• • •
“BIT!” HE CRIES HAPPILY, gnawing a rope of jerky that looks suspiciously as if it might have come from the pet store. He seems overjoyed to see me. Has he forgotten what I’m like? “Where’s your kitty cat? I’m gonna kill her.”
“Don’t you dare say you’re going to kill the cat, Greg,” my mother says, appearing wraithlike in the doorway. “She won’t know you’re joking.”
“Whatever, femme,” my father says, releasing a low, loving toot in her direction. Unrestrained conversational tooting was considered a form of self-expression in his family. Ask my mother to sum them up, and she will suck a long breath through her teeth and say, “Ah, the Lockwoods. All the money in the world, and they couldn’t keep their farts in.”
• • •
IF MY FATHER is best described in terms of his nudity, my mother is best described in terms of her Danger Face, which is organized around the information that somewhere in America, a house is on fire. There are human Lassies among us, who are more alert to disaster, who feel a little ding! go off in their heads whenever a child falls into a well. She is one of them, and all humankind is her Timmy.
The only magazine she ever subscribed to was called Prevention, and it exclusively carried articles about which fruits could prevent cancer. The cover always featured a picture of a jogging young grandma in a sports bra pumping her fist in the air as she overcame any number of invisible diseases. My mother’s expression, while reading it at the kitchen table over an antioxidant-rich meal of beets and steamed carrots, called to mind Edvard Munch’s The Scream.
She gave birth to five children herself, and is now approaching eight grandchildren. She would tell you she was meant to be a mother, and it’s true when she’s in the presence of little children, she achieves her most concentrated essence. She stops speaking English at all and erupts into meaningless vocal improvisation, a sort of cautionary scatting. It sounds something like this:
“. . . honey . . . no . . . eeeeYAHHH . . . uh uh uh . . . STOP HER . . . she’s eating it . . . no, sweetheart, that will kill you . . . oh, look . . . look look look . . . she loves me . . . all babies love me . . . wuh uh, THE STAIRS . . . get her . . . SHE’S GOING TO FALL . . . grab her before she breaks her neck . . . ooooo AH-AH-AH-AH . . .”
It is a miracle any of us learned to talk at all, but not so surprising that we had a strong sense of our mortality from an early age. It’s all for the best that she was so watchful too. If it had been left up to my dad, we would have fallen off cliffs a long time ago.
• • •
MY FATHER DRAWS HIMSELF UP out of a loose, lazy pile of carnality and ambles off to introduce Jason to his latest terrier, a little black beast named Whimsy. She is, I regret to tell you, not the brightest dog. She knows one trick, and it is called Roll Over Three Times. Nevertheless, my father adores her, and talks to her in a baby voice he never used with us, singing a repeating chorus—PUP-py PUP-py PUPPity DOG—to her when no one is listening. She is his boon companion.
“Is she fixed?” Jason asks as she rolls in dark ecstasy at his feet. It’s the only “dog conversation” he can think of in the moment.
“Naw, she’s all woman, J,” my father says, regarding her fondly. This is typical. My family has the most intact dogs on the planet. Do not even think one of our dogs does not have its balls, or is not capable of shooting out puppies at a moment’s notice. When my brother Paul adopted a large Olde English Bulldogge he called Bacon, the first thing he did was send me an explicit picture of its equipment, as if to assure me the continuing existence of dogs was secure.
Bulldogs named after slabs of meat are too butch for my father, though. He goes in for trim and hysterical rat-chasers—rich, blue-blooded, and convinced of the need for a fence between the United States and Mexico. They’re tiny enough to carry around in a purse, and he calls them by squeaky diminutives like Dicky and Tatty and Naugie. This must have something to do with the fact that his mother’s people were from New England. When he is communing with his dog, he is suddenly a tall, overbred woman named Buffy, who plays mah-jongg on the weekends and eats only hors d’oeuvres.
Perhaps out of loyalty to the breed, he addresses my mother as Cairn. “Oh, yeah, he married me because I’m a human terrier,” she told me once, with admirable equanimity. “I’m excitable, I’m hairy, I have a great sense of smell, and I’m a bitch.”
• • •
THE DOG IS POINTING her head at the ceiling and trying to communicate something to us, probably about religion. “Hush up, Whimsy!” my mother commands.
