Priestdaddy

by Patricia Lockwood

  “You’re still here. You’re still standing,” my mother says now, and then I do relax. It is sweet, sometimes, to hear clichés after long days of trying to say something new. And to be fair, since we can never really see into people’s minds or motives, the actual reason she chose that gynecologist might have been because the other doctors in his practice were named Dr. WeeWee and Dr. Bosom, which was a symmetry she would have been powerless to resist.

  “I hope your father doesn’t read it,” she adds, but to my knowledge, my father has never read anything I’ve written, for one simple reason: no submarines.

  “Did you see some of those comments, though?” she asks, dabbing her eyes and sinking back into her chair. “One of them said drinking alcohol around men was like smearing yourself with salmon oil and blackberry juice and walking into a forest full of bears. No it isn’t! It’s not like that at all!”

  Now it is my turn to soothe. “No, no, no, no, no, no, Mom,” I tell her. “You must never look at the comments.”

  Back in bed, watching shadows slash across the ceiling, I draw the comforter up to my chin and try to keep my teeth from chattering. I have almost never felt so bare—something even beyond bare, as if some interior room had been turned inside out and I found it was large enough to contain the whole world. What have I done? I ask myself, wishing suddenly to return to yesterday, when no one knew and I was no one’s confessor, but then I call up the perfect rhythm of that afternoon in Savannah and am calmed. A trick I often use, when I feel overwhelming shame or regret, or brokenness beyond repair, is to think of a line I especially love, or a poem that arrived like lightning, and remember that it wouldn’t have come to me if anything in my life had happened differently. Not that way. Not in those words.

  • • •

  TWO DAYS LATER, I wake from a dream of God creating the pig for the first time. I have these dreams at least once a week now, and they always mean my father is in the kitchen cooking a whole pound of bacon. I yawn, begin to sip the milky tea that Jason has left for me on the bedside table, and open my email.

  There is a note from the editor of the Penguin Poets Series, who had asked to see my manuscript about six months earlier. He apologizes for not responding to me sooner, but says he read my collection again the other night, and found it to be so blank and so blank, two words that look like fireworks, and he would like to publish it next year if I am willing.

  I spill hot tea on my naked boob, but I don’t even notice. There is something about an acceptance. It makes the blood and the brain effervesce; it climbs the ladder of the happiness you felt in the heat of the work. There is no jolt like it, except the one you would experience in grade school, when just after lunchtime your English teacher would say, “Today in class we will be writing a story.” And your fingertips would turn to glad ice, and the bottoms of your feet would thrill, and the bologna sandwich in your stomach would flip over, because she was speaking directly to you. If I am ever medically dead, try whispering that in my ear and see if I don’t sit up again gasping, ready all over as the tip of a pen. Today we will be writing a story.

  My first book had been published in 2012 by an indie press that paid in copies: a hundred for every thousand printed, so that after a while, you found yourself with a definite surplus. Before that, I remember only a decade of desperate unconnectedness and of knowing no one, which towered like a pile of unread papers. If reading was the highest form of seeing, how would I become visible? I had no professors to guide me, no fellow students to accompany me on my way. The few times I snuck into a university library, hungry to dip into the books I could not find elsewhere, I felt I was about to be tackled any moment by the police. Once I crept into the stacks at Washington University, where my sister Christina had so hoped to study music, and I can still feel the sharp stamp of bricks against my back as I crouched in a shadowy corner with my paper, scratching out the line “teeth infinite white and infinite many” with the wild lawlessness and curtailed breath of someone who lives in a country where poetry is illegal.

  I wrote and Jason licked envelopes and we sent out; I slept with pencils under my pillow and scribbled images on the backs of my diner order pads; we scraped together twenty-dollar entrance fees for contests I did not win. Every poem of mine that was ever accepted was picked out of the slush pile. It went on that way for ten years. I stood strangely by myself, a shifting, shimmering, mutable manuscript in my hand, new poems roosting in it and other poems departing, first poems about Jesus, now poems about murder, now poems about lizard people for some reason—and came no closer to being acknowledged by that great, scanning eye which didn’t know I existed. What reached out of me then must have been ambition, but it felt like longing.

  Still, remembering the raw crackle of that poem racing to the four corners, I think, “This was the price? This was the purchase of entry, into that closed and impregnable world?”

  If it had been a letter, Jason would have snatched it out of my hand and clasped it to his heaving breast. Instead, he makes me read the email to him over and over, until my voice begins to sing in its familiar course. “You did it,” he says, bursting into tears. “This is just like when an animal succeeds in a movie.”

  “There’s nothing in this rulebook that says a dog can’t play basketball!”

  “There’s nothing in the Constitution that says a lizard person can’t be president!”

  We high-five and race each other downstairs, toward the ever-present scent of bacon.

