My mother, not wishing to let Ireland down, now turned her attention to the all-consuming art of procreation. There are two facts of our ancestry she frequently mentions, believing they apply to me: my great-great-great-aunt was excommunicated from the Catholic Church for practicing witchcraft, and my great-grandmother was a corset model. The great-great-great-aunt was known far and wide for telling fortunes, administering potions, gazing deep into the eyes of potatoes, and just generally giving the pope a hard time. The great-grandmother who modeled corsets was spoken of in the same tone of disapproval, as if somehow they were in league with each other across centuries—this one stirring the cauldron, that one bouncing in slow motion through a field of daisies. No surprise at all, then, when I emerged from my own mother in the form of a tiny psychic covered with tits.
“An old soul,” said the nurse, but everyone saw through her tactful euphemism to the truth: I was a sport, an abomination, a monstrous hybrid of high and low. A voluptuous scent of sulfur attended me. I rolled toward the doctor and made an obscene gesture that no one had ever seen before.
“She looks just like me,” my father said.
My parents joined hands and named me after a nun in an attempt to alter the course of my destiny, but there was no turning back and they knew it. The nurse covered me with ink and stamped me.
We all lived together in a trailer while my father dove into his books and stayed under, under, until finally he was ready to be ordained. He put on his first white collar, which it would be my mother’s responsibility for the rest of their marriage to keep clean, and we moved from the trailer into a parsonage. If I have any memories of this time, they are of castle walls and chocolate-brown pews and bright banners hanging in high places. Lutherans have a passion for banners that approaches the erotic. They are never happier than when they are scissoring big purple grapes out of felt and gluing them onto other felt. I can picture a few members of the congregation, who were square-faced and blue-eyed and gently brimming with pie filling. I also recall consuming an enormous quantity and variety of mayonnaise salads, which Lutherans loved and excelled at making. If Jesus himself appeared in their midst and said, “Eat my body,” they would first slather mayonnaise all over him.
Against this pastoral, God-fearing backdrop, I exhibited my first signs of blasphemy. At a funeral in that solemn, banner-hung church, I turned to my mother and demanded, “WHERE’S YA NIPPLE, MOMMY?” She clapped a hand over my mouth and carried me out amid a loud chorus of Lutheran gasps. I could not see why. My yearning for the invisible was just as legitimate as theirs. It would not be the last time I tried to locate a nipple in church, but it would be the last time I announced it.
They were homey people, but somehow my father was not at home among them. The sermons he gave stretched themselves more and more away from Martin Luther and toward something else, but at that point, only my mother knew what it was. My father, she knew, was becoming Catholic. He was tired of grape juice. He wanted wine.
Here is how it works: when a married minister of another faith converts to Catholicism, he can apply to Rome for a dispensation to become a married Catholic priest. He is allowed, yes, to keep his wife. He is even allowed to keep his children, no matter how bad they might be. The Vatican must review his case and declare the man fit for duty. (My father’s paperwork was approved by Joseph Ratzinger, later to take the name Pope Benedict XVI, later to resign the papacy and become an enigma in fine elfin shoes wandering through private gardens, his eyes among the bushes like unblinking black roses.) Once he has received this approval, the man can enter training for the priesthood and be ordained, but only after every member of his immediate family passes the Psychopath Test.
At his ordination, he lay flat on the floor, and I felt a moment of brief concern that someone was going to stomp on him. The ceremony lasted as long as what it promised us: an eternity. I was wearing my itchiest dress, the color of bad weather, and I wriggled in my seat the entire time, which later came to seem significant. My mother sat next to me, and I understood that she was what made him different from the other priests, and that I was what made him different from the other priests. After it was all over, everyone had to call him Father, but I called him that anyway, so it made no difference to me. All fathers believe they are God, and I took it for granted that my father especially believed it.
There was always a certain stoniness to his pronouncements, as if he had come down off the mountaintop holding tablets, even when he was saying things like “GAD” and “NAW” and “JIMINY CHRISTMAS.” I inherited this too, and I thank him for it.
