Priestdaddy

by Patricia Lockwood

  • • •

  IT IS IMPOSSIBLE to think about literary seclusion without thinking of Dickinson writing, “I had a terror—since September—I could tell to none—and so I sing, as the Boy does by the Burying Ground—because I am afraid—”

  People like to speculate about the cause of this terror, assuming it came from outside her own body. Emily Dickinson: Scared by a Big Dog in Her Prime? Emily Dickinson: She Saw One Penis and Renounced Human Society. Instead, I like to speculate about the slim, dangling rope she threw across that terror, with a basket at the end filled with little cakes for children. I like to imagine, too, that she sent down cracked-out poems along with them, mostly pertaining to baked goods:

  Heaven—Was a Sugar Cube

  Baby took a Taste

  Just—as Pearls—of Cherubim

  Bit into the Christ

  People assume that the shutting-up made her smaller. But locking yourself up can be a way to shrink the castle down to your size, and to expand your body toward the wider limits of the walls, until you are rooted at the foundation, see sideways out the glass, and do your highest thinking with the smoke that leaves the chimney. And still, through the window, you can send out sweets. Emily did not show her face to the children, only the hands and arms that set down the poems. What if she wanted simply to reveal, and not to be exposed? What counts as hiding, and what counts as devoted contemplation?

  There is a place near our gray-and-white house that reminds me of her. It’s a museum of miniatures, where you can see the whole imagined spectrum of human habitation for five dollars. The building is Spanish-style, with a roof of undulant red tiles that blends into a broader roof of leaves. The first time I visit, I race around like a giant gobbling local villages in order to see it all. The best is the violin shop in the hollowed-out body of a fiddle, and the miniature jewelry store where a woman in a fox stole is considering a diamond ring, and the miniature dollhouse workshop that makes the whole enterprise self-aware. Also the food—tin-scaled fish slit down their bellies, quails waiting to be plucked, glistening tiny hams in crumbs of brown sugar and bunches of radiant grapes. There are rings of keys, scrimshaws and sextants in salty sea captains’ parlors, empty cradles and blue willow china. Teakettles. Desks for writing letters. Vials of perfume and shadow boxes of speckled birds’ eggs and inkwells that will never diminish. I am in the house of nouns here, and it fills me with the conviction that good books sometimes give: that life can be holdable in the hand, examined down to the dog hairs, eaten with the eyes and understood.

  “Everything looks just like everything,” Jason exclaims, wheeling from case to case in a frenzy, wondering how the artists have shrunk domesticity to the last detail. The only thing that isn’t convincing is the people. Somehow they can never get the people quite right—something about them cannot be nailed down.

  “Do you think you could get really into dollhouses?” I ask him, as he peers into a sitting room and squeals over an infinitesimal stained-glass window.

  He responds instantly. “Yeah. Dollhouses for Men. It’s Good to Be a Small Man.”

  • • •

  HOW DID I BECOME a person who almost never left the house? Until I was twelve I lived as an element of nature, tending to my untamed Rooms, wading through creeks and waist-high grasses, and bicycling diagonally across vacant lots long after the sun had flamed down. All the while I collected: unsplit geodes with their lunar skins, horn corals with mushroom frills at the top, shivered green glass and grocery lists and bottle caps not yet flattened into the second dimension. Collecting was a mad instinct to own the world. If I had to go inside at all, I wanted to bring the whole outdoors with me and hold my own context in my hand.

  Then, when we moved to the neighborhood in St. Louis that was piece by piece being lifted into the sky, where girls were in danger and no one played after dark, the most curious thing happened: I felt the slow clank of a metal shutter coming down, being lowered by some unseen hand until there was only a stripe of light underneath, and that was the news from outside. I was thirteen, and it was beyond my strength to raise it again. How to go back: to that diagonal flight across fields, that confident pocketing of everything I surveyed? How to remember that easy, bone-deep assumption that the world is for you too?

