I Can Barely Take Care of Myself (7 page)

Yes. Maybe if more kids watched a supposedly realistic enactment of a nuclear holocaust, kids would be off playgrounds completely and instead roaming the halls of their local mental institutions or in line at the pharmacy for some nice
prescription opiates.

I’ll never forget the scene where the nuclear bombs from the Soviet Union hit Lawrence, Kansas—all portrayed with that (Emmy-nominated) stock footage of mushroom clouds. Residents of Lawrence, Kansas, are on the highway. The traffic is bumper to bumper. The entire state is desperate to drive away from the three hundred incoming nuclear missiles from Russia, but no one makes
it out alive. The sky zaps and rumbles. Flashes of red and orange appear and then a white mushroom cloud rises on the horizon and, just like they’re being X-rayed, the people in their cars go from bodies to bones in an instant. Skeletons suddenly sit behind the wheels of cars.

My dad tried to console me with realism. “Jen, this movie isn’t completely true. If the Russians bomb us, they’ll hit
Washington, DC first. Besides, the Russians don’t want to nuke us because then we’ll nuke
them
off the face of the planet.”

The Day After
ended with Jason Robards’s character nearly
disintegrating into the arms of another man as they sat helpless among the ruins of Lawrence, Kansas. They held each other as they waited for their last breaths. I rabidly read the credits, which assured me that this
was just a fictional event. My mother talked over the disclaimers. “You know what I’m realizing? We don’t have the right kind of basement for a nuclear war. It’s too porous and Ronnie, when are you going to fix that old, rotten cellar door? That’s not going to keep out radiation. I guess we could drive to Jennifah’s school and stay in the bomb shelter there.”

That was news to me. There was a
bomb shelter under my school? I decided that I no longer trusted adults. First you have your crazy adults, like the ones who want to run countries and start wars. Then you have your lying adults, like my teacher who pretends war isn’t possible even though she’s teaching us state capitals directly over a bomb shelter. If there was no way that a nuclear war could happen, why was I forbidden to watch
a movie about it? Why didn’t my teacher send home a note warning parents not to take their kids to see
Poltergeist
? I now believed that war was imminent and this was everyone’s way of educating us about what to do because no one had the guts to just tell us, “We do frequent tests of the Emergency Broadcast System because we know that soon there will be an actual emergency.”

The next day on the
walk to school I told my best friend, Shannon, about the movie. She hadn’t watched it. She declared that her mom grew up in England and knew a lot about Europe and other countries. “So, if there was going to be a war, she would have told me.” I felt bad for Shannon. Her naive apocalypse mentality was going to leave her caught by surprise.

FOR A LONG time, I had the coping mechanism to push the
utter terror that was known simply as “being alive” to the back of the cupboard of my brain. I loved life. I was a spunky kid. All I wanted to do was to have fun. So despite my grave misgivings about nuclear
holocaust, I was still excited for our school field trip to Plymouth Plantation, which is a Disney World–esque pastiche of a rural 1600s community in Plymouth, Massachusetts—home of the Mayflower
landing. It’s also a place for Boston-area actors to get some work, either a pit stop on their way to their real ambitions or the final resting place of a career that never blossomed. Plymouth Players acted as carpenters, milkmaids, and blacksmiths, carrying on as if it were really the 1600s, demonstrating their skills without any modern conveniences.

Once we were let loose on the plantation,
my fourth-grade class immediately began its mission: get one of these pilgrims to screw up and act as if it’s 1983, not 1683. I watched the class bully, Greg, mess with a busy Pilgrim woman. “So, do you have milk?” he asked. She answered, “Yes. We get milk from the cow’s udders every morning.” He said, “Do you put it in the fridge?” She said, “I don’t know what that is.” He asked her, “Do you have
a VCR?” The class burst into giggles and Mrs. Williams warned, “Okay, that’s enough.” This pilgrim was unfazed. She answered, “Do I have a what? I don’t know what that is. But I do have this device, a loom!”

I wandered from the group and over to the edges of the plantation, where the bridge to the present day led right into the gift shop. I recognized a familiar sign discreetly hanging on the
wall behind the door, a yellow sign with three triangles meeting in the center.
FALLOUT SHELTER
. Wait, was Plymouth Plantation a target for a nuclear bomb? Does everywhere have a fallout shelter? One minute I could be browsing the collection of Plymouth Rock refrigerator magnets and Mayflower coloring books, and the next minute I could be underground, taking shelter from a nuclear winter.

