Priestdaddy

by Patricia Lockwood

where people are a psychopath the most is in their own homes.

I believe he itched against the way things were.

the athleticism of religion

A book doesn’t ask to begin, any more than a baby asks to be born. But still, best to begin at the beginning.

It seemed the very act of stacking boxes in a secondhand car and driving away with your childhood home in the rearview allowed you to be born again in whatever form you chose, and I could hardly wait.

When I remember this, the urge to fly back and shake my young self by the shoulders shakes my present self to the point of pain.

A cliff had presented itself as we were walking along together, and it called for a leap.

Only my little sister, Mary, dribbling a soccer ball in and out of the room as we talked, seemed unconcerned. “We are the ones who are not normal,” she said as she passed, her shin guards flashing. “How bad can a guy named Jason be?” “I am so much more likely to murder him,” I said, trying to put their minds at ease. “He wouldn’t even see it coming. I would wait till he was asleep …”

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.

Empedocles wrote that the eye was fire set in a lantern, which poured out to illuminate mountains and forests and the face of the beloved. Other Greek philosophers believed sight was water. Either way, it was an element, capable of flaming or flooding if it was let loose from its delicate pen, of sending mountains and forests and the face of the beloved up in smoke, or else surging them away till they were gone.

“It’s not art if it’s evil,” she said. “It’s only art if it’s evil, Mom.”

the vestigial organ of religion—the

“I wouldn’t have blamed you at all if … did you ever think of not marrying me?” “Of course,” he says, and I feel the jolt you feel when alternate universes, which usually run parallel and unseen alongside you, leap out of black water and crisscross like dolphins over your trajectory. When you realize it might have been different.

He seems overjoyed to see me. Has he forgotten what I’m like?

the comfortable tone of instruction.

There are houses people cannot seem to leave, even though the doors are wide open. You feel very slightly heavier in them, the way you would on Jupiter. This is one of those houses. There is more gravity in this room than there is anywhere else on the planet, so much that I can hardly step outside it. My hands weigh a hundred pounds each and I can barely lift my head off the pillow in the mornings. The bed fills the whole room, and I lie on it and float, thinking about what I should do. The world moves its scenery back and forth in front of the window; it has nothing to do with me; it is passing me by. I lie on the bed and feel myself gently going out of print.

I had no real power; it was men like these who were in charge of my life. If they decided tomorrow I had to cover my hair or wear skirts or pray separately, or be barred from reading certain books, or take certain pills and not take others, or be silent in the presence of men, I would have to do it. To have that bald dynamic of power on display in your home every day, pretending to arch over and protect you—it does something to a person.

But religion, above all, must recognize the power of the symbol. It must recognize the power of standing up and sitting down. If the church teaches anything, it’s that sometimes we have to answer for what other people have done. Let me do it by standing up and walking out of the countinghouse, 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?

position

Oh sweetie, it's not about that.

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.

There is something about an acceptance. It makes the blood and the brain effervesce; it climbs the ladder of the happiness you felt in the heat of the work. There is no jolt like it, except the one you would experience in grade school, when just after lunchtime your English teacher would say, “Today in class we will be writing a story.” And your fingertips would turn to glad ice, and the bottoms of your feet would thrill, and the bologna sandwich in your stomach would flip over, because she was speaking directly to you. If I am ever medically dead, try whispering that in my ear and see if I don’t sit up again gasping, ready all over as the tip of a pen. Today we will be writing a story.

If reading was the highest form of seeing, how would I become visible?

his eyes so wide that I see the bionic flash of his lenses, the one that always reminds me that I am outside of him and his most fundamental perceptions, that we have brought different pasts to our place of overlap.

I haven’t fully formulated what I’m doing yet, but I carry a notebook and listen, and Jason listens for me when I am not there. “Oh my god, you will never believe,” he tells me, breathless from running up the stairs, his tummy bulging with whatever my mother most recently fed him. “Don’t worry. I wrote it all down for you on a napkin.”

