Priestdaddy

by Patricia Lockwood

  There was something about me specifically that made my father angry. It had to do with my head, and what was in it. It had to do with what I’m doing right now: sitting outside the circle in silence and sifting the scene through my right eye. He used to say, “I’ve forgotten more than you’ll ever know,” which puzzled me. Didn’t that still mean that neither of us knew it?

  “Don’t look at me like that,” even my mother would cry sometimes. “Don’t you dare look at me like that.”

  “I’m not looking like anything,” I would protest, and I didn’t think I was. “I’m not doing anything,” and I was certain I wasn’t. Still I stood there, as if to prove some point about immovability and irresistible force, and looked. My mother always turned away first, but my father never did. The staring reached out of me and the stared-at reached out of him, and somehow we met there, two powers of the air.

  “I know everything you’re thinking,” he would say to me, like a hypnotist. “Everything that’s in your mind. You’re never, ever going to say something I’m not expecting, because you’re exactly like me.” This should have been laughable—most of what I thought was so strange, and my father could neither make a good joke nor properly compare a crescent moon to a fingernail clipping to save his life. Still, he carried the pulpit in front of him always, and his voice rang out and reverberated in the dome of my skull: I know everything about you, I see everything about you, looking at you is just like looking in a mirror. When I stared back at him, it was not to be defiant, but to insist that I was not simply the image of everything he hated about himself and was powerless to change, that my face was distinct from his, was mine.

  He hasn’t lost his temper with me once since I moved back, though. The knowledge that someone is writing about him has wrought a curious change in my father. “I think he’s being more patient with me because you’re always watching,” my mother has confided, and when she asks him if he’s worried about how he’ll be depicted, he tells her gently that I can write what I want, because people belong to themselves. Some calm has entered him, some rough chop around him has smoothed. When he walks home after Mass one Sunday afternoon and sees me reading under the cool forgiving oak in the front yard, he laughs and calls out, “I never thought it would be so much fun to have you home. It’s so nice when your kids grow up and you don’t have to kill them anymore.”

  • • •

  “Y’ALL AREN’T CATHOLIC, ARE YOU?” Darrell asks Jason one night, when Jason is shooting baskets in the church parking lot, in a circle of burnt-orange glow.

  “Oh my GOD no,” Jason says, pronouncing the word “God” with the proper fervency for the first time in his life.

  “Because the people around here can be really Catholic,” Darrell says, with a force of understatement that could shoot a rocket to the moon.

  “They talk about the bishop all the time,” Jason says, defeated. The two men share a moment of sympathetic understanding, surely asking themselves: how did we end up here? Then, as if to insist on their citizenship in a wider, brighter, less cross-carrying world, one not weeping to the rhythms of Gregorian chant, Darrell asks if we’ve gone dancing yet—in that real night where lives are streaming and loosed, their bodies hanging from them by a single stitch, just up the road at Power & Light.

  • • •

  CHUCK BLOWS UP AGAIN—over nothing, my mother tells me, over absolutely nothing. I picture him building to an actual physical explosion, puffing suddenly into a fight cloud, flinging words and gestures and hot breath outward in every direction. “That won’t help,” Darrell repeats to him, the phrases well-worn as beads. “That won’t do anything.” One of the faithful secretaries has had enough, and when she hears about it, she corners Chuck and shouts at him, “You better watch out, or else Darrell is going to have your job and be living in your house,” and suddenly I’ve rounded the corner on a panoramic view—could that be true? Could Darrell move into the handyman’s house, maybe have his son over, maybe see his mother there? I don’t have a house either, and I don’t know that I ever will, and a house seems like the ultimate acre to me, the place where you can finally live a real life.

  The worst part, my mother has confided, about being married to a priest is that she must float from place to place; the bricks are never hers and she is never home. So when she moves into a new rectory, she calls the handyman over, gives him a list, begins telling him the things to do that will make it seem like she belongs there. It will be this way as long as my father is alive. When he passes away, she will be turned out with nothing: no house, no retirement, and no money, just an armful of screaming guitars.