My father is incensed. “What did you say? What did you say to my dog?”
“She’s barking her head off, Greg! The neighbors are going to complain!”
“Oh, I guess you just wish that my sweet little dog was dead!” he yells, being somewhat given to dramatic overstatement. The dog is a bone of contention between them, because my mother is Highly Allergic. She is also Highly Allergic to the cat we’re currently attempting to spirit upstairs before my father notices, but she never mentions that. My father despises cats. He believes them to be Democrats. He considers them to be little mean hillary clintons covered all over with feminist legfur. Cats would have abortions, if given half a chance. Cats would have abortions for fun. Consequently our own soft sinner, a soulful snowshoe named Alice, will stay shut in the bedroom upstairs, padding back and forth on cashmere paws, campaigning for equal pay, educating me about my reproductive options, and generally plotting the downfall of all men.
My mother hooks her arm through mine. “I’m not sure what reason he has to hate cats so much. If anyone should hate cats, it’s me. When I was a girl, a cat snuck into my room and gave birth all over my bed.” She smiles sentimentally, thinking of the carnage, and then sneezes. Then sneezes again, and sneezes again. She begins sneezing without interruption every night at midnight, like a werewolf that’s allergic to its own fur.
On the other side of me, Jason squeezes my hand. From one Wonderland into another.
• • •
MY MOTHER LIGHTS like the first streetlamp when she looks at us—the coziest, homiest, most nostalgic one. She will have friends now, and new mouths to feed, and people to stay up into the nocturnal hours with her, talking and laughing. My father’s move to the Kansas City diocese carried her away from all her children, who are mostly in Cincinnati and St. Louis, and she misses being close to her own mother and brother and sisters.
My father’s sense of family is more theoretical. He likes having a lot of kids—the continuing existence of dogs is secure!—but I’m not even sure he knows where all of us live. He never socialized much with my mother’s side of the family, either, so I doubt he’s suffering from the distance between them. He feels a claustrophobia in crowds he never felt down on the submarine, and one of my uncles once gave him a copy of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos for Christmas—to taunt him, he believed—and he has never forgotten it.
Even my mother was incredulous. “A book about the universe? Are you kidding me?” she said, as if Cosmos is generally found shelved somewhere between The Satanic Bible and the books about gay penguins.
“What’s wrong with that?” I asked.
“Oh, Tricia.” She clucked at my foolishness. “Even a book about the universe can have an agenda.”
• • •
“LET ME TAKE YOU ON A TOUR,” my mother says, and guides us into the kitchen, where, she informs us with visible regret, a contractor recently lost part of his hand. The house is unfamiliar, yet somehow it contains all my childhood houses. There are the crucifixes I remember, the couches, the dishes. There is that same lingering odor of my father’s cooking, which smells like ground beef being tortured in a pit of fire for its sins. There is, heaven help us, the art.
Pretty much all art in this house is of Jesus reaching out with two fingers and trying to milk things—the air, the clouds, the Cross, a cripple
who wants to get blessed but who instead is going to get milked, by Jesus. Jesus stands against a celestial background. He reaches toward a plump, dangling ray of the sun. He is going to milk the hell out of it.
When the paintings aren’t of Jesus, they’re of ships and jungle cats, which fit better with the theme than you might expect. On one wall is a photo-realistic 1960s painting of a tiger, leaping at you so ferociously that you know he must have eaten Jesus, and that in fact Jesus, crouching inside him and full of a taste for human flesh, is the one who is hungry for you. Over the couch hangs a picture of a quail following a set of human footprints in the snow. Whose footprints is she following? I hardly need to tell you.
Above the fireplace hangs a painting of a full-rigged ship resting in the harbor at Nantucket. This is my father’s most prized artistic possession. It is called simply “The Stobart,” as other people might say “The van Gogh” or “The Banksy.” The Stobart is perhaps the world’s most literal ship painting—a setting sun, pearly blues and anemone pinks and oyster grays, puddles on planks, riggings painted with a single hair. Yet you cannot shake the feeling that Jesus is hiding out in there somewhere, as the weirdest, hottest cabin boy, or an incredibly ripped, tan parrot who repeats after no one and gives crackers to YOU. “I never get tired of looking at that masterpiece,” my father remarks, gazing deeply at The Stobart, lusting for the cabin boy he cannot see.
