Fear at Every Turn
I had a Huffy bicycle I loved to ride when I was 8 in 1969. I first learned to ride it with training wheels when I was younger and I’d had it a couple of years already. It was a white and plum two-wheeler, aero-designed to look like a Camaro, including a chrome headlight and wheel rims. I used to ride it around Scotland Drive on the flat part of our neighborhood street and then climb up the gradual hill where Scotland Drive would turn into Edgemere Road. If I got up the hill that far, it was a steep climb and I’d have to stand to pedal. The payoff was the coasting downhill back to Scotland Drive, hair flying, breeze hitting my face, the rush of speed and pure joy of an 8-year-old bike riding after school on a spring day or in the early evening just before dinner, when my dad would yodel or ring that brass bell for us to come home. Mortifying. But riding my bike was worth the embarrassment.
That is until the day, the neighborhood demon child, Michael Accetturo, out for unmitigated evil and mischief, saw me flying down the hill, smiling and having fun. Was he jealous of my muscle-car-of-a-bike? Or just beginning his life of crime? As I approached where he was skulking along the road, he stuck out his foot, or maybe it was his arm – I don’t remember – and my bike lost control and I lost my balance and crashed to the street, tearing up my left knee with gravel and dirt as I hit the asphalt at 15 miles per hour.
I lay there on the pavement stunned and crying and panicked; my heart racing; my knee bleeding. Someone from the neighborhood must have come to my aid. I don’t remember that part either. Maybe I picked myself up off the street and hobbled home walking my bike down the hill. Parents kept an eye on their kids playing, but from inside the house; they weren’t hovering helicopters like they are today. Our kitchen window looked out onto the street, so maybe Mom was making dinner and saw the accident, or noticed me with my bike, and the blood trickling down my shin. Or another parent did, because I’m alive to tell the tale.
The boy lived 10 houses away on Intervale Road. He was in my grade at Squiertown elementary and everyone knew his family was in the Mafia. His uncle was Anthony “Tumac” Accetturo, Sr., who became the caporegime of the New Jersey-based Lucchese crime family – one of the “five families” that dominated organized crime in the metro New York City region. They were all bad to the bone – born under a bad sign. My town was full of mobsters. The uncle wound up doing time for wire fraud and racketeering, sentenced 30 years to life. But he eventually “sang,” becoming an informant in exchange for a lesser sentence. He lived out his life in Florida. Michael’s older brother John died in a house fire, the year after he graduated from Livingston High School. I have a class picture from my kindergarten class and there’s little Michael wearing a plaid suit jacket and a bow tie and a smarmy grin on his face. You know he was plotting something even when he was 5. So already at 8, young Michael, the mobster-to-be, was primed for a life of illegal activities like whacking someone for the thrill of it and he practiced the family business in our neighborhood.
I hadn’t been afraid of riding my bike at top speeds, careening down the hill on fire, but now I was fearful that I would get hurt again. It took weeks for my knee to heel; it was the same spot I’d injured a year or two before when Ronnie Bennett pushed me down on the playground during the dog-eat-dog sport of kick ball. When they cleaned the gravel from the wound, a rock was embedded in my knee and I had to get a tetanus shot. I have a rock-shaped scar to this day.
Fear is learned.
My grandmother, Bess Lenox, was afraid to drive because of her first time behind the wheel. Grandma didn’t know how to drive a car when she married my grandfather, Jacob. She had met Jake down south in Washington, D.C., while he was still grieving the loss of his first wife, Lena. He had the two kids – his son, Stanley, and the baby girl, Adele, and he was managing on his own as a single dad in 1926. His sister, my Aunt Bec, lived nearby, just outside of the District, on Rockville Pike, so she’d been helping him. Bess’s parents and Jake’s parents were friends from the same town in Lithuania. They had emigrated together, leaving Kovna, fleeing the pogroms, and they came in to the U.S. through the port of Baltimore and settled there. Jake moved up to the District, where he was working as a civil engineer. Bess’s mom, Rae, sent her to visit Jake, the young widow. It didn’t take long for them to fall in love and get married. Bess was now a step-mother to two young children. Jake moved up to New Jersey, where Bess lived, and they found a home in Paterson, where you needed a car to get from place to place.
Bess was already intimidated to get behind the wheel, since her mother did not drive a car, nor see it necessary for girls to learn to drive. But Jake was determined to teach Bess the art of driving – in a stick shift. He would have been patient and kind as he taught her – because he always was. So, Bess tried to follow all his instructions. She started the car, tried to put it in gear…and the car stalled. And that was it. She got out of the driver’s seat and never went back. She was afraid and it paralyzed her from ever trying to drive again. She was a passenger for the rest of her life. My mother, Marilyn, who was born several years later, learned to drive as a teenager and chauffeured my grandmother wherever she needed to go. We all did.
