Priestdaddy: A Memoir

by Patricia Lockwood

We often sang together at church because our voices sounded related, though mine was obviously the humpbacked insane relative who lived up in the attic and only descended for meals.

Singing was full of hidden passageways, and sealed-up staircases, and secret rooms. Most of the time I couldn’t find them, but once when I was doing scales a roof lifted off and my voice jumped an octave above anything. It was off the piano completely, and I sailed for a second above the city of singing. I didn’t know how it had happened and I was never able to do it again. It had come from the other side of the world.

More intriguingly, she told us the story of a man who painted a musical staff on an aquarium and put a goldfish in the aquarium and then sat in front of it with a flute and played whatever note the goldfish swam. “Oh great,” I thought. “We’re all goldfish, and some dick with a flute is playing every move we make.”

I thought a voice had to be about your fluency, your dexterity, your virtuosity. But in fact your voice could be about your failings, your falterings, your physical limits. The voices that ring hardest in our heads are not the perfect voices. They are the voices with an additional dimension, which is pain.

Sex would probably have helped, but the only thing I was having sex with then was the intolerable sadness of the human condition, which sucked so much in bed. It was always playing the Requiem Mass when we were doing it, and its D was very minor indeed.

Singers were different because alone among people, they had been taught the right way to breathe. Their breath was a participation, a light lunch to give them strength, a bite of the bigger breath.

There is something easy about singing harmony with your family—even I could do it. The sweetest part is when you come back to the home note after diverging all throughout the hymn, and you sing it in a unison that is closer than other people’s. When you come back to the home note, you are hoping to achieve complete overlap. If you sing in perfect tune your sounds will disappear into each other, and for a minute you will have no sense of your own borders. You could lose yourself forever if you did this every day, but once a year on Christmas it was all right.

“You must always believe that life is as extraordinary as music says it is.” Rebecca West said that. You must also believe that it is as high, and as low, as strained to the breaking, and that the silence before and after it is as sweet.

It would be nice if they had a ceremony like this for accountants, or firefighters, or tree surgeons. Imagine if to become a plumber, you had to lie flat on your face in the toilet section of a hardware store while all the senior plumbers swung plungers around you

If a cathedral is a spiraling, infinite library of human prayers, it is also a palace of free association. I have not felt the pleasure of letting my mind wander within the walls of one for a long time.

Everyone always thinks that their religious rituals are the last word in dignity, but that if they slipped into another house of worship they would find a bunch of brainwashed idiots acting ridiculous.

the priest used to sit him on his lap and stroke his hair intently and give him garnet sips of wine. He crooned my brother’s name in a velvety voice, reciting it like poetry, and flicked his eyes at my mother as if daring her to stop him. Already I had learned to recognize the ones who hated women, from the way they treated my mother. “Young children need to be touched,” he said, in that voice that meant he hated her and also something else.

In childhood, we used to eat unblessed hosts by the fistful, not distinguishing much between them and my mother’s Health Crisps. They came in sturdy plastic buckets that you could wedge between your legs, and the white discs on white discs gave the look of riches. They tasted like the second dimension, and vaguely like the black leather of my father’s car seats. There was a cross on each that you could feel with your tongue. Ten seconds, and it would melt into nothing—no calories even, just a moment of texture.

The opposite of machismo is marianismo.

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.

A woman’s body always stands on the outskirts of the town, verging on uncivilization. A thin paper gown is all that separates it from the wilderness.

their faces are too smooth and too ancient at the same time. They appear to be missing their beards. They look like Civil War reenactors who are reverse-aging into babies.

I RECOGNIZE THIS AS BLUSTER, because my father is a blusterer. If you have a blusterer in your house, you must treat him as the weather, capable of gathering himself in a second and storming. If a blusterer does harm, it is as the weather does harm: by flattening and blowing down. This is more a feature of fathers, I have found. God too spoke out of the whirlwind.

Who was homey? Was he homey, or was it God? Did homey signify some sort of respect for the natural order, which we were disregarding through our actions? Our Homey, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, you do not play that, on earth as it is in Heaven.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?