  “I think it’s the last straw this time,” my mother says about Chuck, though she admits that hardly anyone ever gets fired around churches, no matter what they do. Still, she is hopeful that a reckoning is coming, that things will be put right, valleys exalted and mountains made low.

  • • •

  BUT OVER LUNCH ONE DAY, just before I leave on my book tour, my mother tells me that Darrell is dying. Her sentences are flat with resignation, already stepping in rhythm toward the horizon, and there isn’t a breath of the glee she sometimes takes in relating some distant disaster, that unconscious glee that can only mean “It wasn’t us this time, it wasn’t our family, I counted the heads and we are safe.”

  The cancer started in the liver and now it’s everywhere. Metastatic, and I think of that definition of the word “flashover”: the point at which a fire in a room becomes a room on fire. He is wasted, the kind of wasting that makes every joint stand out bare in all its brass mechanism, like a doorknob waiting to be turned. He doesn’t want visitors, he doesn’t want his son to come, he doesn’t want anyone to see him like this. They think he only has about a month. My mother offers no other baroque details: no color of, no size of, no pain scale. Only that: a month. If she isn’t crying now, she will be as soon as she’s alone. Her father died of cancer, it went to his brain, at the end he didn’t even know who she was.

  Whenever someone says the word “month” to me, I call up an empty square filled with other empty squares, days and hours and minutes, bricks on bricks spiraling inward, pinwheel and diamond and herringbone patterns marching smaller and smaller to some vanishing point. And when she calls, not even two weeks later, to tell me he’s gone, I see a tall wall of those bricks knocked down and him striding out free with the real day pouring past him, all hours and minutes and seconds in a red rubble at his feet, the whole church of time torn down.

  He was only thirty-eight, my mother tells me chokingly. She says, “It was not fair.”

  • • •

  THERE IS TALK of holding the funeral service at Christ the King. If there isn’t any money, we’ll raise it, since money is the one thing we can raise, up to save us with its arms held wide. But Darrell was a Baptist, he has his own church. The funeral will be held there. “It’s in a bad part of town,” my mother falters. “Dad doesn’t think I should go,” and suddenly I’m angry. “Bullets go flying in that neighborhood,” she tells me, in the voice she uses to echo my father, who believes in bad neighborhoods with as much conviction as he believes in the Sermon on the Mount.

  “Bullets go flying in every neighborhood,” I say stupidly, and I am talking about the random, which ricochets down every street, but both of us understand she will not go.

  Instead, my father says a memorial Mass, because we do what is within our power. My mother asks me to come, but I can’t bring myself to do it. There is something I cannot stomach about those prayers for the faithful departed—they are so final, they freeze a person at the moment of their leaving. A real life walks out, and a door in our imagination closes. That’s that, we tell ourselves, it couldn’t have happened any other way. Nothing we could have done, no flowers we could have heaped on them while they were still among us.

  • • •

  DEATH IS ONE of those subjects where it’s worse to be
glib than to be bad. When you set out to write about death, your limits are in front of you like a kind of mortality. You can go that far and no farther, and you can see nothing beyond. There is no great, grand, thunderclap ending except the thing itself.

  When I was a child, I always hated being used in my father’s sermons, shrunk to a symbol to illustrate some larger lesson, flattened out to give other people comfort or instruction or even a laugh. It did some violence to my third dimension; it made it difficult for me to breathe. “That’s not me,” I would think, listening to some fable where a stick figure of myself moved automatically toward a punishing moral. “That has nothing to do with me at all.” If I had a soul, I thought, it was that resistance, which would never let another human being have the last word on me.

