Priestdaddy: A Memoir

by Patricia Lockwood

Lutherans have a passion for banners that approaches the erotic. They are never happier than when they are scissoring big purple grapes out of felt and gluing them onto other felt. I can picture a few members of the congregation, who were square-faced and blue-eyed and gently brimming with pie filling. I also recall consuming an enormous quantity and variety of mayonnaise salads, which Lutherans loved and excelled at making. If Jesus himself appeared in their midst and said, “Eat my body,” they would first slather mayonnaise all over him.

“What exactly do Catholics believe?” I’d been preparing my whole life for this question. “First of all, blood. BLOOD. Second

of all, thorns. Third of all, put dirt on your forehead. Do it right now. Fourth of all, Martin Luther was a pig in a cloak. Fifth of all, Jesus is alive, but he’s also dead, and he’s also immortal, but he’s also made of clouds, and his face is a picture of infinite peace, but he also always looks like one of those men in a headache commercial, because you’re causing him so much suffering whenever you cuss. He is so gentle that sheep seem like demented murderers in his presence, but also rays of sunlight shoot out of his face so hard they can kill people. In fact they do kill people, and one day they will kill you. He has a tattoo of a daisy on his lower back and he gets his hair permed every eight weeks. He’s wearing a flowing white dress, but only because people didn’t know about jeans back then. He’s holding up two fingers because his dad won’t let him have a gun. If he lived on earth, he would have a white truck, plastered with bumper stickers of Calvin peeing on a smaller Calvin who is not a Catholic.”

Don Pablo’s was a fake Mexican restaurant that prided itself on the sizzlingness of its food. Why would you want food that sizzled only a little bit, when you could have food that sizzled so loud it sounded like the screaming of souls in hell?

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 of all men.

Deer were the pacifists of the animal kingdom. They sat around doing weeds all day and didn’t even try to get jobs. The males of the species pranced and ate salad and had a hundred kids they didn’t know about. In November, a long line of them marched to the polls, leaves held delicately in their mouths, each marked with the name of the Green Party candidate. A deer, in short, was a peace sign made out of meat, and the only way to fight it was with bullets.

“J’adore the French horn,” my mother murmurs, amid the holy blasts. I am less appreciative of its grandeur, possibly because I am a heathen. Jason’s father is a French horn player, and one Christmas he gave us a CD of songs he had recorded called Horn of Praise. Several years later, it was followed with Horn of Praise II. Perhaps the mad impulse to praise with horns is endemic to all Christianity.

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.

“I never thought it would be so much fun to have you home. It’s so nice when your kids grow up and you don’t have to kill them anymore.”

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. Let me speak for the meek and say that we don’t want the earth, if that’s where all the bodies are buried. If we are resurrected at the end of the world, I want us to assemble with a military click, I want us to come together as an army against what happened to us here. I want us to bring down the enemy of our suffering once and for all, and I want us to loot the pockets, and I want us to take baths in the blood.

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

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.

Who among us is not the great I AM? Who among us doesn’t live in a nightgown or some other bare-ass outfit at the center of his own wide sky—shining, unchanging, without beginning or end, a word in the east and a body in the west?

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.