Mom learned to be fearful from her mother.
My mother, and my father, Freddy, were married in July of 1960, but didn’t go on a honeymoon until the winter school break. (Marilyn taught high school English and French.) They went to Mont Tremblant in Canada. Freddy was from Czechoslovakia and grew up skiing in Austria and he wanted to share his love of skiing with his new bride. He set her up with a ski lesson and he went off to take a few runs on the expert trails while she was taking her beginner class. After donning her skis, she fell immediately on the bunny slope. And that was it. Off came the skis and she carried them in her arms, walking back down the little hill to meet Freddy after his morning schussing. She would not even try to ski again. We would go on family ski vacations to Vermont when I was a kid, and Mom would sit in the warm lodge and knit sweaters until we came in for lunch. The marriage sustained. The skiing didn’t.
Because of fear.
But I liked skiing. My brother and I took ski school lessons to learn the basics and then skied with my father on the trails, first on easy green ones, then advancing up to intermediate, and eventually on the black diamond expert slopes. Skiing on the east coast, especially in Vermont, was like ice skating: the snow was hard-packed – not powdery – and it would freeze on the mountain and form sheets of ice covered by only a thin coating of snow. You had to be good at edging your skis into the snow and carving wide, careful turns as you slalomed down the mountain. As you picked up speed and skidded across the surface, all you heard was the long-sustained scraping of your edges against the hill, followed by the pause when you unweighted to make the turn and then back onto the edge to complete it. A bit like gliding around the rink at South Mountain Arena in West Orange where I’d learned to ice skate on Sunday mornings, but without the organ music and Zamboni.
When I was in my 20’s, I started going on ski adventures to Colorado and Utah with skiing friends. With my practiced east coast ski/skating technique, I was confident I could get down any trail – until I met the moguls on the powdery high altitude peaks. My friends were much better skiers than I was, and they would handily ski down a trail full of bumps, while I would gingerly try to glide up and over them. As they picked more difficult trails and routes, my confidence dwindled. I fell regularly. In Colorado and Utah, you can ski on the back “bowls” of the mountain. These are wide expanses of mostly un-groomed terrain; some are more skiable than others. You could take a ski lift up to the bowl area, hike the rest of the way carrying your skis on your shoulder, and put your skis back on when you’d reach the summit. Then, you’d pick a spot from which to point your skis into the bowl and ski down the mountain. I’d fallen many times, losing my balance, tumbling down, out of control until I’d hit a flatter area – my skis, poles, hat, goggles landing in a yard sale. It ceased being fun, knowing that crash was inevitably ahead of me, and I began to dread these expeditions, while my friends gleefully bounded down the snow wall.
We were in Alta, Utah, on the back of the mountain. The sun was glistening off the snow crystals. The sky was azure, pristine above the tree line. It should have been glorious to be in nature like this. We were on a little ledge of a path that cuts into the side of the bowl – just wide enough for two skis and flat enough so you don’t lose control of your speed as you round the side of the mountain, looking for the precise launch window. I’d had a cold and had taken some decongestant and my head was stuffy. The high altitude was giving me a headache and my equilibrium was unstable. To my right was the precipice and if I teetered, I would fall. I lost all confidence and I panicked. My heart was racing and I was afraid to move my feet; terrified that if I picked up any speed at all, I’d immediately fly off the hill and fall and fall and fall. At that moment, I didn’t want to be on a mountain, high up in the clouds, in the snow, in the cold. All I wanted to do was stop and get off. Somehow, I made it down to the bottom that day. But I took off my skis and stopped for good.
By then, I had started running (or picked it up again after a pause) and was serious about training and building my endurance. I hated the cold and the snow and the danger of falling. The risk of maybe breaking my neck or my legs was too high. I was too scared for skiing to be fun anymore. That fear was practical and self-preserving, but also experiential. I knew I could get hurt so I stopped doing it. Like if you play with fire – you know you’ll get burned.
When I was in fifth grade, two school friends and I went to see a movie that was being shown at the Livingston library. One girl, Kathy Reynolds, lived up the street, and her mother drove us to and from the movie. We saw Johnny Tremain, a Revolutionary war story about a teenage silversmith’s apprentice, who strives to be a master craftsman. It was a Disney film, based on a classic novel. I’m sure our parents thought it was suitable for 10-year-old girls to watch, though PG-13 ratings didn’t exist yet. There was a scene in the forge, where young Johnny pours molten silver into a wax mold for making a silver basin, in his effort to prove his skills. He loses his balance, slips and catches his fall by putting his hand down – in the molten silver. His hand is seared and he screams. The sounds reverberated in my head and all I could think of was the pain he must be in and what if that happened to me. I was unsettled by it and scared and just wanted to tell my mother what happened. I returned home from the movie and came in the house to find my mother visiting with her friend, Suzie, who had flown up from Florida. Suzie had been one of Mom’s high school French students and they’d become friends because as a young teacher, Mom wasn’t much older than the kids she taught. I knew Suzie and knew my mom had been anticipating their visit together, so I mentioned something about the movie, but not how scared I was. That was the catalyst for my life-long fear of being burned and disfigured. I’m still afraid of fire, flames, using a gas stove or grill, candles, matches, probably hot lava; it’s all related.