Not only can you not dance to it, but it makes you want to lie down on the ground and never move again. It’s just a bunch of call-in shows where people talk about whether something is a sin or not, and they almost always decide that it is, in fact, a sin. 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.

I lacked the courage or the knowledge to invent a self, which could have withstood this, that, anything.

There is something easy about singing harmony with your family—even I could do it. The sweetest part is when you come back to the home note after diverging all throughout the hymn, and you sing it in a unison that is closer than other people’s. When you come back to the home note, you are hoping to achieve complete overlap. If you sing in perfect tune your sounds will disappear into each other, and for a minute you will have no sense of your own borders. You could lose yourself forever if you did this every day, but once a year on Christmas it was all right.

My teachers taught me to abandon the final consonant, so that certain songs never ended, so that you walked out of the room and into the sunlight with the song still continuing behind you. Some unresolved chords I have heard I swear I can still feel—somewhere inside me, I am waiting for them to finish.

“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. More music than even music to me is what has been written about it.

I have snuck in contraband, in the form of a notebook. I hide it in my lap, along with a mini golf pencil. At this point, I consider myself on an anthropological mission, much like Margaret Mead. I have discovered that this makes almost anything bearable—it would have been such a salvation in my childhood to think I had been sent on a mission to notice. That would have turned my insubstantiality into something useful, even advantageous.

Nothing serious, but to the Irish, as she has often warned me, the kiss of sun can all too easily become the kiss of eternal night.

The old impressions return: that you are floating in the jelly of a clock, that you are inside a bird’s backbone, that your head has gone an octave up and your body an octave down. That you are physically compelled to stand and kneel with the rest of the people, that you are required to answer with everyone else. Religion trains you like roses—it installs automation in the arms and legs, even in the mouth. Or as Jason once asserted, with his trademark mix of authority and malapropism, “They’re priming you like Chekhov’s dogs. To hear the gunshot and drool.”

To this day, I’m always shocked to find out there is a word for something, as if I spent my first seven years in the forest sleeping next to a bone.

Memories of religion reside mostly in the body, as if it’s a light gold sport that you played during childhood in a vacant lot. Your hands and the hands of your friends all moving together within some larger organism, the comfortable and gold-oiled grooves of your position, the hope that this time the ball will disappear over the fence and never be seen again; God had taken it.

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.

There was something about me specifically that made my father angry. It had to do with my head, and what was in it. It had to do with what I’m doing right now: sitting outside the circle in silence and sifting the scene through my right eye. He used to say, “I’ve forgotten more than you’ll ever know,” which puzzled me. Didn’t that still mean that neither of us knew it? “Don’t look at me like that,” even my mother would cry sometimes. “Don’t you dare look at me like that.” “I’m not looking like anything,” I would protest, and I didn’t think I was. “I’m not doing anything,” and I was certain I wasn’t. Still I stood there, as if to prove some point about immovability and irresistible force, and looked. My mother always turned away first, but my father never did. The staring reached out of me and the stared-at reached out of him, and somehow we met there, two powers of the air.

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.

I think of that definition of the word “flashover”: the point at which a fire in a room becomes a room on fire.

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.

Forty miles is an excellent distance to be from your parents: close enough for your mother to bring you an “extra” sour cream apple pie that she “accidentally” made by “mistake,” but far enough away that it feels like real life—despite

Confinement is different, after all, when it’s your idea.

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?

The afterimage of the rectory flashes behind my eyes, the white door open and beckoning me inside, the steps leading to that eternal upstairs where I could stay as long as I needed. It was an idyll, of course it was an idyll. A family never recognizes its own idylls while it’s living them, while it’s all spread out on the red-and-white checked cloth, while the picnic basket is still open and before the ants have found the sugar, when everyone is still lying in the light with their hearts peeled and in loose sweet segments, doing one long Sunday’s worth of nothing. It recognizes them later, when people are gone, or moved away, or colder toward each other. This is about that idyll, and I began it in that grass-green clearing of time, and I am giving it no chance to grow cold. 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.