My Year with Eleanor

by Noelle Hancock

  “Why do you think we didn’t work out?” I asked.

  He thought about this for a few seconds. I thought he’d say something like “We were too young” or “After I went away to college, the distance became too much of a strain.” Instead, he said, “I was more willing to throw myself out there and you liked things you were more used to.” I blanched. One of the things I’d loved about Josh was how he’d forced me out of my comfort zone. But maybe to him I’d simply been dragging him down? The idea hit home because it was one of the things that worried me about my relationship with Matt. Every time he criticized me for not being more social, I wondered how long until he just got fed up and left me for some girl who loved dinner parties and didn’t need a therapist to coax her into trying new things.

  Joey pulled over near a thick assemblage of bushes and opened the car door. “After an hour of driving around, my bladder is at breaking point,” he said. Then, after making sure a cop couldn’t see him, he headed toward the bushes and peed.

  The plan was to go back to Josh’s place, meet up with Monique, and head out to a bar. That way if meeting her was awkward, we could drink after. Immediately after. Josh and I were sitting on opposite sofas chatting in his living room when a key turned in the lock. My breath caught. This meeting, I knew, would set the tone for the rest of the weekend.

  “Anybody home?” a pleasant female voice called out.

  “We’re in here!” Josh called.

  When Monique walked in, I saw it was worse than I’d thought. She was even more beautiful in person. The Facebook photo had also failed to convey her perfect sumptuous breasts.

  She shook my hand. “I’m so happy to finally meet you,” she said so warmly I actually believed her.

  Josh scooted over and made room for her on the couch. I was relieved that they didn’t kiss hello. We chose a safe subject and chatted about work. She was an international program specialist at the U.S. Department of Commerce. She asked me questions about my Year of Fear, and I recounted some of my latest adventures. At one point she reached over and stroked his hair. It was hair that I’d stroked ten years earlier and would never stroke again, hair that had receded from me. The intimacy of the gesture caught me off-guard, and my stomach dropped a little. Then the moment passed. I was starting to relax when there was a knock at the door. Before anyone could answer, a tall woman with dark wavy hair bounded into the room. “Noelle, this is our friend Trouble,” Josh told me. “She’s coming out partying with us tonight.”

  Soon we arrived at a spirited Georgetown bar called Mr. Smith’s. A few of Josh’s college buddies stopped by, and everyone took turns buying drinks and shots. Mr. Smith’s had in its employ a gifted piano player with a marginal singing voice, not that it mattered when every patron was trying to drown him out.

  “Sweeeeeeeet Caroliiiiiine! Buh-buh-buh! Good times never seemed so good. So good! So good! So good!” we thundered, pumping our fists in the air.

  “I got this round,” I said. “Who wants whiskey?” Josh and Trouble raised their hands, while Mo-Mo stuck to her vodka cranberry. The three of us tossed back the shots. Josh slammed his shot glass on the counter, planted his face between Trouble’s sizable breasts, and shook his head vigorously while vibrating his lips, a gesture known as motorboating. Trouble unleashed a howl. Appalled, I glanced over at Mo-Mo but she was laughing with delight.

  Okay. Now I remembered why we didn’t work out.

  We left after Trouble got kicked out for sticking her hand in the ceiling fan and nearly breaking it. We relocated to a nearby dance club, where Josh immediately began flirting with a group of middle-aged African American women. Soon they were all out on the dance floor where he was grooving behind one of them while repeatedly pretending to spank her ass. Mo-Mo watched the proceedings with amusement, occasionally snapping pictures with her cell phone. I excused myself to the bathroom. When I got back, Josh, Mo-Mo, and the rest of our group had been lost to the dance floor. I climbed up on a raised platform crowded with a group of giggly dancing coeds and spotted Monique encircled by some frat boy types. One of them was dry humping her aggressively. I scanned the room for Josh. He was break-dancing while the women from earlier cheered him on. I felt oddly protective of Monique. A rescue operation was clearly in order. I hopped down from the platform and danced my way over.

