My Year with Eleanor (22 page)

HEREBY AWARDS THIS CERTIFICATE OF TANDEM FREEFALL SKYDIVE TO

Noelle Hancock

WHO, ON THE 9TH OF MAY IN THE YEAR 2009, DID EMBARK ON A MOST FANTASTIC JOURNEY. EXITING HIGH ABOVE THE GROUND FROM AN AIRPLANE IN FLIGHT, CASTING FATE TO THE WIND AND FALLING FREE. MAY YOU ALWAYS ENJOY BLUE SKIES ABOVE, AND MAY YOUR LANDINGS BE FOREVER SOFT.

“It sounds like it was written by an extra from
Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure,
” Bill grumbled, “which isn't that surprising considering the strain of dude we had instructing us.” He still looked slightly shaken from his wild descent with Sebastian.

“The instructors definitely wrote that while smoking weed in that trailer with the pirate flag,” Chris agreed.

“I actually think it's kind of sweet,” Jessica said.

We turned to her in surprise and she blushed. “I mean, when I was floating down I was thinking all of these hippy-dippy ‘I love the universe and everyone in it' thoughts. And it
was
a totally freeing experience.” She added, with a defiant little nod, “So, yeah, I get whatever the hell they're talking about.”

“I brought a surprise,” Chris said. Grinning slyly, he pulled a bottle of rum from his backpack. “Shall we celebrate?” We passed it down the line, each us taking a long pull straight from the bottle. Then we did it again.

I was so utterly content that I was slightly wistful. It was the feeling I got when I was about to finish a really great book. I was nostalgic for this moment even as I was still in it. Soon the train would come and whisk us back to the city. I wished I could sit there forever in this train station in the middle of nowhere with the three people in the world who would jump out of a plane for me.

Chapter Twelve

A mature person is one who does not think only in absolutes, who is able to be objective even when deeply stirred emotionally, who has learned that there is both good and bad in all people and in all things, and who walks humbly and deals charitably with the circumstances of life.

—ELEANOR ROOSEVELT

“I
t was the weirdest thing,” I told Dr. Bob when he asked how skydiving went. “When I was about to jump out of the plane, I wasn't afraid at all.” I brushed a clump of my hair off my forehead, remembering the loose strands had danced in the air when they flung open the door and the wind rushed in; yet somehow I'd stayed utterly composed.  I told myself, ‘You don't have to get through this long scary ordeal, you just have to get through the present moment.' When I thought of skydiving as just a collection of moments, I realized there were maybe three seconds of scariness—the part where I was stepping across thin air to put my foot on a ledge outside the plane. And when that started to feel scary, I brought it down to an even more micro level by concentrating on my shoe. I was in this mental place that was supercontrolled, yet free.”

I noticed Dr. Bob was smiling at me knowingly. “What? Why are you looking at me like that?” I asked.

“You were practicing mindfulness.”

“I was?” I said wondrously. “I was!” I'd tried to practice mindful meditation for months, but up in the air it just clicked.

N
ow that I'd figured out how to conquer physical fears, it was time to start facing more emotional ones, like my fears about my relationship with Matt, which I'd shoved into the basement of my mind since the Nantucket trip. So much of the time in relationships we're peering into the future, trying to predict what may lie ahead. Maybe the real answers were in the past. And if I wanted to avoid screwing up my relationship with him, I needed to examine the mistakes I made in past relationships.

“It is easy for us to be quite misled about ourselves, about our bad qualities as well as our good,” Eleanor once wrote. “And it is impossible to proceed with the right motives instead of the wrong ones as long as we have any serious misconceptions about ourselves.”

There were two types of people in this world: people who stayed friends with their exes and people who didn't. I fell squarely into the latter category. I hadn't spoken to my exes in years, which made them a pure, untapped resource. Ask your friends or family members to talk about your flaws and they'll soft-pedal it. But your exes will give it to you straight. You're no longer friends so they don't worry as much about protecting your feelings. Also, significant others are privy to your dark side in a way that family and friends rarely are. It's an unvarnished opinion. As Dr. Bob pointed out, perfectionists organize their lives around avoiding mistakes. The thought of revisiting my past failures and rejections made me feel more vulnerable than any physical challenge I'd undertaken. But it would be worth it if it would help me avoid making the same mistakes with Matt.

Frankly, I was shocked that my two college boyfriends, Isaiah and Ben, agreed to meet with me. There was no upside to the interview for them, after all. Both relationships had ended badly.

