Priestdaddy

by Patricia Lockwood

After it was all over, everyone had to call him Father, but I called him that anyway, so it made no difference to me. All fathers believe they are God, and I took it for granted that my father especially believed it.

St. Bonaventure was said to have continued his memoirs even after his own death. The only surviving relics of him are the arm and hand he wrote with. That seems exactly like God, doesn’t it, to kill a man and then make his hand keep writing his books.

Three weeks later I sat in the chill waiting room, picked up one of those magazines that are always telling you how to “surprise your man” during sex—as if what the volatile male animal needs is to be surprised while he’s inside you—and

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.

Summer, like a government,

and immediately my every sense is locked into the ancient, timeless female effort of Preventing the Next Generation from Dying.

Back at the rectory, the gumbo is simmering on the stove, in the battered aluminum stockpot that my mother uses to cook for crowds. It’s the color of the flood and everything is swept up in it. I stir it with a wooden spoon and discover that her arthritis isn’t the only reason the chopping took so long: each piece of celery or onion or bell pepper is exactly the same size, almost supernaturally so. My mother and I are after perfection. We are seeking a particular click in the head. We share the feeling that if we hang a picture or set a sentence down just right, we will instantly and painlessly ascend to the next level. We will be recognized, and the time we spent will be multiplied into forever and given back to us. “Yes, I am OCD,” my mother confessed to me once. “Obsessive-compulsive … [long pause] … DIVAAAAAA!”

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.

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?