  My father, sipping hazelnut coffee out of an oversized mug that reads I LOVE MY “WHITE-COLLAR” JOB! is really delighted. He chuckles, the way he does when the rogue cop gets the better of the by-the-book police chief. “I told them you could make it on your own,” he says, almost to himself. “Hoo-hoo, bay-bee. I told them you didn’t need to go to school.” He has always revised history to larger and smaller degrees, but lately the revisions are so complete as to be disquieting. Within a year’s time, he will have progressed to the story that I stood in that room and told him college couldn’t teach me anything anyway, because writers didn’t need it.

  “Congratulations!” the seminarian cries when we tell him. Then, taking into account my roosterish hair, my cutoffs, and the striped Ernie shirt I threw on in my haste, “Wow, you really DO look like a monster in the morning.”

  That night, stretched out across the bed with the cat in a chinchilla curve on the small of his back, Jason asks me to read the email again. “You’ll get a thousand dollars when you sign the contract, and then another thousand when the book comes out,” he says, his eyes so wide that I see the bionic flash of his lenses, the one that always reminds me that I am outside of him and his most fundamental perceptions, that we have brought different pasts to our place of overlap. “Maybe we’ll be able to move out sooner than we thought.” A little candle lights in him. It is hope, and it is necessary, because I know he is starting to feel it: the craziness of the house, closing in on him too.

  • • •

  THE SORT OF DIARY that fixes my body in time and space, that records the weather and my moods and what my rosebushes are doing, has always been impossible for me. As soon as I begin to set down the facts, the old childhood chorus of Is that true? Is that really true? starts up, and I hesitate, and then I scratch out the sentences until they’re solid black. Here, though, I find myself carrying around a slim cardboard notebook and a felt-tip pen and jotting down everything everyone says, as fast and free as it comes out of their mouths, feathering the fresh ink as I go. Sometimes I just sit in the dining room with my cheek propped on my fist and transcribe my father’s running commentary while he’s watching sports. (“I like Chunky Soup . . . oh yeahhh . . . I’d like to have a whole room full of that stuff. Make it Sirloin Burger,” he said last week as he and his dog watched commercials. The mental image this conjured may never leave me.) There is something pleasant about this, almost like having a real job again. It forces me
to participate in the household, in the regular course of human days, which I have so long ignored. Occasionally it even forces me to attend breakfast, with its pointless toast and stupid eggs, for fear of missing one of my mother’s literary eruptions. I haven’t fully formulated what I’m doing yet, but I carry a notebook and listen, and Jason listens for me when I am not there. “Oh my god, you will never believe,” he tells me, breathless from running up the stairs, his tummy bulging with whatever my mother most recently fed him. “Don’t worry. I wrote it all down for you on a napkin.” I smooth out the napkin and read:

  “Did you know rats in big cities are getting aggressive from eating too many cigarette butts? They’re addicted to nicotine and they want more.”

  —Karen Lockwood, nearly screaming, while eating an omelet at a breakfast restaurant in the year of our Lord 2013

  I copy it conscientiously into the notebook. Ever since I confessed I might be writing about her, my mother has risen to heights of quotability exceeded only by Confucius, Muhammad Ali, and that guy who was always saying things like “You have hissed all my mystery lectures. You have tasted a whole worm.” She claps her hands joyously at me and commands, “Quote it!” She has been shy since she was a young girl, in kneesocks and prim pointed collars. She blushed whenever anyone looked at her, so fully and furiously up to the hairline that classmates called her Red. She is one of those fabled survey respondents who would rather die than stand up in a spotlight or give a speech, but still she wants the same thing I did: to meet the ideal reader. To be visible, at last, in words she has chosen.

  “I can see right through you,” my father used to tell me when I was little, and the cringe of that feeling, of being transparent to God and everyone, was so strong that I swore off all forms of autobiography for a long time. How could I be sure I was telling the truth about myself when he claimed to know me better than I did? How could I state anything with absolute certainty—whether I liked a particular song, or wanted to get up and go for a walk, or even whether I was hungry or thirsty? The only time I didn’t feel like a liar was when people asked me what I did and I told them that I wrote, and then I became a great ivy-wrapped I, just as I would have been in the illuminated manuscript. Of course that is what I would grow up to do. Of course I would find a way to live inside that sure, swift, unassailable answer. My heart fluttered and faltered within me; it was not strong and I knew it; I would replace it with that sweet pang of purpose that came chasing after Today we will be writing a story.

  That was the bargain, and I shook my own hand on it. I would write forever, but not about myself and not about what happened, and never about my most profound and deforming secrets—that I had been raised in an alternate reality, that my childhood sky was green. There were many, many other things to occupy me, I reasoned: Dialogues Between the Pines and lewd copy for dildo catalogs, for starters. But how long can you outrun your subject, when your subject is your own life? Dialogues Between Pines and lewd dildo copy are necessary contributions in their way, but it seems more necessary, back in this house and back under this roof, to simply record what I can see from where I am. Everyone gets a window. This is what mine looks out on: that same stunning, disorienting view; that square of deep green sky.

  8

  TOUCH OF GENIUS

  I didn’t kill him,” comes a spectral voice over the phone. “At least, not all the way.”