Have I ever actually gotten burned? No. Sunburned? Yes. My ears got nearly fried because I didn’t wear a headband or hat when I skied atop a mountain at altitude while spring skiing out west. My arm has gotten singed once or twice taking a tray of cookies out of the oven. But have I ever been in a fire or disfigured my hand in liquid silver? No. The closest I’ve been is at a silver jewelry counter in Nordstrom or at a silver artisan’s booth at a crafts show. But the image from the movie is seared in my brain. So when I’m grilling turkey burgers, I use long tongs and wear elbow length industrial strength gloves. When I’m pumping my own gas in California (a scary prospect for a girl from New Jersey who never had to touch a gas pump until moving west) there’s always a “what if”? What if this explodes while I’m filling my tank?
But you can’t erase fear that’s ingrained. The expectation of dangers and threats stick in your brain. Fear doesn’t just disappear. It’s triggered. It nags at you. What if I light a candle and my cat knocks it over and it burns my place down? What if I go for a hike on a trail and there are giant tarantulas crossing my path? What if there’s a rattlesnake? What if I come to a web full of spiders and they crawl all over me and remind me of the time our house was enveloped with daddy longlegs and I had to call an exterminator who, when he saw the infestation, uttered an incredulous, ‘wow!’? What if I’m trapped in the dark like coal miners entombed forever inside a mountain that has collapsed around them? What if there’s no way out?
So I’m afraid of scary real things like bugs and clowns; of esoteric vagueness like the darkness and the dark cloud of doom that hangs over me; the pain borne of emotional crises brought about by interacting with other people who might reject me when I open up and make myself vulnerable only to be hurt. Those fears hold me back and I won’t try again because I don’t want to put myself into that situation again where all I feel is pain.
The very first week of college, living in the freshman dorm, several new friends and I gathered in the corner suite where six guys shared a room. One had broken his leg playing football during freshman orientation and was holding court, drawing visitors to commiserate with him. I was excited to be among my new classmates, but also nervous about meeting people. I’d always been shy and never felt I fit in. Would my track record as an introvert keep me from stepping out of my comfort zone on the sidelines? But there I was talking about skiing with a handsome boy from a small town in Massachusetts, who was plopped down on a beanbag chair, and seemed interested in my adventures on the mountains in Vermont.
One day I invited him to come with me to join some friends at a local campus hangout. We sat across the table from each other and held hands and then we were together constantly through the semester. I didn’t tell my mother about him because he was Catholic and I was sure she would disapprove. I liked him, though, and my days were brighter because of him. We studied together for our philosophy class, shared stories of our lives and shared a bed. I was actually happy. Then we both were going home for winter break for a few weeks and he promised to call me. He didn’t. When we returned to campus, he avoided me like we’d never met, even though we lived four rooms apart – like he was ghosting me if there had been cell phones then. I found out he’d gotten back together with his former girlfriend. He just dropped me without a word and broke my heart. Had I misread the relationship? The loss ate at me and I couldn’t concentrate on schoolwork or moving forward. I wound up getting ill with mononucleosis and had to go home for a month to recuperate. I had to drop a course and then make it up over the summer.
When I graduated from college, I moved back to New Jersey. A few years later, in 1986 or so, I’d switched jobs but was still commuting to and from New York City by bus. My dad had undergone the heart surgery, but I didn’t know yet that he was dying. A girl I’d known from my Hebrew school rode the bus and we started a regular conversation each time we’d see each other. We were in similar industries and had much in common. We’d get together after work. She invited me to join her and her family for fun activities on the weekends. It seemed like we were friends. I felt I could rely on her for emotional support when I was scared my dad would not survive his terminal illness.
Four years later, my father died on a hot Thursday morning at the end of July. A few days after the funeral, my good and trusted friend came to pay her respects at the Shiva at our house, where my mom, my brother, and I were surrounded in mourning by extended family and friends. My brother had booked a beach house on Long Beach Island for the next weekend, and my mother encouraged him to go and said I should go too. I think Mom wanted to be alone in her grief and wanted us out of the house. In the spur of the moment, my brother invited my friend to come along. She said yes and that she would drive me there.
