My Year with Eleanor Read Online Free Page B

a school like that. At my high school, students had sometimes brought their children to class. One time someone dropped a backpack on the floor and the gun inside went off, hitting someone in the leg. School administrators couldn’t figure out how to ban guns, so they banned backpacks instead.
    Surprisingly, Eleanor flourished under Madame Souvestre. She engaged in lively discussions on world affairs. She tried out for field hockey despite having never seen a game and made the first team. “I think that day was one of the proudest moments of my life,” she later said.
    During school holidays, the headmistress invited her favorite student to accompany her on trips across Europe. Traveling with Madame Souvestre was “a revelation” for Eleanor. “She did all the things that in a vague way you had always felt you wanted to do.” They took unmarked paths and changed their schedule on a whim. During an evening train ride through Italy, Souvestre spontaneously grabbed their luggage and ordered Eleanor off the train. She wanted to walk on the beach and see the Mediterranean in the moonlight.
    â€œNever 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.
    â€œEach 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.
    â€œJesus!” 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.
    â€œSo I’ve figured out what we’re doing for my