  I know all women are supposed to be strong enough now to strangle presidents and patriarchies between their powerful thighs, but it doesn’t work that way. Many of us were actually affected, by male systems and male anger, in ways we cannot always articulate or overcome. Sometimes, when the ceiling seems especially low and the past especially close, I think to myself, I did not make it out. I am still there in that place of diminishment, where that voice an octave deeper than mine is telling me what I am. Before I turned thirteen, I had never been part of the class that my father called empty-headed and addressed as “dollface,” that our church seemed to see as just bodies. I was simply myself, unique and irreducible. Suddenly I became female, and it was as if a telescope I had been looking through—with a clear eye, up at an unbounded night of stars—had been viciously turned on me. I went to a pinpoint. Does God exist was never a question for me then; do I exist took up the whole of my mind.

  I did not make it out, but this does. Art goes outside, even if we don’t; it fills the whole air, though we cannot raise our voices. This is the secret: when I encounter myself on the page, I am shocked at how forceful I seem. On the page I am strong, because that is where I put my strength. On the page I am everything that I am not, because that is where I put myself. I am no longer whispering through the small skirted shape of a keyhole: the door is knocked down and the roof is blown off and I am aimed once more at the entire wide night.

  • • •

  ONE AFTERNOON I am sick in bed and my father calls to ask me how I am. I try not to let him hear my surprise, since he usually calls us only on our birthdays, to sing, “Happy birthday to you, you belong in a zoo, you look like a monkey, and you smell like one too.”

  “Feel better, Bit,” he tells me in a gentle voice, like a bear that has swallowed a songbird. “Try not to write anything obscene today.”

  “Too late,” I say, glancing at my laptop, where I’m sketching out the memory of our first road trip. I hang up the phone and begin to laugh, remembering the sight of him at the wheel in his Psychotic State T-shirt, the same shirt I would later inherit and wear all through high school. Thinking if I could write him how he really is, I would be the greatest genius on earth. If I could see it as clear as it really was, and show it to you how it really happened.

  When I was very little, we drove a window all the way to California together. It was my first time away from my mother, and from the tragic look on her face as she waved good-bye to the van, I could tell she entertained absolutely no hope of me ever being returned in one piece. Dad assured her it would be good for me to experience something of the world, and strapped me in tightly next to his project, which was six feet long and depicted the Last Supper. Judas, crudely geometric but recognizable, leaned toward Jesus even knowing he would betray him. All the way to California, I looked through the richness of that scene at the abundance of the country. The country was wheat and wine. I had a bag of grapes in my lap, and they shone with veins when I held them up to the light, just as the stained glass did. The perpetual meal was laid out, always in the process of being eaten. It was enough, the story promised, to feed us all forever.

  “Pork rind?” my father offered from the front seat. I took one and held that up to the light too. It was transparent and bubbled and the color of an earlobe. Pork rinds were our favorite snack at that time, though I would soon give them up, after learning they were made of skin.

  “That’s the stuff,” he said. “Kill Porky, bay-bee.” The radio was blasting the insanely juicy bass line of “Heart of the Sunrise,” which was one of his anthems. His seat belt hung free, and the minivan ate the miles. Three of the grapes in my bag had turn
ed into raisins, which seemed like a revelation.

  “Dad, I have to go,” I said.

  He himself had not peed in eight hours, and viewed this as a moral achievement on par with fasting, wearing a hair shirt, or whatever the hell it was that Joan of Arc did. “You know what to do,” he told me, and pointed to the plastic baby potty in the side of the van.

  The test had come. I unbuckled from my seat and looked pleadingly at the Jesus of the Last Supper, who was said to save people by offering himself in their place. I tugged down my elastic-waisted shorts, which were the exact shade of indigestion medicine, and began to hunker down. At that precise moment, my father swerved into the next lane with the satanic decisiveness of a man committing vehicular homicide, I was thrown in all my glory against the clear glass of the side window, and the bare bottom of a tiny child became visible to a long line of truckers making their way down the interstate.

