Priestdaddy: A Memoir

by Patricia Lockwood

He had, however, written one good image, which stays with me even now: “the milk bottles burst like scared chickens.” It might strike you as irresponsible, to fall in love on the strength of one image about chickens bursting, but this was a different time. I didn’t even know what he looked like. He was under the mistaken impression that I was “fifty years old and Latina.” We were all made up of words.

She would tell you she was meant to be a mother, and it’s true when she’s in the presence of little children, she achieves her most concentrated essence. She stops speaking English at all and erupts into meaningless vocal improvisation, a sort of cautionary scatting. It sounds something like this: “. . . honey . . . no . . . eeeeYAHHH . . . uh uh uh . . . STOP HER . . . she’s eating it . . . no, sweetheart, that will kill you . . . oh, look . . . look look look . . . she loves me . . . all babies love me . . . wuh uh, THE STAIRS . . . get her . . . SHE’S GOING TO FALL . . . grab her before she breaks her neck . . . ooooo AH-AH-AH-AH . .

mentions that. My father despises cats. He believes them to be Democrats. He considers them to be little mean hillary clintons covered all over with feminist legfur. Cats would have abortions, if given half a chance. Cats would have abortions for fun. Consequently our own soft sinner, a soulful snowshoe named Alice, will stay shut in the bedroom upstairs, padding back and forth on cashmere paws, campaigning for equal pay, educating me about my reproductive options, and generally plotting the downfall

Even my mother was incredulous. “A book about the universe? Are you kidding me?” she said, as if Cosmos is generally found shelved somewhere between The Satanic Bible and the books about gay penguins.

He knows he was meant to be a priest because once he had a girlfriend who wore an intoxicating perfume and then one day his mother bought it and started spritzing herself with it too. That is a sign if anything is. If my dad, at some point during the nineties, had come home on a skateboard, smoothing his butt cut and adjusting his wallet chain, I would have gone straight into the nunnery without a moment’s hesitation. Such things belong to the realm of destiny.

It moves next to the image of sitting in the cold, clinical office of the pro-life gynecologist my mother had designated for all her daughters, and telling him what had happened and hearing him say, “Well, now you’ve learned that you can’t trust everyone, can you,” in a voice wiped entirely of human sympathy, as he squared my file with two brisk taps against his desk and stood to leave. It must have been then I began to suspect, something is not right with the way these people have arranged the world, no matter what their intentions.

A trick I often use, when I feel overwhelming shame or regret, or brokenness beyond repair, is to think of a line I especially love, or a poem that arrived like lightning, and remember that it wouldn’t have come to me if anything in my life had happened differently. Not that way. Not in those words.

but still she wants the same thing I did: to meet the ideal reader. To be visible, at last, in words she has chosen.

If the sad transmissions of Catholic radio ever reach the aliens, they will never even try to conquer us, figuring that some other overlord has already taken care of it.

When I am asked for a bio, I write a lighthearted one harking back to my trailer origins; when asked for a description of my poetry, Jason offers, “Electrifying . . . like if a bumblebee stang you right on the clit.”

And the ocean so close, and the sun buttering the blankness of my mind, and my hands unknotting knots in the warm, uncomplicating water.

I watched everything, swimming with the sensation of learning what I liked.

It’s a cicada year, so when I walk through the door to get a sense of the temperature, green missiles bomb tunelessly into my face. The scream of them is shrill and fuzzed at the edges, and fills the sky with the signal of an ancient technology. It sounds like the Old Testament is yelling at

My father had told me that one of the homeschoolers had called to ask if she could throw away “the sinful books.” I thought, “Yes, but I will write another, and then another one after that, and another and another.”

” He wanted to feel that if the whole world ended, he could still live in it, and inhabit the sphere like his own backyard, roasting its megafauna on spits and drinking its lakes when he was thirsty. In reality, if my father were ever called upon to survive on his own in the wilderness, he would very quickly die of treat deficiency, or of tripping over a big rock while bellowing, “WHO PUT THAT THERE,” or of trying to use a snake as toilet paper. I doubt he could build a fire, unless it’s possible to start a fire by yelling

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.

When you cannot pinpoint a pain in your body, the whole world seems to throb with it.

“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.

AT THE KITCHEN TABLES, over tea, the women would dream up the worst possible scenarios and then at the end they would say, in the alto tones of a martyr, “Well, I would keep the child.” Always I would keep the child, with the flame-circled air of a person setting her jaw and throwing her head back and making the heroic choice. But what they were asking was for there to be no choice at all. That was the country they wanted.

I took notes all throughout the ordination and I want to take more now; I am in that noticing and setting-down mood where the day is your dog and sits up begging for attention.

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.

But it is hard, while people walk among us, to imagine their absence; while they are present, they are a bread that is passed and passed among us and never comes to an end.

As long as I lived in my father’s house, I remembered to set a place at the dinner table for the unthinkable, to include it in the conversation, to pass the bread to it and refill its red wine, but I’ve been away so long that I’ve forgotten. I have to learn how to do it again.

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.

“And I am the only zoo animal currently living who has the key to my own cage. Open it and go outside.”

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.

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.

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.

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

What she wants is to be left alone to take one thousand pictures of a beautiful thing,

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?

This is about the moment when I walked into the house, and they were there, as they had always been there, as they would not always be. This is about how happy they were when they saw me, how the sun rose in their faces, how it was another day.