Isaiah and I had met during my senior year of college. He was the captain of the basketball team and we dated for ten months. In the beginning he was affectionate and caring; then over the course of the year he grew distant. I asked him what was wrong and he wouldn't tell me. Toward the end of our relationship he positively shut down. He rarely wanted to hook up with me. The more distant he became, the harder I clung. My presence seemed to make him irritable. I no longer made him laugh. He'd been really taken with me in the beginning, so I knew it must have been something I'd done. Trying to get us back to the place we'd been before, I threw myself deeper into the relationship, which only made him retreat further. One night while sitting on a beach together, I said: “I love you.” When he said nothing back, it was a symbolic moment: I'd been having a one-sided relationship with myself. A few months later he dumped me—horrendously—on my birthday, via cell phone, from another girl's party. It was one of the more distressing periods of my life, so it was difficult to reach out to him. Yet he sounded happy to hear from me and, to my surprise, had incredibly positive memories of our relationship.

“But you grew to resent me,” I said. “Why? Was it something I did?”

“It had nothing to do with you or us. I was in a depressive state. I was nearing the end of college, I'd been playing poorly all season, and I realized that basketball, the thing I'd lived for my entire life, was over for me. That was the most difficult year of my life, but it would've been much more difficult without you. You were the happier part of my day. I felt safe when I was with you.”

I was dumbfounded. “
Seriously?
” For so many years I'd wondered how I'd screwed things up and it turned out that it hadn't been me at all.

With Ben I'd had the opposite problem: I hadn't loved him enough, yet I hadn't been willing to let him go either. After a year and a half together, I semi-broke up with him; then we sort of got back together while seeing other people at the same time (note: this
always
works out well). Our neither-here-nor-there relationship carried on for another year, but it had curdled. What was once sweet turned sour, chunks of bitterness clogging all of our interactions.

“What mistakes did I make in our relationship?” I asked him. We were having lunch in New Haven, where he now worked as a building manager for the Yale Divinity School.

“I wish you'd be more firm with me and hadn't allowed us to keep hooking up,” he said. “I wish I'd had enough self-respect to stop trying to get you back.”

“Why do you think it got so bad?”

“For that last year and a half we didn't have the security of a relationship, so we were jealous and insecure. And we were immature.”

Immature
. That was one word for it. We behaved in ways we never had before and haven't since with anyone else. Ben left drunk messages at five in the morning about how much he loved me and hated me. Once, after he copped to fooling around with one of my friends, I stormed into his closet and pulled from the hangers every nice shirt and sweater I'd ever bought him.

“I'll be damned if you're going to go around picking up other chicks using my good taste!” I shouted over the pile in my arms.

“You can't do that!” he protested. “Those were presents!”

“And
presently,
I'm taking them back,” I said, marching off. Begrudgingly, I returned the repossessed shirts the next morning after a firm lecture from my roommate, Amanda, on the spirit of giving.

“Okay, last question,” I said at the end of our interview. “People change a lot in relationships. Or sometimes the person that they always were just becomes clearer. How did your opinion of me change from the beginning of the relationship to the end?”

He thought for a moment, started to speak, then stopped. I nodded encouragingly and he admitted with a grimace, “By the end of our relationship, you were no longer attractive to me. Like, I knew I'd once thought you were pretty, but by the end you'd become ugly to me.” Well, that stung, but I could tell that it had pained him to say it. To break the tension, I laughed—then so did Ben. I thanked him for his honesty.

The third ex-boyfriend, Josh, was my high school sweetheart and most serious relationship of the three, and therefore the scariest. My fingers were actually shaking as I typed my pitch: “Hey, I'm working on this project where I try to face all my fears before age thirty so I'm going back and interviewing all my ex-boyfriends about our relationship (because how scary is that—right?! LOL!). Would you want to sit down and chat sometime soon? I can come to D.C.”

“Hey there. Sounds dangerous! Ha!” Josh wrote back. “Can't wait to hear more about it. You should come down the weekend after next! You can stay on my couch.”

My surprise that he agreed quickly turned to worry. I hadn't mentioned Matt in the e-mail and didn't know if Josh was dating anyone himself. What if he thought this was an elaborate booty call? Surely he didn't think I needed to cross state lines to get some action? But a few days later another e-mail from Josh arrived.

“By the way,” he wrote, “my girlfriend, Monique, pretty much sleeps at my apartment every night. But don't worry—she is happy to have you stay with us. We're really looking forward to it.”

Both relief and alarm surged through me. Relief because I now had a non-awkward reason to write back, “So am I! And the next time you guys are in New York you'll have to meet my boyfriend, Matt.” The uneasiness came from the realization that not only would I be hanging with my ex-boyfriend for two days, but I'd also be sleeping fifteen feet away from him and his current girlfriend. Suddenly my decision to stay the night felt a little aggressive.