• • •
MY FATHER’S HEAD appears in the doorway like a planet of much higher density than ours. Tucked under his arm is a thick book about false popes, of which there must have been a great many. Our glasses flint and flash against each other, shortsightedness against shortsightedness, and I regard him with a complex fondness. I remember a sermon he once gave about me called “The Prodigal Daughter,” soon after I first ran away with Jason at the age of nineteen. I had returned for a brief visit and was singing cantor with my older sister in a side alcove of the church, next to the wheezing old organ and a choir of votive candles. I listened with my head bent down—I have memorized the floors in all my father’s churches. The sermon was about me being the bad pig-keeping son who runs away from home and then has to oink back on all fours when his money runs out. At the time my reaction alternated between embarrassment and amusement, but now I see it must have been prophetic. All these years I have been tending the pigs of liberalism, agnosticism, poetry, fornication, cussing, salad-eating, and wanting to visit Europe, but I am back home now, and the pigs can’t come with me.
My father greets us with his usual largesse, disparages the president in passing, expresses a belief that the Cincinnati Bengals are going to “win it all this season,” yells out “Hoooo-eee!” for no particular reason, tells my mother to wash a jumbo load of his underwear, and then pops back into the kitchen and begins to cook one pound of bacon.
“Dad,” I call to him, “did you ever take this test Mom was telling us about?”
“I took it twice,” he answers. “The first time I got angry, because they asked every question four different ways, trying to mess you up. So I resented it, and I answered every question wrong on purpose, and it came back that I was one hundred percent a psychopath.”
“And the second time?” I venture.
“Oh, the second time I just took it normally.”
My mother nods along to this shocking confession with a “hell yeah” expression on her face. An overwhelming feeling of Who ARE these people? washes over me, but in fact I know exactly who they are, and they make more immediate sense to me than people who grew up going to the ballet and getting The New York Times on Sunday and passing personality tests with flying colors. The sizzling scent of my former life wafts out from the kitchen, and I breathe it along with the air.
A book doesn’t ask to begin, any more than a baby asks to be born. But still, best to begin at the beginning.
1
MEETING OF THE MINDS
At nineteen, I ought to have been in college along with the rest of my high school class, gaining fifteen pounds of knowledge and bursting the sweatpants of my ignorance. What else did people do there? Changed their names to Patchouli, became vegetarians, grew out their leg hair for the first time, got so caught up in their studies of ancient Greece that they murdered a farmer while worshipping the grape-god in the countryside. It seemed the very act of stacking boxes in a secondhand car and driving away with your childhood home in the rearview allowed you to be born again in whatever form you chose, and I could hardly wait. I had applied and been accepted, and was all set to start attending a Great Books college in the winter of 2001, but the night before Christmas—two weeks before I was supposed to depart for Annapolis—my father called me into his study for a talk.
The orotund, indignant
sound of Rush Limbaugh was blasting from a radio in the corner, and the drunken leprechaun sound of Bill O’Reilly was blasting from the television. It was my father’s pleasure to listen to the two men simultaneously, while emitting the occasional “hoo-HOO” of agreement. He was wearing his most formal boxer shorts, the ones you could almost not see through. He patted a spot next to him on the overstuffed leather sofa. (It was one of his personal commandments that a couch must absolutely always be made of leather. If your couch was made of chintz or something, go live on Fairy Island.) I sat down, averting my eyes, staring past the curve of his cheek and out the window, where the upper feathers of a pillowfight swirled between us and the school next door.
“We can’t do it, Bit,” he said, shaking his curly head kindly, as if it couldn’t be helped. “The money just isn’t there,” he explained, which made me think of a smoke-and-mirrors trick: poof, and the pile of money is gone, the pile of textbooks, the pile of bricks that would have been college.
“Okay,” I said, automatic, from a body that didn’t seem to be mine. I didn’t ask a single question. When I remember this, the urge to fly back and shake my young self by the shoulders shakes my present self to the point of pain. What I knew about the world was from books; what I did not know about the world is that there are ways, there are ways in, through, above, and around it. I accepted the statement as a mountain, a fact on the face of the earth—as final as if he had told me I would not be going to heaven. Suddenly out the window, the pillowfight ceased and the snow flew in long white strikeouts.