  This is what it is to write about people who are alive and then, sometimes, people who are dead. To say that his eyes were clear as agates, that his voice was a gravelly baritone, to surround him with the right adjectives and set him into the story—all this is an attempt to fit him in the glass box of a good sentence so everyone can see what he means. But it won’t work, the words can’t hold him, and I am glad.

  The desire to describe voice, gesture, skin color, is a desire to eat, take over, make into part of the pattern. I am happy every time to see a writer fail at this. I am happy every time to see real personhood resist our tricks. I am happy to see bodies insist that they are not shut up in this book, they are elsewhere. The tomb is empty, rejoice, he is not here.

  • • •

  MY FATHER COMES HOME from work and he is exhausted. He winces as he walks on his knee replacements, he hunches under extra weight, feeling always the subterranean throb of his back, sometimes exhaling a distressing sound of pure suffering—never the word “God,” but close: gad. It was always this way. He came home and there was nothing left except a desire to be alone with himself, so he could regenerate the language he needed to speak universally. There is a certain fatigue that comes from always presiding over the baptisms, the weddings, and the burials—the three ceremonies where you are most certain to encounter poetry, even if it is present nowhere else in your life.

  A truce, then, between me and my father’s house. I was not made in his likeness, but I have chosen something of his same extremity, his willingness to be available for the questions that knock on the door in the middle of the night. His voice inside the verses was so sweeping, his judgment from the pulpit so black-and-white, that it was hard not to inherit them. It was hard not to inherit the desire to stand over the deceased and say something, and it was impossible, finally, not to inherit his anger. As long as I lived under his roof, I told myself that I had no temper, that I would never speak that knot of heat I felt so often in my throat, forced down into my rib cage, sent flowing into my fingertips. But I belong to myself now, and I can admit it. When I sit down at the desk, the anger radiates out of me in great bronze spikes, like holiness in the old paintings, and a sermon rises up in me as if it had been waiting for breath, and puts itself together bone to bone.

  • • •

  I’M NOT INTERESTED in heaven unless my anger gets to go there too. I’m not interested in a happy eternity unless I get to spend an eternity on anger first. Let me speak for the meek and say that we don’t want the earth, if that’s where all the bodies are buried. If we are resurrected at the end of the world, I want us to assemble with a military click, I want us to come together as an army against what happened to us here. I want us to bring down the enemy of our suffering once and for all, and I want us to loot the pockets, and I want us to take baths in the blood.

  What do I want? I want him to have a job, and be living in your house. I want us to stop selling heaven as the home we don’t get here. I want an afterlife for my anger; I want levitation, perfection, and white wings for it, and I want an afterlife for my question, which is an answer.

  But for now the question just hangs in the middle of the air, halfway up the blue sky, the long unbroken mosquito whine of a why, and the only thing that answers is the voice of my father, saying what he always said, saying the same thing your father always said: “Life isn’t fair, nobody ever said it was going to be, who told you that.”

  19

  INTERIOR CASTLE

  My grandfather George Lockwood built houses, the sort of quick-and-ready houses that made the country ugly. When we at last move out of the rectory, nine months after we first stepped over its doorstep, it is into a house that reminds me of these. It is forty miles away from Kansas City, in a small town of aspiring radicals called Lawrence. Forty miles is an excellent distance to be from your parents: close enough for your mother to bring you an “extra” sour cream apple pie that she “accidentally” made by “mistake,” but far enough away that it feels like real life—despite the fact that your closest neighbor is a hippie with waist-length white dreads who grows lettuces for his job.

  You want my mother on your side during a post-apocalyptic war for resources, and you also want her with you when you move. She acquires superhuman strength during these times, like the women who lift cars off babies. In a way, that’s what she’s doing, except the car also contains all the literature the baby has ever owned, the contents of its closets, and all its freaky baby makeup.

  As Jason carries boxes of long-lost books through the front door and I group them on the shelves according to mood—archipelagoes of books about islands, obscene books piled willy-nilly on top of each other, stories of parallel worlds set side by side—Mom disappears into the dirtiest holes of the house she can find and rejoices in them like Pigpen’s mother giving him his annual bath.