“I can't believe that you're doing this,” Jess said when I called her in a mild panic the night before I left for D.C.

I opened my laptop. “What? Going to D.C. to spend a weekend with my high school sweetheart and his practically live-in girlfriend? Or planning to cyberstalk the girlfriend before I go?”

“Both. You know what? I'm coming over,” she told me. “I'm just leaving the gym, so I've showered but will be adorably sans makeup. Adorably meaning frighteningly.”

“Bring a bottle of wine.” I was too addled to even remark on the revelation that Jessica had joined a gym.

“I
brought wine and Chris,” Jessica said when I opened the door to find the two of them on my doorstep. As soon as we had poured the wine, Jess hauled my computer into her lap.

“First of all, let's get a visual and see what we're working with.” Within seconds, she'd pulled up Josh's Facebook page and had identified the girlfriend via one of his photo albums.

“Oh shit,” I breathed, reaching across Jessica and pressing a button to enlarge one of the pictures. Lustrous black hair and rich olive skin filled the screen. She was stunning. I made a despairing face at Chris and Jessica.

“Okay, so she's uncomfortably pretty,” she conceded.

“She looks really fun, too,” I said miserably.

“You can tell from a photograph that she's fun?” Chris asked dubiously.

“It's her earrings—they're fabulous.” Suddenly a horrifying thought entered my mind. “Oh God, do you think they'll have sex while I'm there? Is that a turn-on? Like having sex when your parents are home?” I was down to half a pill a night, but it still took me at least an hour to fall asleep.

“Hell yeah!” Jessica said. “A girl's gotta mark her territory when her man's ex is in the next room.”

“We would,” Chris agreed.

“Yeah, but we're petty and small.” I buried my face in a pillow. “You guys! If I hear them having sex, I will seriously go into cardiac arrest.”

“Earplugs,” Jessica advised, raising her wineglass and toasting their existence.

“What if they're all lovey-dovey in front of me and it's weird?”

“Why does it matter?” Chris asked. “You've got a perfectly wonderful boyfriend of your own to kiss and hump.”

“I know, you're absolutely right.” He was so wonderful, in fact, that when I'd asked him if he was okay with me visiting Josh and his girlfriend for the weekend, he'd replied, “This is someone you dated when you were kids and we're not kids anymore. So, aside from the fact that I trust you unhesitatingly, it never really occurred to me to worry.” He had no reason to worry. It wasn't that I thought I'd have feelings for Josh, but that I'd have feelings for Monique—jealous feelings. It was one of my worst qualities. I had the capacity to be jealous over guys I'd dated years ago, guys I didn't even like. It was incredibly childish and surely spoke to some larger insecurity that should be explored with Dr. Bob, but first I had to get through this weekend.

J
osh had one of those boisterous voices that grabbed you by the shirtfront and said, “Now hear this!” He was a native Texan yet seemed like a scrappy kid from 1930s Brooklyn. One time when he was walking up the stairs, I saw him turn to the popular cheerleader directly behind him and say, “I'm gonna let you look at my ass, okay? It's sensational, but try to contain yourself.” He was brash and inappropriate, and I loved him immediately. I figured out his schedule and rearranged my routes so that I ran into him between classes. I flirted with him stridently, slapping his butt as I passed him in the hallway.

“Hey, no touching the merchandise!” he'd cry.

We'd been dating for a few weeks when he invited me to the ROTC formal. I borrowed a friend's blue satin dress that implied, erroneously, that I had breasts and my mom blow-dried my hair for the occasion. We were in the middle of a slow dance when a dozen of Josh's ROTC buddies approached him eagerly, saying, “It's almost time!”

“Time for what?” I asked.

“Actually that's something I've been meaning to ask you about.”

“Okay . . .” My heart raced. He was going to ask me to be his steady girlfriend. Here in front of everyone!

“Since my first ROTC ball freshman year, I've had this ritual of getting down on all fours and galloping around the dance floor while bucking like a mule,” he explained. “But I was thinking this year maybe you could ride me around the dance floor instead.”

By the time I realized he was serious, the partygoers had formed a massive circle around us. Someone even had a video camera. Josh got down on his hands and knees and looked at me over his shoulder with a “how 'bout it?” expression. When your crush requests you take part in an elaborate donkey fantasy before your contemporaries, there's really only one way to react. So I hitched up my floor-length gown, climbed on his back, and held on as tight as I could.