  “Hey girl!” I shrieked, throwing my arms around Mo-Mo, sliding between her and the guy. She flashed me a look of relief.

  “Yeah!” the guy cheered, thinking he now had two girls to dance with. He grabbed my hips and ground his pelvis into my butt. Perfect. I began by thrusting my pelvis wildly, so wildly, in fact, that I knocked him back several feet.

  “Whoa!” he called out, unsure what to make of this dance floor interloper. “Some moves you got there.”

  He attempted to get behind me again and again, but I thrust back my pelvis hard so he just bounced off. When he tried to slip past me to Monique, I proceeded to phase two: a call to arms. I waved my arms enthusiastically to the beat, lashing out unilaterally against everyone within several feet. The guys backed away in alarm. After a few minutes, they realized they were not going to get anywhere and slunk off into the crowd.

  Mo-Mo smiled at me. “That was great!”

  When we got home at three A.M., it was Mo-Mo who set up the couch and made sure I had a glass of water and extra blankets. I took a sip of the water and gulped down my sleeping pill for the night. The second their bedroom door closed, I popped in the Jessica-recommended, sounds-of-sex–blocking foam earplugs. For at least an hour, I stared at the ceiling listening to my heartbeat, which somehow sounded magnified through the earplugs, a heartbeat in surround sound. I had three major challenges coming up; despite all my worry time and compartmentalizing, it was getting harder not to stress about them. I was too wound up to sleep. Also, I was on a couch, so it was harder to get comfortable. I squinted at the clock on their DVD player: 5:00 A.M. In a few hours they’d be getting up and I’d be crabby from not getting enough sleep. I didn’t want to be a rude houseguest, right? I rolled over and reached into my backpack, which was on the floor leaning against the couch. I pulled out the bottle, reasoning that this didn’t count because I was doing it for Josh and Mo-Mo, not myself. They shouldn’t have to suffer because of my insomnia. Anyway, I didn’t need much. Just half a milligram. It was almost nothing.

  The next morning I woke up to Mo-Mo handing me a mug of fresh coffee and asking if I’d care for pancakes, which she’d made herself. I was touched.

  “Josh had to run to the office,” she said as we settled around the kitchen table, “but he’ll be back soon to drive you to the bus station.”

  She and I chatted easily over breakfast. It was just the two of us, Josh’s past and Josh’s future. I was amazed at how natural it felt and how much I liked her. Out of all the challenges, this was the most personal. Most of my fears were about letting go of something that had been holding me back. With Josh, I faced my fear of letting go of a person—or in this case, an idea of a person.

  When Josh drove me to my bus, Mo-Mo came along. Riding in the backseat of their station wagon to the bus stop, I felt as if they were my parents. They hugged me good-bye, and I hoisted my backpack over one shoulder and got in line for the bus. Just before I stepped on, I turned and saw they were still standing in front of their car waving at me.

  I got a window seat and spent most of the ride staring out of it, seeing nothing. I’d been sabotaging my relationship with perfectionism. I’d been searching for Matt’s flaws, looking for clues that our relationship might not work out. In the process I’d taken his positive qualities for granted. I could see that now.

  When I was an hour away, Matt sent me a text message. “Baby, you’ve almost returned to me!” it said. “Can’t wait to see you!”

  I’d needed to be reminded of the horrible arguments I had with Ben to appreciate that Matt and I didn’t fight. Remembering ho
w emotionally distant Isaiah was made me grateful that Matt wasn’t withholding. He gave himself fully and freely to me. He spent hours driving me to activities that he had no vested interest in. At my trapeze recital he’d videotaped my performance and stepped on several audience members as he scrambled to get the best angle. I couldn’t believe I ever doubted him. Josh and I had had our moments, but we’d also burnt out quickly. The passion had been unstable. Josh had often left me wanting. Matt’s love may not have been showy but it was there, always. It was a well I could draw from at any time. When I was around Josh, I became my best version of myself. Josh dragged me out of my comfort zone and forced me to try new things. But I could become that person for myself. I had to become that person for myself.

