Jen Kirkman - I Can Barely Take Care of Myself

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.”