Priestdaddy: A Memoir

by Patricia Lockwood

leaning into the softness of each other’s shoulders, and watched the interrogation. She has

murderer. “He seems so . . . calm,” she told me in an undertone. “Maybe too calm.”

father has never willingly put on a seat belt in his life. He has always found the very idea of “safety” to be ridiculous. Why would he ever want

be safe? What was he, a little girl? A miniature woman? A babylady?

those men did...

these boys was that they ate steak every day and were in a terrible band called Flush. They had tried out a lot of names, Jason told me, but when they hit on Flush, they knew it was the

At one point a second cathedral grew up around it, made of scaffolding, and construction workers sat there and ate their bagged lunches and swung their legs. No one knew what they were doing, and it seemed to go on forever. The Flannery O’Connor house stared suspiciously at them all day. She had been a child in that house, with boiled-clear eyes and a watery chin. She had been briefly obsessed with the Dionne Quintuplets. She had a chicken that she taught to walk backwards. The little-leafed vines that climbed up the side of her school had fine penmanship; so did she. She would grow up, and leave, and keep peacocks. Her lipstick would always be the wrong color, but her ink would be fine: black. The sea that had been removed from the city was a force, was full of pronouncement, was equally capable of religious calm. You could feel it, you could still feel it. And over it all, anchored equally in time and eternity, the beautiful laboring sound of the bells.

floor. I had decided not to take a job right away, but to keep concentrating on the strange bundle of poems I was writing, ones that revealed my most hidden preoccupations: sex, gender, animal puberty, bizarre fetishes and the Midwest, the Loch Ness Monster despairing of ever being able to leave her remote silver-skinned lake and get an education. I was never sure whether these long stretches of refusing to draw a paycheck were a mark of my entitlement or the only act of rebellion available to me. My flaming certainty that I was born

The internet addicts somehow banded together and raised the money in less than twelve hours. Their sense of humor had not abated. They gave in increments of $4.20 and $6.66 and $69.69, and they gave under usernames like gilled_burpito and PLEASURE_STEPDAD. The jokes were gifts too. Everyone gave, students and rich people, a man who had written a television show about an island and a dancer called Bubbles who donated all her tips from that night and a comedian whose chest hair looked like three otters engaging in a leisurely orgy while floating up the river of his torso. It was people I knew and people I didn’t know. It was so total and unexpected I couldn’t look at it directly, as if generosity itself had opened up its trench coat and flashed me. Jason shook me awake that morning to tell me to call off the fund-raiser, we had raised enough. It was his thirtieth birthday, and he was crying. • • •

“Whatever, femme,” my father says, releasing a low, loving toot in her direction. Unrestrained conversational tooting was considered a form of self-expression in his family. Ask my mother to sum them up, and she will suck a long breath through her teeth and say, “Ah, the Lockwoods. All the money in the world, and they couldn’t keep their farts in.”

MY FATHER is best described in terms of his nudity, my mother is best described in terms of her Danger Face, which is organized around the information that somewhere in America, a house is on fire. There are human Lassies among us, who are more alert to disaster, who feel a little ding! go off in their heads whenever a child falls into a well. She is one of them, and all humankind is her Timmy. The only magazine she ever subscribed to was called Prevention, and it exclusively carried articles about which fruits could prevent cancer. The cover always featured a picture of a jogging young grandma in a sports bra pumping her fist in the air as she overcame any number of invisible diseases. My mother’s expression, while reading it at the kitchen table over an antioxidant-rich meal of beets and steamed carrots, called to mind Edvard Munch’s The Scream.

Pretty much all art in this house is of Jesus reaching out with two fingers and trying to milk things—the air, the clouds, the Cross, a cripple who wants to get blessed but who instead is going to get milked, by Jesus. Jesus stands against a celestial background. He reaches toward a plump, dangling ray of the sun. He is going to milk the hell out of it.

There is a painting of poppies above the bed that I gave my mother one Christmas, believing her taste in art to be immature. The poppies are red and pink watercolor splotches that look like spilled blood. A lot like spilled blood. A lot like spilled blood . . . on the panties of the snow. Oh my god, I realize, looking at it again, I gave my mother a menstrual painting.

When we find ourselves alone for a minute, Jason and I hold each other tightly. I pat him on the back, and a helpless infant belch rumbles up from his underground. “You burped me!” he exclaims. So I’m not the only one.

“WHAT ARE YOU FEMMES DOING,” my father booms from the doorway. He always calls us femmes. It is, believe it or not, a term of affection. When he’s angry, he calls you a feminazi. When he first encountered that epithet, on Rush Limbaugh’s radio show in the early nineties, he hugged it to himself as wholeheartedly as a second wife. Nuns are feminazis, Democrats are feminazis, the secretary who asks him please not to call her “dollface” is a feminazi. It goes without saying that I am a feminazi. He finds uses for the word in all sorts of situations. If he were alone in the wilderness and a cougar charged him, he would yell, “FEMINAZI!” right in its tawny face, and I have no doubt the cougar would back down.

curious panting comes outside my door. It is my own ancestor crouched on all fours in the hallway, her hair gone mirror-colored at the crown, trying to guess whether I need to go to a restaurant or not. She believes if you don’t visit at least four restaurants a day, you die. “Mom, I’m working!” I call out. A long pause. “But do you need a hamburger,” she whispers.