  “There’s my girl!” Matt called out when I opened the door to his apartment. I followed his voice to the bedroom where he was reading one of those goofy science-fiction novels he’s addicted to. “You were gone so long I forgot how sexy you are! I love this shirt on you,” he said, pulling me down on the bed to nuzzle me. I was wearing a dirty Yale T-shirt. I looked at his face to see if he was teasing, but he was completely serious.

  Three weeks after my visit I received an e-mail from Josh:

  I wanted to let you know that Mo-Mo and I got engaged this past weekend. She was very surprised, but we are superexcited and looking forward to planning everything. We both wanted to share the news with you.

  At the word engaged my heart instinctively leaped up in my chest. Then I read it over, acknowledged it, accepted it. Everything was as it should be.

  “Wow. Congrats!” I wrote back. “How did you propose? Was it a big grand gesture or did you keep it simple?”

  “I put together a scavenger hunt at the US Arboretum,” he e-mailed, “and at the final clue, where I had first told her I loved her, we were getting ready for a picnic and I got down on one knee. So kind of a mix of the grand and the simple.”

  For a second I was speechless. Then I forwarded the e-mail exchange to Jessica and attached a note saying. “He stole my bit! For his engagement! Oh, that is cheap. That is cheap!”

  “Well, think of it this way,” she replied. “After the rabbi pronounces them man and wife, Josh will probably motorboat the maid of honor.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Courage is more exhilarating than fear and in the long run it is easier. We do not have to become heroes overnight. Just a step at a time, meeting each thing that comes up, seeing it is not as dreadful as it appeared, discovering we have the strength to stare it down.

  —ELEANOR ROOSEVELT

  “So next you’re doing stand-up comedy, then you’re going to work at a funeral home for a week, right?” Dr. Bob asked.

  “Then Kilimanjaro. Remind me again why I saved the biggest challenges for the end?”

  “It’s too bad you couldn’t have combined the two and done stand-up at the funeral home. You’d have been guaranteed a good crowd!”

  I groaned.

  “You know, public speaking is the number one fear in America,” he said matter-of-factly. “Death is actually number two.”

  “Yeah, Jerry Seinfeld has a bit about that. Most people would rather be in the coffin than delivering the eulogy. I get that. When I get up onstage, death feels like a reasonable alternative.”

  “So stand-up is your biggest fear, then?”

  I nodded. My muscles tensed up just talking about it. “I would rather do anything, anything else. I’d honestly give everything in my bank account—well, what’s left of it—to get out of doing stand-up. It’s completely irrational, I know.”

  “Not at all. People are afraid of public speaking for the same reason animals get nervous when they’re surrounded by potential predators,” he said. “Remember it all goes back to evolution. Our ancestors had dangerous neighbors. Public speaking involves taking a dominant position in front of strangers. Imagine doing that ten thousand years ago in a fierce environment surrounded by starving, angry, and somewhat paranoid strangers. The person who got up in front of the strangers and gave a speech ended up as dinner.”

  “So the audience is going to eat me alive, is what you’re telling me?”

  He winked. “If you’re lucky, they’ll kill you first.”

  Several weeks before, I’d e-mailed Chris to ask if he knew any comedy clubs holding open mic nights. As a blogger for New York magazine’s website, he was plugged in to everything that was happening in New York. He’d e-mailed me a press release for something called the New York’s Funniest Reporter contest, in which journalists were to take the stage at a comedy club and perform six minutes of stand-up. At the end a panel of judges would declare a winner.

  “And it’s for charity,” he’d added in a follow-up e-mail. “A hundred percent of proceeds go to Operation Uplink, which buys phone cards for soldiers in Iraq so they can call their families.” This convinced me I’d found the right venue to make my stand-up debut. Charity was such a big part of Eleanor’s life, I’d been regretting that I hadn’t done more to honor that this year.

