Priestdaddy: A Memoir

by Patricia Lockwood

My mother’s face, as she witnessed these lessons, belonged to one of the hellscapes of Hieronymus Bosch—the figure being crucified on a harp, perhaps, or the man giving birth rectally to a glass egg.

“PROPAGANDA!” he once burst out suddenly, when he caught Mary and me watching Bambi in the living room, curled up together on the couch. If there was any fictional character my father hated, it was Bambi. “Acting all innocent. Oh yeah, the hunter’s always bad, isn’t he! He has red eyes and he kills your mommy!” Flames began to gulp up the screen. “Booooooo-hooooooo, the precious forest is on fire!” he continued, in the same tone he used when he openly mocked Earth Day. “Sack up and be a man, Bambi. I’m coming for you.”

If someone mailed me a jar of grass that exhorted me to PURIFY AND CLEANSE, I would probably stuff a pair of my panties in there and mail it right back to them.

It is probably the last conversation like this the seminarian and I will have. After his ordination, particular friendships with women will be discouraged. I understand why, but in a wider sense, it is frightening. If you are not friends with women, they are theoretical to you.

I couldn’t read music but music could read me. It went through me line by line and scene by scene, with one finger down the middle of the page, highlighting me recklessly. Its comprehension was so complete it was even horrifying. No meaning in me was hidden from it, but it was totally closed to me.

Singing down into yourself was called vocal masturbation, and you weren’t supposed to do it, even though in literature there were postmodernists running around all over the place wanking themselves into recursive frenzies and getting awards for it. In singing, though, there was no place for people who were filling whole pages with the word HAHA or not letting themselves use the letter e or turning to the reader and saying oh hello, I see you there, reading my book naked in your bedroom.

You know it took me so long to write this piece because I kept trying to make it beautiful and finally I just had to shake myself by the scruff of the neck until a more natural sort of grunting came out. You can’t make something sound beautiful. It’s either beautiful or it’s not.

It’s not that they thought women were mere incubators—the men might have thought that, but not the women. The women were in love with the body’s seduction of itself, they bent backwards to it, they danced in their own arms and danced beautifully and looked down on anyone who didn’t. They dipped low, almost to the floor, they swirled their skirts when they weren’t wearing any, they felt a hand on their lower backs and moved with it. What it was, was a sense of pride. They wanted to be more of their noun than other women, as John Wayne was more of a man.

“marianismo”

The twinge you are feeling right now is the twinge of wondering whether I am really right-thinking, whether I am really on the right side when it comes to this subject. I put that twinge in because I sometimes feel it myself. But after all that, you must understand I had to leave right-thinkingness behind.

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. Half of its whole being is devoted to remembering how to live in the woods. This is why Witch, this is why Whore, this is why Unlucky and this is why Unclean. This is why attempts to govern the female body always have the feeling of a last resort, because the female body is fundamentally ungovernable. Barbie, the neatest, tannest, blondest doll who ever existed. Barbie, from the Greek, meaning foreign or strange.

There was a girl with a black widow’s peak and a lovely froggy voice who wore larger T-shirts than the rest of us, and she sometimes sobbed uncontrollably throughout these talks, her friends leaning hard on either side of her as if trying to dive down into her heart, telling her there there with their entire bodies—because, if I have not said it, these people’s veins ran with kindness, and they wanted to do right by each other. Sometimes an adult came and prayed over her. Her father had gone to prison for sneaking into her bedroom at night while everyone else was sleeping—he was drunk, everyone said—and had been released again before we came. I did not know about it then, so I wondered why she cried. Perhaps, I thought, she felt guilty. But always, the talk would continue, about how premarital sex was like using a dirty toothbrush or drinking a cup of spit. How sex was a fire that belonged in a fireplace, but if it got out of control, it would burn the house down. How bodies, once given to each other, were never really separate again. Not often, but sometimes, the girl cried, and people gathered around her and laid their healing hands.

His Last Rites kit sat on the stairs just by the front door: a square plastic bottle of holy water and a smaller one of golden oil, called chrism, and a round metal box with a simple cross on top that held the host.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.