I Can Barely Take Care of Myself, Jen Kirkman [the false prince txt] 📗

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