  “Ahahaha!” my father laughed, a wild laugh, the laugh of a man who has taken on himself the task of driving a bucket of pee and a church window across the country, and though my face had flushed deeper than the oval in Jesus’ cup, I knew we must have been thinking the same thing: wouldn’t that make a story for the people back home.

  I stumbled back to my seat and buckled myself in. Who does a story belong to, the one I rode beside? Neither my father nor I could really claim it. It belonged to some church far off in the distance, which neither of us had ever seen. It would be installed in a stone wall, where it would glow over the good people like an agate slice. Flat faces, flat loaves, flat halos, flat savior and flat sinners, a cross section of what actually happened. Didn’t it? Couldn’t it have?

  The next morning, in a sunny bungalow in San Diego, I felt the earth move underneath me and in me: a slight shift, a rumble, two inches more into the blue sea. A cross went crooked on the bare wall above me; my heart went crooked inside my chest. It felt so private that I was sure it belonged to me alone, until I went out to eat cereal in a strange kitchen and my father told me there had been an earthquake, that all of us had been through it, separate and marveling, on the earth that we shared. A good thing they hadn’t installed the window yet, I thought, because it could have cracked, been unpuzzled into its hundred original pieces, dividing Christ from his followers and Christ from his betrayer—and after everything had settled, I knew there wasn’t anybody in the world who could look at that jumble of bright color on the floor and put it all back together again, bit by bit and just as it was.

  • • •

  FOR THE FIRST FEW WEEKS, Jason and I bask in the glow of being recently reunited with a whole marriage’s worth of shared belongings and private speech. There are moments when we feel something is missing, but we soon realize it is either (a) guitar or (b) meat smell. The meat smell I re-create by roasting haunches and cooking complex ochre-red stews, and Jason makes up for the lack of guitar sounds with piercing falsetto Neil Young impressions. From time to time I even leave a Rag of my own in one of our sinks, wet and haunting, to remind us of where we came from.

  We don’t have to talk about the bishop anymore, or the robes and crosses and chalices, but still we do. We are part of that circle now, for better or worse. The latest topic of gossip is the epic triptych that my father has commissioned to hang above the altar, to make his hopelessly modern church appear more traditional. When it is delivered, and my father unveils it to us on one of our weekend visits with shy pride, we are shocked to discover that the artist has painted Jesus wearing literal Pampers. Tens of thousands of dollars, for a picture of the incarnate word in a diaper.

  “Tell me about when you stopped going to church,” I ask Jason later that night, though he has told me before. We are in bed, in the grip of that marvelous aloneness that I can hardly bring myself to believe. My head is tucked against his chest, and his breath stirs the most counterclockwise of my cowlicks.

  “I must have been twelve or thirteen. I just told my father I wasn’t going anymore. We were unloading the dishwasher, it was a very domestic scene. We didn’t fight or anything. He said, ‘Well, if it isn’t true, why would so many people have died for it?’ With this checkmate look on his face.

  “I felt so sorry to have to say it. I said, ‘Dad, people have died for every religion.’”

  “And then he was quiet,” I finish.

  He is quiet. “When did you stop believing?” he asks in return, though he knows there wasn’t one moment.

  “It just seeped out of me, after I left the house. It was like forgetting a language you spoke a long time ago, when you were a child.” That is not quite right, though—I did not forget so much as turn it inside out, repurpose it, and occasionally use it to tell jokes like “Jesus is SUCH a manger babe” and “God got so many abs that he look like a corncob.” People do sometimes accuse me of blasphemy, which is understandable and which is their right. But to me, it is not blasphemy, it is my idiom. It’s my way of still participating in the language I was raised inside, which despite all renunciation will always be mine. The word “God” does not fall out of the vocabulary, as the sun does not fall out of the sky; the shapes of the stories remain, as do their revelations. I was never fluent in tongues back when it mattered, but when I am left to myself, out come all the old worshipped words, those fondled verses tumbling on verses, onto the page which can hold and forgive them.