“Of course,” I thought, actually blushing at my stupidity. There was a reason we hadn’t bought any supplies, any notebooks or highlighters or beanbag chairs for my dorm room. There was a reason I didn’t have a framed poster of The Kiss or The Starry Night all ready to hang—or at the very least one of Francis Bacon’s screaming popes, to remember the family by. There was a reason my mother changed the subject when I brought up my departure, now one day nearer, now one more. The entire East Coast began to float out to sea. The chamber behind my eyes felt hot. I thought, “Why would I ever think I could go.”
The same thing had happened to my older sister, Christina, who had a soprano so lovely it sounded like the pure concentrate of a hymn. She had planned to study singing at Washington University in St. Louis but had had to drop out at the last minute, for reasons that remained foggy and unexplained. Something about a FAFSA, something about my mother’s inability to ever file our taxes on time. Perhaps she had been called in for a similar talk and had accepted the verdict without question. A brief, tumultuous year later, she was married. But somehow, even after all that, I had not foreseen it happening to me.
My father’s left hand dangled in a green Tupperware bowl full of homemade pickles, which were the only vegetables he ever ate willingly. The bowl was gargantuan, easily large enough to baptize the infant Taft. He lifted one transparent circle out of it, set it on his tongue, and crunched happily. The signs of his consecration were everywhere.
I lingered a bit longer, in a room filled with gleaming guitars on stands, candy-apple red, spruce green, lake blue and carapace black. They wailed a little in the silence. Soon he would acquire another guitar, more costly than all of these, a lefty that had originally been made for Paul McCartney. When Paul decided he didn’t want it, my father snapped it up and showed it to us with the lavish, loving gaze he reserved for colorful, well-oiled, and obedient machines. Later, I would take a detached literary pleasure in the notion that higher education had been unwittingly robbed from me by a Beatle.
• • •
ADRIFT, I MOVED from the rectory of my father’s church in Cincinnati to the abandoned convent next door. The convent looked out on a petroleum plant, and just beyond that, the polluted, hellbender-colored Ohio River. The sisters had fled long ago and now the building was used for church business during the daytime; I heard the ceaseless counting of collections while I hid upstairs reading books on an old futon. But when the sun sank down and was replaced by an artificial orange somehow brighter than daylight, I tiptoed downstairs and took refuge in a place of living, moving, breathing text, a book that continually wrote itself: the internet.
The room had the scent of office supplies. Stacks of paper, adding machines, cups of pens, a folding table that stretched across a whole wall. In the corners were the narrow starved bookcases you see in church places, that have never held a copy of Jane Eyre. Often there would be a pewter medal of the Virgin lying forgotten in the dust of one shelf, like pennies in other houses. The scene was familiar, but there was a difference now. There was a portal in the corner and I could reach my hand in and get any information I wanted.
I sat in the computer chair and spun myself around once, twice: the child’s gesture of sudden and unsupervised freedom. Across the front lawn I saw blacktop, then the road, then the train tracks, then the tanks, then the river, then Kentucky. It looked like the seamed side of something—of the country, of industry, of American progress. Old modes of communication raced across the view, old ways of eating the miles. I turned the computer on and listened to the tower rev and wheeze. The monitor was capacious enough to hold a human head. I lifted my hands to the keyboard and opened up a window. I took a breath and eliminated the distance between two points.
“I wrote a poem today,” I typed to Jason, a total stranger who lived in Fort Collins, Colorado. We had met by chance, on a bulletin board devoted to the discussion of poetry, and were now in the grip of a fevered correspondence. “It’s about Billie Holiday giving herself an abortion in a hot bath.”
“I wrote a poem today too,” he responded, not five minutes later. “It’s about the splendor and the majesty of the tetons.”