“I hate all modern art, because it’s mad at God,” he likes to say. Most Catholics have never recovered from that painting of the Virgin Mary with elephant dung all over it. They are under the assumption there are entire museums in New York dedicated to anti-Catholic shit paintings, where all varieties of zoo scat are flung at pictures of the innocent Virgin.
“Did you see how ugly the church is?” he asks me now. I did. He suggests it’s because it was built in the 1950s, when people were already starting to be Communists.
“I’ll tell you what the problem is,” he says, taking on the comfortable tone of instruction. “When people started forgetting about gender roles, they started building ugly churches. Architecture requires an equal balance of the male and the female in order to be beautiful.” What? There’s no way that can be right. According to those standards, the perfect cathedral would be a gigantic Prince symbol people could pray inside.
• • •
MOM HAS MADE her old sewing room ready to welcome us home. The walls are white as eggshells and the ceiling is low enough to touch. It’s about ten feet by ten feet and there are two gable windows that add to the feeling of snugness. There are two big closets, the kind you would hide in with your notebook when you were a child, and there’s a cut-glass lamp that throws pineapple-patterned light all over the ceiling. On top of the chest of drawers is my entire childhood collection of gnomes, accumulated during a time when I lusted after gnomes so strenuously I’m surprised I grew up to have sex with human beings as opposed to whimsical statues in people’s gardens.
There is a painting of poppies above the bed that I gave my mother one Christmas, believing her taste in art to be immature. The poppies are red and pink watercolor splotches that look like spilled blood. A lot like spilled blood. A lot like spilled blood . . . on the panties of the snow. Oh my god, I realize, looking at it again, I gave my mother a menstrual painting.
“Mom, is that . . . are those . . .” I indicate the art.
She dismisses my astonishment with a wave of the hand. “I was wondering when you would figure it out. I figured maybe the painter had a trauma. Maybe she got her period one time in church.”
I promise never to attempt to educate her again. It must have been very wrong of me. Jason enters with two suitcases and sees us staring. “Why is there blood all over the wall?”
• • •
FINALLY SHE CREAKS OPEN the door of the upstairs bathroom and shows Jason where the thousand-count bottle of aspirin is. “If you feel that shooting pain in your left arm, you bear down with all your might like you’re sitting on the toilet and then you take two of these,” she tells him tenderly. Peering past her, I notice an economy-sized bottle of Palmolive inside the shower.
“What’s that doing in there?” I ask.
She is silent for a moment, as if debating whether to tell me. Then she sighs. “Your dad washes himself with dish soap.”
• • •
AS I WALK BEHIND HER down the halls, it happens. I shrink inch by inch until I am no longer an adult, but a baby toddling along in a comically oversized business suit. I have been pretending to be a grown-up this whole time. My briefcase is full of milk; I have been found out.
This, then, is home. What is home? Is it a sort of lap of location, that exists only if certain conditions are in place? Is it the intersection of rigidity and comfort—a junction of familiarity that you curl into? Is it a feeling? I don’t know, but I’m being hugged hard against it, and I can’t tell when I’ll be let go.
When we find ourselves alone for a minute, Jason and I hold each other tightly. I pat him on the back, and a helpless infant belch rumbles up from his underground. “You burped me!” he exclaims. So I’m not the only one.
• • •
WE FALL FAST into a routine. At night, we eat angel food cake with strawberries and whipped cream, and drink prosecco my mother chills in the freezer. It takes only two glasses before she’s doubled over giggling and bellowing, “OHHHH YEAHHHHH.” At some point during my childhood, she decided bellowing “OHHHH YEAHHHHH” in a loud Kool-Aid Man voice was a catchphrase, and she has punctuated her speech with it ever since. When I inevitably begin hiccuping from the bubbles, she whacks me on the back and screams, “It’s because you’re gulping it! Drink it differently.”
