Roosevelt Eleanor - My year with Eleanor: a memoir

My Year with Eleanor

A Memoir

Noelle Hancock

For Matt,

who was my rock throughout

this entire process,

For my loving parents,

who showed me the importance of

staying down-to-earth,

And for Eleanor,

who taught me to fly

Contents

Your life is your own. You mold it. You make it. All anyone can do is to point out ways and means which have been helpful to others. Perhaps they will serve as suggestions to stimulate your own thinking until you know what it is that will fulfill you, will help you to find out what you want to do with your life.

ELEANOR ROOSEVELT

I was lying on a beach in Aruba, mulling a third pia colada, when I received a phone call announcing Id been laid off from my job. The call came, ironically, on my company cell phone. Id brought it with me to the beach in case something came up at work.

Something came up.

Theyre shutting us down! squeaked my coworker Lorena.

W-what?

The whole website has been closed down. She sounded like shed been crying. Were all out of a job.

I sprang forward on my lounge chair and struggled to free my butt, which had sunk between the vinyl straps. What are you talking about? I shook my head in disbelief.

They called us into a meeting and announced it this afternoon. It took everyone by surprise.

Why didnt anyone call me?

Theyve been trying, but the office has some kind of block on international calls. Im calling you from my cell, she said, dropping into a low, conspiratorial whisper. I thought youd rather hear it from a friend first.

But this doesnt make any sense. Were doing so well! Our online readership had been steadily climbing. Just last week, our website had drawn a million page views in one day.

Something about cutting costs. Her voice was a little loose. I listened closely and heard loud conversations and Bon Jovi in the background.

Are you at a bar? I asked, confused.

Yeah, the whole staff is at that Irish pub across the street from the office. Listen, I have to get back. Ill call you later, okay?

When I hung up the phone, I saw my freshly tanned fingers tremble slightly. I stared straight ahead without really seeing anything.

Who was that? Matt asked from the lounge chair next to me.

That was the office, I said dully. Ive been laid off.

Wait what ? Matt threw down his newspaper. He swung his legs around so he was facing me.

Theyve shut down the entire company, I continued in that odd emotionless voice. Announced in a meeting this afternoon.

Oh, baby, Im so sorry. Is there anything I can do?

He grabbed my hand and I felt the faint squish of sunscreen. Still, I couldnt bring myself to meet his gaze. I was stuck in one of those trances where it appears some invisible hand has smeared itself over your world. And, in a way, it had. It couldve been an impressionist painting: Girl Without a Job Sitting by the Sea, oil on canvas, 2008.

A ringing sound jerked me out of my daze. I turned and watched Matt grope inside our beach tote for his cell phone. As a political reporter for the most highly regarded newspaper in the country, Matt was also accustomed to answering work calls while on vacation. Just as he found it, the ringing stopped and a chime sounded signaling he had a voice mail.

He peered at the caller ID screen under the glare of sunlight. Crap, its work. My editor probably wants me to make some calls for that story thats running tomorrow. He ran an anxious hand through his thick brown hair.

Ill be fine. Go call him back. I need a moment alone to process this anyway.

Dont be ridiculous. Im not leaving you like this.

Like what? I said, forcing what I hoped was a convincing smile. Sitting in a tropical paradise? Seriously, go make your call.

Matt scurried off toward our hotel room, casting a few worried glances over his shoulder. When he disappeared around the corner, I let my smile fade. I felt as though Id been riding in a car and the driver had unexpectedly slammed on the brakes. Everything had stopped. I was shocked and confused, but also embarrassed for the person I was a few minutes ago who didnt see this coming.

My eyes drifted to the stack of celebrity magazines next to my chair. The one on top was splayed open, Arubas aggressive trade winds flipping its pages, creating a mini moving picture, the famous Jessicas, Jennifers, and Kates of the world morphing into one other, much the way they do in real life. Id been reading the magazines for work. For the last several years, Id worked as a pop culture blogger, churning out stories on a half-hourly basis. In turn, celebrities provided me with constant material by getting married, getting divorced, getting arrested, getting too fat, getting too thin, or just leaving the house for coffee. Yes, the job was fairly absurd, but at nearly six figures, so was the salary.

Twenty feet away, palm trees waved fiercely. Wed been told not to put our chairs under them because coconuts can drop and bonk people on the head, knocking them unconscious. I had a sudden urge to move my chair over there. Instead, I stood up and crunched through the sand toward the hotel. I marched down the steps of the hotel pool and plowed through the shallow end, bouncing from leg to leg, like a moonman on a spacewalk, until I reached the swim-up bar.

This vacation had been a reward to myselffor those days I arrived at the office at 6:00 A.M. and didnt leave until 9:00 P.M. , for working on Christmas Day, for making myself care who won The Bachelor . For the first time in months, Id started to relax. That was obviously shot to hell now. I needed to get out of my head for a while, and I needed reinforcements. Settling in on one of the submerged stools, I waved over the bartender whod been taking care of us for the last few days.

Okay, Hector, we have a situation, I said. Bring the bottle of Jack Daniels and a shot glass. I briefly relayed what had happened. He nodded understandingly and poured a shot for me and one for himself. We held our tiny glasses in the air.

Clink! The liquor burned a fiery trail down my throat. He immediately poured a second shot. Next I adopted a large family of pia coladas, forcing Hector to add rum until they turned brown. Forty minutes later Matt found me passed out on a lounge chair wearing Hectors baseball cap that said, Aruba: The bar is open!

T hree weeks later, Id traded swim-up bars for coffee shops. Every day I went to some local caf and trolled the classifieds for job openings. The economy had imploded seemingly overnight. Economists predicted the country was on the brink of a long recessionthe Great Recession, they were calling it. No one was hiring. Not even the coffee shops. Id already asked.

This morning Id chosen a coffee shop where all of the baristas had facial piercings and tattoos. I got the impression they were judging me for ordering a latte. I placed my aging laptop on a table near the window and it groaned to life as though annoyed at being woken up at this hour. While the computer booted up, I snapped open the newspaper. A headline on the front page blared 80,000 Jobs Lost in March. I had been laid off in March.

It felt weird, doing nothing. I once spent fourteen hours a day cranking out blog posts and hysterically checking about thirty celebrity websites to stay abreast of breaking news. My BlackBerry had vibrated endlessly with gossip tidbits from fellow reporters. One time I took a ninety-minute flight and by the time we landed Id received one hundred nineteen e-mails. When I wasnt at work, I was recovering from work. I felt so available most of the time that in my downtime I wanted to make myself as unavailable as possible. This meant going straight home after work every night, flopping onto my IKEA sofa, and watching people on television do the things that I was too tired to do myself. Within months, I was closely following the lives of about fifty fictional people, yet I had no idea what was going on with my friends. Even the thought of socializing had become exhausting. Id started rejecting most of the invitations that came my way: brunches, birthdays, dinner parties, even a morning hike. Although I stand by that decision: friends dont make friends walk uphill before 11:00 A.M . Id begun communicating primarily via e-mail, text messages, and Facebook status updates. Id stopped wanting to meet new people at all. It was Matt who gently pointed out one night that I hadnt made a new friend in the three years wed been dating.