Suddenly
my thoughts were tumbling over one another like socks in a dryer.
If there is a nuclear war right now, we are going to die on this plantation. If I try to run off this plantation, I’m going to get lost and no one will be able to find me. I can’t breathe. What if something is wrong with my lungs?
Even though I was only just standing there, thinking scary thoughts, my body was reacting like I was
in the front seat of
a roller-coaster carriage, about to careen down the tracks on the first drop.

I got a surge of adrenaline and turned to run back to the plantation, back to 1683, a simpler time when wars were fought with bows and arrows. Then I heard a noise. A plane was flying low overhead and the rumbling shook me. What if it was a warplane carrying a bomb? Suddenly, I couldn’t feel my
heart beating. Were there secret modern hospitals at Plymouth Plantation or just fallout shelters? I felt alone and on the verge of death while everyone around me kept up this stupid butter-churning charade.

Even with my cardiac arrest, I managed to run back to my group and saw my classmates innocently learning how to shoe a horse. I asked Mrs. Williams, “Why is that plane flying so low? What’s
going on?” The blacksmith continued banging metal together and denied the very existence of the plane. “What’s going on is that I’m preparing a new shoe for our trusty horse.” I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t have my life risked in order to carry on this facade that it wasn’t 1983 and that our lives weren’t all in nuclear-level danger. I was possessed by a newfound fearlessness and disregard for
authority. I screamed, “Drop the goddamn pilgrim act! It’s Armageddon!”

And it happened. I got a pilgrim to drop the act. He wiped his brow with his handkerchief and said to my teacher, “Is she okay?” I felt like I had just come up for air after drowning. The pain in my heart stopped. The rush of speaking up was exhilarating and my knees began to buckle.

Mrs. Williams led me away from the group
and the blacksmith continued to heat his coals. My teacher demanded an explanation. I told her that I saw the fallout shelter sign and then the low-flying plane and I wasn’t sure whether the air-raid signals like the ones in
The Day After
were working at Plymouth Plantation. Mrs. Williams said, “You watched that movie? Jennifer, nobody else in class watched that movie. I sent home that note.”
Instead of yelling at me, she took my hand and led me to the parking lot. She told me to relax and sit the field trip out. Mrs. Williams whispered with the bus
driver and I spent the rest of the field trip napping on the front seat of a parked bus.

I had no idea that what I’d just suffered was a panic attack—a simple fight-or-flight response that happens to your body and brain when adrenaline
takes over. I thought what I experienced were two separate incidents: I was concerned about the fake pilgrims and my real teacher ignoring the fact that nuclear war was imminent, and coincidentally on that very same day, during my confrontation with a fake pilgrim, I happened to have mysterious heart palpitations and chest pains.

Once my mom got wind of this we went straight to the emergency
room. I did a stress test—you know, those things that forty-year-old men do on a treadmill with all of those stickers on your chest like E.T. had on in the scene where he was dying. The ER doctor diagnosed me with “stress.” That seemed about right to me. I didn’t realize I was nine years old. I felt like I was forty. I
was
stressed. I was worried about nuclear war. I was worried about my sister
who was getting a divorce and my other sister, who was just starting college but her grades weren’t that good. I was worried about my parents, who had been fighting a lot. I had to keep the entire family together! If stress was all that I had—I was pretty damn lucky! I called my sister Violet in her college dorm at UMass Amherst. I told her the good news: “I didn’t have a heart attack. I’m just
stressed!” She said, “You’re nine. You shouldn’t have stress. If you’re stressed now, you’re going to be a nervous wreck when you’re a grown-up.” She didn’t hang up the phone but let it swing back and forth from the pay phone cradle. I heard her run down the hall with her friends, laughing and screaming all the way. Our lives were so different.

I didn’t realize until years later at a cocktail
party that
The Day After
did not affect everyone of my generation the way it did me. Some people were like, “That movie was so stupid. Did you see that dumb part where everyone turns into a skeleton? My friends and I were laughing.” I visited Shannon and her family last Christmas. She bounced her adorable son on her knee and remembered, “Jen,
you were always obsessed with the world ending. It
was so funny. You used to cut up pictures of Bruce Willis and put them in your shoe because you wanted to be with him when you died. Who thinks about death at age nine, let alone Bruce Willis?”