  Groggy, I reach for the alarm clock and squint at the blood-red numbers. It appears to be fourteen in the morning, but that’s not a real time. “Who is this?”

  “It’s your mother.” She sounds offended. “Who gave birth to you without anesthesia. Anyway, I’ve had a little accident.”

  “Where are you?” It occurs to me that I haven’t seen her in a while. I’ve been completely absorbed in writing a poem called “Genie Penis,” about the little tip of the genie that goes down into the lamp, and I haven’t left my room much for the past week. Her answer could be as various as either “downstairs,” “at the grocery store,” “in Canada,” or “playing chess with a chimp in a rocket ship.” I brace myself for the unexpected.

  “I’m in Cincinnati, visiting your brothers and sisters. I snuck out of the rectory two nights ago, under cover of darkness.” She’s always sneaking out of the rectory under cover of darkness so my father doesn’t catch her and trap her under a vast pile of his laundry. The fact that her children live in three different cities means she long ago mastered the art of trilocation, much like the godhead himself. “I peeked into your room before I left and asked if you wanted to come with me, but you sat up in bed and gave me the finger and said you needed to stay home to get ideas for your writing.”

  Yeah, that sounds like me. “Wait a minute, go back. You had an accident? What happened?”

  She takes a deep, shuddering breath. “A pedestrian ran into thegrindup.com.”

  That is not an English sentence, I recognize. Let me explain. thegrindup.com is a rap entourage van my sister Christina purchased for the express purpose of conveying her six children from one place to another. Modern vehicles are no longer built with Irish procreative capabilities in mind, so when you get to the point where you have six children and are pregnant with your seventh, your only options for transportation are church buses and rap entourage vans. My sister has a sense of style, so she picked the second, and found it a perfect match for her needs. It’s a van of transcendent beauty, black as a stallion and glossy, with the magnificent website address WWW.THEGRINDUP.COM stenciled hugely across one side. Its size cannot be overstated. All the clowns in the world could fit inside.

  According to legend, The Grindup was an up-and-coming St. Louis rapper who spread the word about his work by driving thegrindup.com up and down the city streets while his friends partied in the back. One day they must have partied too hard, because the van ended up at a police auction, where my sister acquired it. She plastered the back with Catholic radio bumper stickers, which was the final insult, because if you’ve ever listened to Catholic radio then you know the flow is awful and the beats are not remotely tasty. Not only can you not dance to it, but it makes you want to lie down on the ground and never move again. It’s just a bunch of call-in shows where people talk about whether something is a sin or not, and they almost always decide that it is, in fact, a sin. If the sad transmissions of Catholic radio ever reach the aliens, they will never even try to conquer us, figuring that some other overlord has already taken care of it.

  She continues her tragic tale. “I was driving past a bus stop when a man wearing earbuds suddenly raced out into the middle of the street. He was listening to music,” she says, aggrieved. “You can’t listen to music all the time or else you get hit by a car. By my car,” she amends.

  “He just ran smack into the front corner of the van and bounced off. You should see the dent he made. He was quite a large man; I’d say he weighed at least two hundred and eighty pounds. People say it isn’t good to be big, but sometimes if you’re not big . . . you’re dead.”

  I’m aware I’m making the low continuous moaning noise of a fearful cow, but I can’t seem to stop. This is the worst story I’ve ever heard. This is worse than Ethan Frome.

  “Luckily I was only going about thirty miles an hour. Oh, Tricia, you should have heard the meaty sound. It was so frightening. I slammed on the brakes, and your sister jumped out of the front seat and began to yell at his body.”

  “She what?”

  “Tricia, she’s pregnant. You have to be alert when you’re pregnant or else you become vulnerable to predators. It’s a biological adaptation.”

  “Ah. Well, I can’t argue with that,” I say, silently adding . . . without making myself crazy for the rest of my life. “I guess we’re just lucky she didn’t experience a sudden craving and try to eat him.”

  “The worst part is that all of your sister’s kids were riding in the backseat, and they saw everything. They were so upset, but they knew wh
at to do. After they stopped crying, they started reciting Hail Marys in perfect unison.”

  Well, at least someone is getting influenced by the incantatory power of the rap van. According to my mother, the only one who didn’t pray was the second-oldest child, Aria, who heard the sirens speeding toward them and calmly decided they were all going to jail, where perhaps they would meet The Grindup for the first time.

  “What happened to the poor pedestrian?” I ask.

  “He broke his arm, and he’ll be afraid of vans for the rest of his life. But he’s alive.”

  I can’t believe I missed this. “Stay home to get ideas for my writing,” indeed. The reality is, I wouldn’t know a good idea if it ran over me while driving a two-ton black van called thegrindup.com. Then again, it’s probably better I wasn’t there. If I had been riding along, I have no doubt my mother would have killed the man completely.

  After I hang up, I come downstairs and find my father subjecting the seminarian to an actual fashion show, sashaying back and forth in the new crimson robe he just bought from a dying nonagenarian priest who was selling off all of his clothes in preparation for his entrance into heaven.