Starting at midnight, she opens up her laptop and begins reading the internet aloud. How long can it be? she reasons. Five hundred pages at MOST. She resisted the internet for so long, but has finally succumbed to its embrace: it is, after all, an excellent place to find stories about people who have died horribly. “Did you hear about this, Tricia?” she asks me, and then reads aloud the story of a young boy who smothered to death on his own teddy bear. “Who would have thought that a hug could be deadly,” she muses. Or, “Did you see the story about the demonic rosaries? China has released demon rosaries into the market. They have pentagrams hidden on them and no INRI and a snake behind Jesus’ head. My friend found one in her house and her husband had to take it out to the garage and destroy it. They say if you come across one you should lift it with a stick and then bury it in your backyard.” Or abruptly, “There’s a new kind of diarrhea, and it’s killing senior citizens.”
“Mom, Mom, Mom,” I say, unable to hold my laughter.
She peers at me through her glasses. “What?”
“Nothing. Keep reading.”
“WHAT ARE YOU FEMMES DOING,” my father booms from the doorway. He always calls us femmes. It is, believe it or not, a term of affection. When he’s angry, he calls you a feminazi. When he first encountered that epithet, on Rush Limbaugh’s radio show in the early nineties, he hugged it to himself as wholeheartedly as a second wife. Nuns are feminazis, Democrats are feminazis, the secretary who asks him please not to call her “dollface” is a feminazi. It goes without saying that I am a feminazi. He finds uses for the word in all sorts of situations. If he were alone in the wilderness and a cougar charged him, he would yell, “FEMINAZI!” right in its tawny face, and I have no doubt the cougar would back down.
My mother ignores him. “Tricia, did you see this online quiz where you have to guess whether it’s a Hot Dog or a Celebrity Leg?” I did, I tell her. Somehow or other, I did.
• • •
WHEN WE CLIMB the stairs to bed, we find sleep eludes us. Out in the darkness, yard to yard, dogs are answering no one. Whimsy is chief among them. All night long, she answers the questions no one has asked.
But there is, underneath that, a more disturbing sound.
It is the sound of my mother creeping back and forth, patrolling the halls, sneaking on tiptoe past our door, pausing to check whether we’re still breathing. Jason and I look at each other and realize, with sad certainty, that we will never have sex in this place. Just forget it. What if the crucifix over the door came to life? What if we were having sex and I caught Jesus’ eye and saw that he was suddenly crying blood? What if the INRI above his head had rearranged itself somehow to read HORNI? Plus, I would probably get pregnant every time.
• • •
THERE ARE HOUSES people cannot seem to leave, even though the doors are wide open. You feel very slightly heavier in them, the way you would on Jupiter. This is one of those houses. There is more gravity in this room than there is anywhere else on the planet, so much that I can hardly step outside it. My hands weigh a hundred pounds each and I can barely lift my head off the pillow in the mornings. The bed fills the whole room, and I lie on it and float, thinking about what I should do. The world moves its scenery back and forth in front of the window; it has nothing to do with me; it is passing me by. I lie on the bed and feel myself gently going out of print.
I have always lived in these places, these places adjacent to the church and adjacent to its powers. There was holy water on the steps, which I sprinkled, and unblessed hosts in the closet, which I ate. The first rectory I remember was a mansion that stretched and stood up, and swallowed and rambled, and lazily ignored all laws of time and space. It was permanently three o’clock in the afternoon there, except when it was three o’clock in the morning. And it was so big I took it for granted that it regularly grew new rooms, and when I opened a door, I understood I might never see that room again. Once I turned a knob and found a room full of nuns sewing quietly on a quilt, with wire hair and support hose pooling around their ankles and glasses on gold chains and straight blue skirts. The nuns glanced up in unison and smiled at me, a sweet chorus of acknowledgment and acceptance, as if I were a baby in a basket they had found on their doorstep. I closed the door and tiptoed away and knew I would never find my way back. That is the way the house was. It was boxy and biological. It was now larger and now smaller, and there was a feeling at the end of each hallway that it was the tip of a twig, and when I wasn’t looking it would leaf. This spell extended to the front lawn, where once I rolled an acorn down a hill and stared hard at the blue depression it made in the snow. Then I looked up and saw a great oak, which seemed to have shot up that minute, instant from my acorn. I could not recall it being there before and believed I had grown it, and feeling at the tips of fingers and toes the power of the twig I took it in my stride.
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