In Britain they call them Nummy Mummies, and due to the gender imbalance left over from the Great War, there are two of them for every male. There’s no way of telling whether your own mother is a milf, but if she likes to play bingo, it’s almost certain.

When the seminarian took the inkblot test, he saw bunnies. “You saw . . . bunnies?” I ask. “Bunnies are fine,” he says with authority. “Bunnies are very wholesome. What you DON’T want to see is half-animal half-humans. That would show you were messed up.” Regular bunnies are just evidence you love Easter, but woe to the one who looks into the ink and sees a rabbit with the luscious lower half of a man.

and saving my number for the smaller side. All my life I have overheard, all my life I have listened to what people will let slip when they think you are part of their we. A we is so powerful. It is the most corrupt and formidable institution on earth. Its hands are full of the crispest and most persuasive currency. Its mouth is full of received, repeating language. The we closes its ranks to protect the space inside it, where the air is different. It does not protect people. It protects its own shape. You have belonged to many of them. So have I. The church was one of mine—it was my family. The story of a family is always a story of complicity. It’s about not being able to choose the secrets you’ve been let in on. The question, for someone who was raised in a closed circle and then leaves it, is what is the us, and what is the them, and how do you ever move from one to the other?

“Maybe,” I say, laughing again. It was true I always had trouble listening and remembering, trouble hearing people when they explained simple facts to me. When I read, my head seemed to go diagonal, and I swore I saw things in the sentences—not what I was supposed to see. When I read the words “moonlit swim,” I saw the moonlight slicked all over the bare skin. The word “sunshine” had a washed look, with the sweep of a rag in the middle of it. The word “violinist” was a fig cut in half. “String quartet” was a cat’s cradle held between two hands. “Penniless” was an empty copper outline and “prettiness” seemed to glitter. “Calamity” was alarm bells, and in “aristocrat” there was the sharp triangle of a cravat, and in “sea serpent” one loop of the green muscle. It was as if I could read the surfaces of words, and their real hearts, but not their information. Even “word” had a picture—I saw a blond hostess in a spangled dress turning black and white letters over one by one. When I read, the meaning swam and the images leaped out and the words gave up their doubles. When I wrote, the same thing happened with the paper.

As T. S. Eliot put it: I should have been a big crab pinching loneliness on its ass under the water

So began the summer of our training. We were forbidden to dog-paddle; we were forbidden to hold our noses. Flotation devices were not allowed. Water wings were a sign that a child needed to be picked off by predators in order to strengthen the herd. Rules about waiting a half hour after lunch to go swimming were to be as strenuously disobeyed as the laws of Bill Clinton. Above all, we were never allowed to “ease into the pool.” He believed that if a child was plopped into the water without ceremony, some bone-deep mammalian reflex would take over and its arms and legs would spontaneously erupt into textbook swimming strokes. If a baby drowned, it was because it wasn’t listening to its body.

” There was an erotic painting of ducks bursting breastily out of a bush hanging over the bed, which he took a long moment to appreciate. The bedspread was patterned with a melancholy design of bare branches and puddles of despondent mud, to remind us of how much everything was going to die someday. “Especially deer,” my father whispered to himself with visible anticipation. He felt this was where he belonged, on an icy brown afternoon when the sky looked like rain, or snow, or doom. He was participating in an age-old ritual, where a boy becomes a man and a man becomes a psycho.

“Dad? I’m writing . . . well, I’m writing a book about you.” “Hahahaha!” he says, throwing back his half-cherubic, half-satyric head. His angel and his demon aren’t even posted on opposite shoulders. They’re standing on top of his neck, making out. “Hahahaha. I’ll murder you.” “Don’t say you’re going to murder her!” my mother calls out. “Not nurturing.”

“It’s all secrets, top to bottom,” I say, with despair at the magnitude of the task before me. “Everything that ever happened in our household should probably be a secret. Whenever I call Mary, she asks if I’m going to talk about the time Dad almost killed her because she accidentally turned off his computer with her foot. Whenever I call Paul, he asks me if I’m going to talk about how Dad used to take him into the backyard and throw baseballs at him.” “What?” Mom exclaims. “Why did he do that?” “To cure him of his fear of baseballs.” The sky has turned as black and bracing as coffee and the

We’re gathered in the narthex of Christ the King. “Narthex” is a word that never fails to make me laugh, because it sounds like a poison chamber or the foyer of a mastermind’s lair. The narthex is another in-between place—not outdoors and not fully a church yet. Historically the narthex was the place where people who weren’t allowed in the real church could go, and now we are here.

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.