I was just really glad in that moment that Shannon’s kid had her for a mother and not me.

A YEAR BEFORE all of this
Day After
drama, I’d written my last will and testament on a cocktail napkin during
a three-hour flight from Boston to Orlando, Florida. I developed a fear of flying the first time I stepped foot on a plane.

My parents and I boarded the now defunct Eastern Airlines plane via an external set of stairs. I felt just like one of the Beatles—except I was not exiting a plane to a hysterical, crying bunch of fans, I was entering a plane with a hysterically crying mother who had just
realized how afraid she was to fly. My mom made her way to our seats in coach. My dad put his hand on my shoulder and guided me toward the cockpit. This was, of course, before 9/11/2001. This was just barely after 9/11/1981. You could smoke cigarettes and listen to a Richard Pryor album in the cockpit if you wanted to back in those days. The stewardesses (not yet flight attendants) ushered us into
the tiny, low-ceilinged pod. My dad said, “My daughter is apprehensive about flying but I wanted to show her how safe it is!” I hadn’t really been apprehensive about flying—but now I was. What if the pilot pressed the wrong button? Would we be ejected from our seats? What if the copilot started goofing around and pulling levers willy-nilly—would the plane take a nosedive? The pilot and copilot
shook my hand. They motioned to the gazillion million controls, gadgets, lights, and levers before them. “This is where the magic happens!” the pilot said. My hands got clammy instantly at even the casual thought that the only thing keeping me in the sky would be “magic.”

We left the pilots to their gadgetry and magic making. There
was one more stop on the airplane tour. My father led me up a
mini–spiral staircase to the lounge. I know what you’re thinking. What lounge? You mean the metal snack tray that the flight attendant wheels around? No. That’s a cart. I’m talking about a lounge; an actual lounge with a bar and alcohol and bar stools. Men and women who looked like they were graduates of Studio 54 sipped drinks, from real glasses, at the bar. Both sexes wore feathered hair and shoulder
pads. I thought to myself,
I want my life to be just like this: glamorous, high rolling, and permanently tanned.
Gone were my clammy hands and the memory of the intimidating cockpit. This glamorous world seemed safe. The people at the top of the spiral staircase had no worries. They were jet-setters. Maybe one of these rich people would adopt me and we wouldn’t have to tour cockpits or fly coach.
I could sit next to my glamorous mom and dad and sip a Shirley Temple while they got bombed on gin. We would travel the world together—always maintaining the perfect amount of fantasy to counteract life’s reality.

Soon I went back to coach to join my real mother, who had her rosary beads in her lap. The beads only came out on big occasions—like funerals. When the beads came out it signaled that
my mom was in dire need of strengthening her long-distance connection to God. She had taught me once how to pray with rosary beads but I could never remember the routine. I had no interest. Madonna hadn’t come out with “Like a Virgin” yet. It would be a little while before I found out how cool they look as an accessory.

I excitedly relayed to my mom that there was a whole other universe/cocktail
lounge right above our heads. She snapped nervously at my father, as if he had been the architect of the plane: “Ronnie, there’s a bar on this plane? How on earth can this plane hold that much weight? We’re not going to make it!”

During takeoff my dad remained silent, fully focused and staring straight ahead, like he was trying not to get seasick on a boat. He gripped our shared armrest. He gritted
his teeth and said over and over in a forced singsong, “Here we go! Here we go!” As the wheels
left the ground, I realized that I was in the hands of two parents who were anything but grounded themselves. My dad was terrified of flying and the tour of the cockpit had been more to calm his white knuckles than mine. My dad clenched and my mom prayed. I was sandwiched in a chorus of “Here we go!”
and “Hail Mary, full of grace . . .”

In that moment, I knew I was going to inherit this rosary-saying woman’s fear and this cockpit-touring man’s denial. It couldn’t be stopped. And the exotic people wearing blue eyeliner upstairs represented a fantasy world, an alternate universe in which I felt I should be living but that I knew was impossible. Later in life, my various therapists have called
this sort of thing “conditioning.” My mom calls it “We weren’t that bad. You have such an imagination.”