I Can Barely Take Care of Myself

My elementary school teacher, Mrs. Williams, had very strong feelings about her students watching The Day After. She sent all of us fourth graders home with a note, strongly urging our parents to forbid us from watching. When I brought the warning letter home my parents were offended that my teacher had the audacity to tell them how to shield their daughter effectively from a life of post-traumatic stress disorder. I had signed my name on the dotted line, under the promise “I will not watch this movie.” My mom put the letter aside. “Jennifah, where was Mrs. Williams when the boys were throwing snowballs at you after school and calling you a geek? She just told me, ‘Boys will be boys,’ and now she thinks she can send home notes telling me what to let you watch? Maybe if more kids watched this movie, they wouldn’t be such little shits on the playground.”

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,