The feeling of getting an email! As if the ghost of a passenger pigeon had flown into your home and delivered it directly into your head, so swooping and unexpected and feathered was the feeling. How suddenly full you felt of white vapor. How you set your fingers on the keyboard to write back, and your fingers disappeared almost up to the first knuckle in those clattering beige keys—so much more satisfying than the shallow keys that came later, or the touchscreens that came even after that. The story of any courtship is one of ephemera, dead vehicles, outdated technology. Name cards, canoes, pagers. The roller rink, telegrams, mixtapes. Radio dedications. The drive-in. Hotmail dot com.
“Send me yours,” I wrote him, at the exact moment he responded to tell me to send him mine.
Most of my poems were about mermaids losing their virginity to Jesus (metaphor), and most of his poems were about the majesty of canyons, arroyos, and mesas. The West had infected him with some sort of landscape mania—these were essentially poems a cartoon roadrunner would write, after retiring from a career of anarchy. He had, however, written one good image, which stays with me even now: “the milk bottles burst like scared chickens.” It might strike you as irresponsible, to fall in love on the strength of one image about chickens bursting, but this was a different time. I didn’t even know what he looked like. He was under the mistaken impression that I was “fifty years old and Latina.” We were all made up of words.
We progressed from typing to the phone. I would lie on my back on the floor of the convent with my bare feet up against the wall, and talk quietly so as not to disturb the shapes of the absent nuns, which still seemed to flock in their black-and-white forms through the rooms. It surprises me sometimes to think that I was never frightened to sleep there alone, but then I remember that I stayed up in the glow all night talking. Sometimes I would doze off for a minute and wake to a seeming sunrise out the window, trumpets and banners and streaming incandescence, but no, it was only that cloud of radioactivity across the street. When I woke, either his voice or his silence was still going on the other end. And then deep in the valley between two hours, a train would roar and rumble: wheels could roll away from these places, wheels did.
• • •
WE HAD CERTAIN
THINGS in common. His father was a Baptist preacher who was saved after a dream about flying an airplane over a landscape of erupting volcanoes. A wall of flame appeared in front of him and he opened the door and jumped. He felt himself drifting softly, safely, toward earth and he looked up and saw that Jesus had him by the hands and was using his own sacred body to parachute him down. This seems like a specifically Baptist dream. Catholic dreams haven’t caught up to airplanes yet. The dream that converts a Catholic is more likely to take place in a medieval prison, or on a slave ship in the days of Ben-Hur, or in a sinister outhouse filled with red light.
After his father converted, he went to Bible school and became a missionary in Southeast Asia. That meant Jason was born in Thailand, among the splash of flowers, clear water and caressing air, the rainbow all fallen out of its stripes. It was like living at the firm center of a fruit. He loved it there. He ran around wearing a diaper and no shirt, much to the curiosity of the Thai babies, who wore shirts and no diapers. He had the same birthday as the king, and every year there was a parade of elephants, and every year his parents said it was for him. When he found out the truth, he turned his back on kings forever. He clenched his small fist, bellowed his rage to the heavens, and resolved to never again recognize the authority of any man on earth.
Catholicism, he saw at once, had more kings than he could ever keep track of. “What did those people teach you?” he asked me one night, mystified. “What exactly do Catholics believe?”
I’d been preparing my whole life for this question. “First of all, blood. BLOOD. Second of all, thorns. Third of all, put dirt on your forehead. Do it right now. Fourth of all, Martin Luther was a pig in a cloak. Fifth of all, Jesus is alive, but he’s also dead, and he’s also immortal, but he’s also made of clouds, and his face is a picture of infinite peace, but he also always looks like one of those men in a headache commercial, because you’re causing him so much suffering whenever you cuss. He is so gentle that sheep seem like demented murderers in his presence, but also rays of sunlight shoot out of his face so hard they can kill people. In fact they do kill people, and one day they will kill you. He has a tattoo of a daisy on his lower back and he gets his hair permed every eight weeks. He’s wearing a flowing white dress, but only because people didn’t know about jeans back then. He’s holding up two fingers because his dad won’t let him have a gun. If he lived on earth, he would have a white truck, plastered with bumper stickers of Calvin peeing on a smaller Calvin who is not a Catholic.”
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