  I sometimes wish my childhood had been less obsessed with the question of why we are here. But that must be the question of any childhood. To write about your mother and father is to tell the story of your own close call, to count all the ways you never should have existed. To write about home is to write about how you dropped from space, dragging ellipses behind you like a comet, and how you entered your country and state and city, and finally your four-cornered house, and finally your mother’s body and finally your own. From the galaxy to the grain and back again. From the fingerprint to the grand design. Despite all the conspiracies of the universe, we are here; every moment we are here we arrive.

  • • •

  WHEN I WAS SEVENTEEN, and nearing the beginning of the madness that would carry me away from singing and God’s Gang and that neighborhood that had such a grip on us, I went to visit the Carmelites, one of the last cloistered orders. The convent was bare, pale linen and sandalwood and linoleum, with sketches of trees outside the windows. It smelled of both human and historical age. I imagined the nuns ate penny-tasting lentils and coarse bread for dinner, sitting together at long knotholed tables, while prayers bumped gently at the ceilings of their heads like loosed helium balloons. They were called contemplatives for a reason. I imagined them drinking clearer water than mine, and eating fruit that was outlined like the apples of Cézanne. They were light with the power of owning nothing, because they renounced their possessions as the priests did not.

  I went to chapel with them, where I knelt and cried in front of the host. How could I not, when it was so blank and complete, when it tasted so of paper? It was the page that said everything. After we filed out again, a particular nun approached me. She seemed, despite her strictures and her rope sandals and the unremitting brownness of her clothes, to be in charge of her own life. I remembered how my father, whenever he met a nun who might be described as a feminist, would say, “Bit, she’s just mad she couldn’t be a priest.” Then he would reassure me that it would never happen, not as long as the church stood plumb on its foundation, because he and his people were Christ figures and Christ was a man.

  But I did not want to be a priest. I was the same as most girls who wished themselves in a convent: I wanted to be where I could think, and where not just anyone could look at me. I wanted to sleep in a bed that was just big enough for me and my own salvation. I wanted to choose constraint and be freed by it, after constraint was all that had ever been offered to me.

  It was cold, though it was not winter, and something howled outside, not wind. It was unbelief, which could not get at us, n
ot here. The sun had set while we were kneeling in the chapel, and the darkness smelled of curled leaf tips and keys. The window behind the nun was a scrubbed square of onyx, like the stone in a ring you might kiss.

  She took my hand and peered up. A sweep of black hair had escaped her habit. She must have been able to see something in me—that I was in the process of discernment, as they said. I could feel that I looked like the first tall stripe from a paint roller covered in white, wet and weirdly shining and desperate to change the whole room.

  “And for you, I think, a religious life,” she said, a calm certainty all over her crisscrossed face. She didn’t even bother with a question mark. My calling was so obvious; it was written all over me. Two years later, I would be living in my own convent as an order of one, typing poetry in the deep glowing hours to a stranger. Four close walls and cathedral space within, arriving with a rush to myself every moment.

  I turned back to the priest who had driven me there over back nowhere roads on a school night. He was the director of vocations, and was rumored to be in possession of a piece of the One True Cross. He jangled a handful of metal deep in his pocket, with the formidable key to the cathedral singing somewhere in the sound, and blinked his black pebble eyes, which still counted among my collection. Two years later, he would be locked up, in a smaller, starker cell than these. I told him I was ready to go home.

  20

  ISLAND TIME

  I promised myself that when it was all over, if I had a little money, I would take my mother to Key West. “Do you think Dad would want to go too?” I asked her, but she was dubious. He mostly stays in his room during vacations, and the man’s feelings about Florida are complicated. On the one hand, it is the natural habitat of ships, salt air, and jumbo shrimps; on the other hand, it is the nation’s wang, on which lives the Homosexual Mouse of Disney. “Key West is the worst of all, to him,” my mother told me. “He thinks it’s one of those places where it’s legal for people to have naked parades.”