  During her years in the White House, from 1933 to 1945, Eleanor delivered an estimated fourteen hundred speeches across the United States and abroad, almost always from minimal notes. She also taught classes in drama, literature, and American history. Her public speaking career lasted forty years, and she’s still known as one of the most popular orators of all time. She accomplished all this even though she started out petrified of public speaking, suffering from stage fright well into adulthood. She was pushed into it by Louis Howe, a former newspaper reporter and Franklin’s chief political adviser. He was a chain-smoking gnome of a man who once declared he had one of the four ugliest faces in New York. While Franklin was recuperating from polio, Howe encouraged Eleanor to give speeches at political events to keep her husband’s name in the air.

  “I remember my own feeling that this was a thing I could not possibly do,” Eleanor wrote in You Learn by Living.

  “You can do anything you have to do,” Louis insisted. “Get out and try.”

  She delivered her first address at the age of thirty-eight at a luncheon for the Women’s Division of the New York State Democratic Committee. Louis sat in the back of the room and observed.

  “I was a most unwilling victim. When I got up to speak I was shaking with fear because I had no idea how to prepare a speech, how to talk, how to handle an audience,” she remembered. “When it was over he criticized everything I had done, particularly the fact that I had giggled every now and then, though there was nothing funny.”

  “Never write it down,” Louis advised her. “You will lose your audience.”

  That advice was something of a problem for me. Because where I truly excelled was blanking out. I’d start a sentence and a few words in I’d forget where I was going with it. One time I was approached by a VH1 producer who was looking for pop culture writers to appear on a short segment they were doing about hot Hollywood couples. For the audition, they brought me down to the studio and led me into a small windowless room that contained a video camera sitting astride a metal tripod. It was the kind of space where you’d expect to have your head cut off on the Internet. There I sat down on a metal folding chair next to a producer, who asked me very basic questions like “What do you think of Jay-Z and Beyoncé?”

  “Uh, Beyoncé is—” I stopped, my mind blank.

  “It’s okay. Just start again,” the producer urged.

  I began again, in a shaky voice, “The thing about Beyoncé and Jay-Z—” I broke off. “I’m sorry, I’m just nervous.” Even being in a tiny room with just a producer and a cameraman was overwhelming. This went on for about ten minutes before the three of us unanimously decided that I should leave.

  In the weeks that followed, I stumbled upon material from all sorts of sources. Jessica phoned me one night to announce a mutual friend of ours was pregnant.

  “Can you believe i
t?” Jessica sighed. “Another one bites the dust.”

  “Does it make me a bad person that I’m kind of repulsed by the idea of pregnancy?” I asked. “A tadpole swims up inside you, latches on like a parasite, and grows bigger and bigger until one day it bursts forth? I’m sorry, that doesn’t sound like a miracle to me. That sounds like something you picked up in Mexico.”

  “That’s why I’m going C-section all the way. I don’t negotiate with terrorists.”

  I laughed. “Did you seriously just compare babies to terrorists?”

  “Anyone who takes your body hostage, explodes through it, and leaves behind that kind of path of destruction is a terrorist. And what’s the protocol in a hostage situation? You send in a team to take the terrorist out.”

  Cradling my cell phone between my shoulder and cheek, I fished around in a kitchen drawer for a pen and notepad. “Wait, can you repeat everything you just said?”

  On the subway one day a bodybuilder type with an aggressive suntan took a seat next to me. He immediately spread his legs into a wide straddle, committing several violations of personal space as his knees and meaty thighs invaded my leg area. This happened a lot on public transportation, and usually I responded by primly pinning my legs together and angling them away from the offender to minimize human contact. But this time, when I scooted over a few inches, Roids spread out even more as if to say, “Great! More room for me.”

  I turned to face him. “Excuse me, but this whole situation you’ve got going on here”—I gestured to his legs—“it’s not working for me.”