  “BLACK MOLD!” she shrieks as she scrubs the bathroom, and then, “No. No, it’s just some filth that somebody tracked in.”

  Just before she leaves, with a cardboard box of cleaning products under one arm, she turns sober. “I just want to warn you,” she says, with the seriousness of someone about to tell me that my father is not my real father. “Meadow mice may be a HUGE problem for you here.” She points at the window of my new study, which shows a panorama of the wind-warped backyard. We have nearly an acre, with a fire pit and a picnic bench and a pyramid of chopped wood, which crawls with brown recluses. “You’re really verging on the wilderness.”

  She glances at my desk, which Jason has just finished setting up against the back wall, where I’ll have an unimpeded view of the hordes of meadow mice attempting to encroach on my domain. “Be sure to sit up straight when you’re working, Tricia, or else you’ll get a Dowager’s Hump.”

  She is right, though, about the wilderness. The first morning in the new house, I wake at dawn, make myself a cup of tea in my special personalized mug that says DOUG on it, and walk into the study to see the branches filled with glossy black squirrels in perpetual motion, gamboling up and down like scraps of shadow. A bobcat patrols the corner of our yard between a jogging trail and the forest, I make friends with a large sensual skunk named Big Boy, and one night a mole, that most agoraphobic of creatures, tunnels his way into our basement, creeps up the stairs, and scratches at the basement door for me to let him out. Even the stars out here are fierce, like points of fangs, like my thoughts.

  “Look what I found in the garden,” Jason says after a weekend afternoon of yard work, and presents me with three huge quartz crystals, clear and cloudy and clotted with dirt. I wash them in a bowl of warm water and add them to my collection, which is ranged in bits and pieces all across the windowsill.

  • • •

  “WHAT ARE THE COMMANDMENTS?” Jason asks me before he leaves for work, holding a brown paper bag full of fruit in one hand, because living with my mother made him fat.

  “Drink water. I am not Lawrence of Arabia’s camel,” I recite. “One hundred pretzels is not a meal. If I start thinking about penguins, I’m too cold. If I start thinking about hell, I’m too hot. Too much coffee has made lab rabbits explode. If I find myself reading the Wikipedia
entry for ‘Death,’ step away from the internet.”

  “And?”

  “And I am the only zoo animal currently living who has the key to my own cage. Open it and go outside.”

  • • •

  WHEN I WAS A CHILD I lived in the woods, where my friends and I occupied ourselves with a game called Rooms. It never occurred to us to call the game anything else, though I was supposedly famous for my imagination. The woods were on an empty lot next to our two-story brick house and they were full of peat-brown, barky vines that grew sinuous along the ground like free foundations. It was a mystical game, but also a practical one: the Rooms existed already among the trees and it was our job to recognize them. We dragged mud-caked rocks up from the creek bed and built walls where we felt walls to be, and paced discerningly around our perimeters and ripped away screens of leaves where we felt windows were. It was always very clear where the door was; it seemed to stand in the air. We entered each other’s Rooms with a grand twisting gesture, to give the door the luxurious feeling of having a knob, and stepped exaggeratedly over the threshold, to give ourselves the luxurious feeling of coming in out of the wild.

  They were an arbitrary form that nonetheless felt ordained, like a sonnet. I always chose the ones that would hold the narrowest beds, the cells. I lined them with emerald-green cushions of moss and sat among mulching leaves and cutouts of sunlight in the middle of them, long after my friends had gone home, reveling in a feeling of totally transparent walls and a roof I could leave through.

  I wonder what would happen if I went outside and tried the game again, just to see if I still have the knack, but in the end I stay confined in my study. Confinement is different, after all, when it’s your idea. I draw my knees up to my chin and look at the books stacked all around me, thinking, “Who does a story belong to? Is this one mine?”