Read Online My Year with Eleanor by Noelle Hancock - Free Book Online Page B

metal cage in its place at the back of the boat. I exploded out of the water, dropping my regulator and dry heaving. Hands scooped me up underneath my shoulders from behind and dragged me into the boat. “Easy, take it easy,” voices urged.
    I rinsed off, taking care not to aim the hose above my neck where it would surely blow the eyelashes and eyebrows right off my face. Weakly, I made my way over to an empty space on the boat deck and lay down, warm in my wetsuit in the summer sun.
    â€œYou okay over there?” Gus finally called out in a tone that implied he no longer thought me hard-core.
    I nodded without opening my eyes.
    â€œIn that case, Les, you go down with Bill.”
    I sensed Bill was standing over me. Or, more accurately, I felt him dripping on me.
    â€œReally, are you okay, Noelle?” Bill almost always called me Hancock; hearing him say my first name was jarring. “Do you want me to stay with you?” he asked. I was instantly moved that he’d come all this way and then offered to give up his shark dives for me.
    â€œI’m fine. See?” I sat up, as proof of my okayness. “Now get back down there!”
    He turned and made his way back to the cage, taking slow, exaggerated steps to avoid tripping. “If you have any last-minute advice on how to avoid drowning, I’m all ears,” he called over his shoulder. “Seriously, my ears are huge !”
    I rolled my eyes and smiled. “Just watch those girly curls of yours around that cable.”
    E leanor didn’t learn to swim until she was a mother and wanted to be able to watch over her children when they were in the water. So, in the winter of 1924, Eleanor took lessons at the YWCA pool in New York and learned to swim at the age of forty. Diving took longer—until the summer of 1939, in fact, when she was fifty-six years old and took lessons from Dorothy Dow, a junior member of her White House staff.
    â€œFinally she could dive,” Dow wrote, “not only from the side of the pool but from the diving board as well. She was anxious to perform for the President, as he said he didn’t believe she could do it. . . . So, Mrs. R. walked out on the board, got all set in the proper form and went in flat as could be. She could have been heard down at Poughkeepsie! I thought the President would explode laughing, and his hand came down on my shoulder so hard I almost fell over. Mrs. R. came up red in the face, with a really grim expression, said nothing, walked out on the board again, and did a perfect dive.”
    L es was laughing when he and Bill surfaced twenty minutes later. “You could’ve gotten your hand bitten off!” he said between gasps.
    Bill looked sheepish as he told us what happened. They’d been down for a few minutes when they were greeted by an eight-foot blue shark. Bill wanted a picture of himself giving the shark a high five. He motioned for Les to get his camera in position; then he reached through the bars, grabbing onto the fin. Bill barely managed to yank his hand back into the cage as the blue turned its head and snapped at him.
    â€œDo you want to dive again?” Gus asked me.
    â€œNo, I’m good,” I said quickly. Before I lowered my eyes, I saw the disappointment on Gus’s face.
    On the ride home, everyone lapsed into that exhausted silence that signals the end of a vacation. Bill and I sat beside each other on the deck, knocking together companionably whenever the boat hit a big wave. Every time I thought of myself refusing to get back in the cage, I felt a flash of irritation. Bill’s bravado only made me feel like more of a failure. He’d also been in the cage when we were trapped underneath the boat. But it hadn’t stopped him from going back down. I’d had my second chance, but unlike Eleanor and Bill, I hadn’t tried again. I’d had my first setback and I’d given up.
    â€œHow do you do it?” I