sent their traumatized daughter to stay with relatives while they continued on their six-month tour of Europe. From then on they usually left her behind when they traveled because of her fear of boats. Being fearful, Eleanor learned, came with consequences.
A few years later there was another unfortunate incident while visiting cousins in Oyster Bay. Uncle Teddy Roosevelt “was horrified that I didn’t know how to swim so he thought he’d teach me as he taught all his own children, and threw me in,” Eleanor recalled. “And I sank rapidly to the bottom. He fished me out and lectured me on being frightened.”
The next morning I walked to the dock and met The Manatee’s captain, Gus, a hefty man with long brown dreadlocks and a monotone voice. The fishing boat was smaller and more rustic than I’d expected. The sleeping quarters were belowdecks in the hull. There was only room for two people to stand up at a time. There were bunk beds—bunk benches, really—built into the slanted walls. There was no shower on the boat, just a hose on deck with water pressure that would be the envy of any fire department. And while I’ve never considered myself someone who demands the finer things in life, I do enjoy a good roll of
toilet paper, and there was none in the bathroom—or “the commode,” as Captain Gus called it. I dug my cell phone out of my backpack and called Bill from the deck to ask him to bring toilet paper. Then, after making sure no one was within earshot, I hissed into the phone, “What if I have to go number two before we dock at Martha’s Vineyard?!”
“Maybe you’re supposed to use the hose on the back of the boat,” Bill answered cheerfully. “Just think of it as an industrial-strength bidet.”
All three of the other people on the trip were experienced divers. I took an instant liking to Ronald, a retired lawyer whose T-shirt read: WORK SUCKS, I’M GOING DIVING! On the back he had written BITE ME! in black marker and drawn a shark face, portrayed in three-quarter profile. Les, an underwater photographer, was a good-looking blond guy, but there was something creepy about his manner that I couldn’t quite explain. Mandy, a special-ed teacher from Pennsylvania, took off her swimsuit cover-up to reveal a neon pink bikini and an assortment of tattoos. Stretching across her lower back was an underwater seascape featuring sea horses, coral, and sea turtles. There was also a scuba diver tattoo on her left shoulder and, for the sake of variety, a mouse riding a motorcycle on her right.
“They were done by my friend, Mona. She really is an artist!” she said, arranging her body on the deck for optimal sunbathing.
The plan was to make the six-hour journey over to Martha’s Vineyard—stopping along the way to do some shark cage diving—and dock for the night. Then we’d repeat the journey, in reverse, the following day. The motor coughed to life, and soon Gus was navigating us out of the hamlet, steering with his right foot while eating a bowl of Cheerios. My stomach flip-flopped. There’s nothing more nauseating than the sight of milk in ninety-degree weather. An hour into the sail, I was downright queasy. I’d never been seasick before, but I knew my day had come as I watched Gus toss pieces of cut-up fish (called chum) into the boat’s wake to create a slick for the sharks to follow. Once the slick was several miles long, we dropped anchor and Gus pulled out a sealed, perforated bucket full of frozen fish.
My Year with Eleanor Page 4
