Priestdaddy: A Memoir

by Patricia Lockwood

She stood in the doorway of the classroom with her beautiful boundaries shining all around her—yes like a halo this time—and he decided he would marry her. He pursued her and he pestered her; he followed her home and threw rocks at her. He pelted a single question persistently at her window: will you marry me? A picture of my mother holding my father’s hand, the very essence of oval-faced, madonna-blank loveliness, with something mischievous about her left canine. “Why did you say yes?” I ask her, but I already know the answer. My mother loves to argue, and love is the only argument you can win by saying yes.

I love him instantly and beyond all reason, in the way you love people you’re going to be able to write about.

SOMEHOW OR OTHER, the seminarian has heard about milfs and he is haunted by the concept. He fears hordes of milfs are roaming the plains of dating, simultaneously breastfeeding and trying to trick young men into having sex with them. “Are milfs something that’s popular in secular culture for guys in their twenties to go after?” he asks. “Yes,” I say gravely, signaling Jason across the room to write that quote down word for word. “Very, very popular. The most popular thing now.”

Renata Adler wrote: “‘He has suffered enough’ meant if we investigate this matter any further, it will turn out our friends are in it, too.” To the best of my knowledge, no bishop or archbishop my father ever served under was innocent of participating in cover-ups, shuffling papers, hushing up victims, sending offenders away for rest and rehabilitation. When I looked up Bishop Finn, I held my breath until I came to the sentence that laid it bare. I held my breath because I knew it would come. •

We are making our way down the breakfast aisle when my mother picks up a box of granola, reads the product description, yells, “Don’t TELL me it’s all-natural. So is CRAP from a CAT,” and shoves the box back into the stack as if she’s administering a punch to breakfast itself.

“Oh no. It’s the classic recipe,” he insists. “This is what Julia Child drank.” I make a scoffing noise that is somewhat out of my control, like a runaway choo-choo. “Julia Child was often so drunk . . . that she tried to bake herself as a chicken on the stove.” “Would you like one more?” “Yes, thank you,” I say very politely. “It tastes like being thrown through a window.”

The best way to write poetry, in my experience, is to first fail spectacularly at singing.

My redheaded teacher taught us about the great composers. Here is what I remember: Bach was a scrolled mahogany computer wearing a little wig. Mozart just farted all the time. Beethoven was deaf and had thunder for hair. Wagner was a Nazi and he had hooves instead of feet. Stravinsky bore the mark of the beast on his forehead. Aaron Copland was cut up for steaks by the National Beef Council and Tchaikovsky was a marzipan baby. John Cage had sex with a piano for five minutes in the middle of the stage at Carnegie Hall and at the end all of New York applauded.

When Marian Anderson first sang for Sibelius, in the same house where he would one day burn a symphony, he cried out, “My roof is too low for you!” and called for his wife to bring champagne instead of coffee. When I read that, I remembered Truenessia standing in our midst with that same call for champagne inside her, a voice that was more than a voice, a voice that was in a duet with its own happiness. Telling us to think ourselves higher.

My father came too, and sat in an unyielding metal chair against the wall and talked, his voice quieter and more targeted at me than I had ever heard it. He said, “The last time I tried to do it . . .” and the rest floated away. The gentleness of the words was so lovely, the tone, the undulations, the caress. He sounded like a wave in a woodcut.

THEN I WOULD DIE. Good sentences repeated themselves for me, and that was a good sentence. It got its teeth on some soft part of you and just bit. Why, these women are wild, I marveled. What it meant was that all civilization left the body when a child was born, that the city and all its government were neatly ejected from a woman and she reverted to feral woods again. It meant that childbirth turned a mother into something with twenty claws, and she would turn them on herself if she had to.

We called it Last Rites, but the Eastern Orthodox had a similar ritual called The Office at the Parting of the Soul from the Body When a Man Has Suffered for a Long Time, and I liked that better, because I liked words.

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.

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.

Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously.

Part of what you have to figure out in this life is, Who would I be if I hadn’t been frightened? What hurt me, and what would I be if it hadn’t?

A family never recognizes its own idylls while it’s living them, while it’s all spread out on the red-and-white checked cloth, while the picnic basket is still open and before the ants have found the sugar, when everyone is still lying in the light with their hearts peeled and in loose sweet segments, doing one long Sunday’s worth of nothing. It recognizes them later, when people are gone, or moved away, or colder toward each other.