This girl showed up at my house on Saturday morning, beach towels and gear in the back seat –and her boyfriend next to her in the front. I got in the car, surprised, confused. She explained that they had another friend who also had rented a house on the island and they wanted to visit with him too. She was my ride. We drove the hour and a half to the Jersey shore. I was in too much grief and pain to recognize what should have been obvious when she dropped me off at my brother’s house and continued on to their other friend’s place. None of it registered immediately, even when she invited me to join them that evening for a party at the house where they were staying.
A second friend, who I’d met while skiing in Colorado, told me she would drive up from her home in Philadelphia and come to see me at the beach. She showed up as promised and stayed with me. That night, “ski-girl” and I went over to the festive gathering at the other house where “bus-girl” was staying with her boyfriend. It was an enormous place, right on the beach, lit up in the night, and the party was an open house inviting in friends of friends. The hosts made everyone feel welcome. I didn’t mingle with too many people – the effort to communicate only amplified my grief and all I wanted to do was walk on the beach and stare into the ocean. At the end of the evening, I asked bus-girl if she’d like to meet for breakfast in the morning. We agreed we’d get together.
In the morning, ski-girl and I walked over to the big house on the beach to meet up with bus-girl and her boyfriend. The two of them were not ready to go anywhere and had forgotten our plans. In fact, bus-girl seemed annoyed that I was even there, but said she’d come upstairs to the deck in a few minutes. Ski-girl and I waited on the wraparound deck overlooking the ocean. We recognized some people we’d met the night before and joined them in getting some coffee.
A few minutes later, bus-girl emerged and confronted me, bluntly telling me: “You’re not an invited guest, and you have to leave!” Stunned and betrayed, it finally dawned on me that I’d been deceived by her false friendship. Her machinations that modeled compassion and empathy were no more than pity. Before that, there had been Marcus Brutus, Judas Iscariot, Benedict Arnold, and the entire cast of “Mean Girls.” But now my closest friend was stabbing me in the back and earning the title of the world’s worst friend.
She was still my ride back home, and when she picked me up later that day I didn’t say a word. I sat stoically in the back seat of her car next to the beach gear and held on to my emotions for the 90 minute drive. I never spoke to her again. And the loss of my friend only compounded my grief from losing my father.
Lost friends are as haunting as lost lovers and the dead. So I fear getting hurt again, physically or emotionally and I won’t make myself vulnerable by pursuing relationships only to get burned – or spurned – when they don’t work out. I know how long the pain lasts and I avoid putting myself back in a similar situation. I fear loving someone and losing them; the excruciating and unmitigated pain of grief.
I sat at Mom’s bedside in the hospital watching as her life faded away drip by drip like the solution in the IV; the seconds ticking off the wall clock I’d stare at as I jotted contemporaneous notes to remember what each doctor told me. I knew as each day went by that I would lose her. That no matter what treatment they did, no matter how hard they tried to save her, she would leave me and I would be alone. There was nothing I could do to stop the tide.
After Mom died, all my fears came true. I lost her and I was alone. I’d lost everyone I’d ever loved. I had to move away from my home and my life and start over. I had to make all new friends and relationships and connections and it felt like I was back on the playground, wondering if I’d ever get picked for the kickball team. How would I make my way in the world? I struggled to find my voice. I had failed at everything I’d pursued so far – from love, to family, to faith, to work. My success rate was zero. I feared the unknown, certain I would fail again as I had before, and fall – without a net – into a deep abyss of despair and hopelessness.
I’ve spent my whole life in a perpetual state of desperation, dodging fears; zig-zagging right and left to avoid them, until I round the corner and run smack into that wall that is self-doubt. Full stop. I stand there, immobile, with no self-esteem or confidence – scared that I will ultimately fail. That every wrong turn will lead to disaster, every misstep to a fall off a cliff. And I’m right back on my bike out of control, knowing I will hit the pavement. I’m stuck on the mountain ledge looking out over the precipice, paralyzed and afraid to take even one step. It holds me back from ever moving forward. What is my recourse? There’s no way around it. Do I turn back? Find another path? Give up and stop trying altogether? I can see clearly now all the obstacles in my way but I don’t always see a way around them.
In her book, You Learn by Living: Eleven Keys for a More Fulfilling Life, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote, “You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‘I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.’ You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”
“You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‘I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.’ You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”
I wonder if other people are that much more confident than I am. Or are they just better at hiding it and pretending they are fearless? One day on a run on the trail, a woman ran towards me wearing a tee shirt that said “Fear Less.” Could I benefit from sporting that shirt? Could I take that one step off the ledge and move forward? Face the fear head on?
I dream that I could just point my skis off the rim and dive into the bowl. And do the thing I think I cannot do.