At the beginning of The Princess and the Goblin, a girl goes exploring her castle one rainy afternoon and is startled to find a white-haired ancestor where no ancestor was before, humming and spinning silk in a remote room that is sometimes there and sometimes not, collecting pigeon eggs from under the eaves for her breakfast. The ancestor is the past, of course, keeping elemental time in her rocking chair. She is the gathering of every gray and silver moment that has brought the girl to this point, to this present where she flourishes like a flower. Looking on her, the girl sees that she is beautiful, or at least that she can beautifully describe her.
A 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.
4
R & R CIRCUS
When I last shared a roof with my parents, I walked around wearing a pair of protective shooting earmuffs all day. I removed them only to shower, and even slept in them sometimes. This was not an eccentricity. My father carries a personal armageddon around with him, made of the most violent and incomprehensible sounds, and no one within a square mile of him can escape it.
The majority of this armageddon consists of guitar music. Before I describe it, let me address an age-old philosophical question: is music always beautiful? Music is not always beautiful. In The Screwtape Letters, C. S. Lewis defines music as “a meaningless acceleration in the rhythm of celestial experience,” but it can also be a sped-up inferno, complete with the cries of the damned.
When the biological urge comes upon him, he lifts his curvaceous red guitar out of its case with a hushed reverence and cradles it in his arms. Then he plugs it into the most powerful amp that’s legal in the state of Missouri and begins rocking himself into a frenzy. It sounds like a whole band dying in a plane crash in the year 1972. He plays the guitar like he’s trying to take off women’s jeans, or like he’s standing nude in the middle of a thunderstorm and calling down lightning to strike his pecs. It’s not bad, exactly, it just makes you doubt your version of reality. He plays a lot of notes very fast and all in a row but they don’t seem to have any relation to one another. I’ve never heard him play an actual song, not even by accident, and I’ve made something of a study of his style over the years. Some people are, through whatever mystifying means, able to make the guitar talk. My father can’t do that, but he can do the following:
Make the guitar squeal
Make the guitar say no
Make the guitar falsely confess to murder
Make the guitar stage a filibuster where it reads The Hunt for Red October out loud
I can’t figure it out, and I think for a living. He practices mainly in his bedroom, so it’s possible he’s having sex with the guitar? It’s possible that somewhere out there I have a half brother who is a sweet lick from the waist down?
Alice, to everyone’s surprise, cannot get enough. She rolls on her back and flashes her claws in the air when he plays. She is blown away by the concept of sustain; the longer a note lasts, the more she purrs; it seems to stretch her actual perception of time. She wriggles with pleasure; she twists and switches her tail; she forgets to close her mouth over her thirsty pink tongue. She is dropping her panties, catwise.
She is especially susceptible to The Riff. It is my father’s custom to play a little riff of his own composition—it sounds like a Republican terrier howling the first three notes of “Smoke on the Water” to a blood-red moon—and bend the last note so hard it exits the sphere of music entirely, and then look at his audience with a sweet, expectant face, like, “Can you believe how good that was?” “It was so, so good,” Alice answers him, writhing on the hood of his Corvette, purring in every cell of her, her whiskers vibrating as if they were recently strummed. Her body is a leotard, her fur is a perm. If I let her out, she’ll wait under the star on his dressing room until he opens the door and carries her inside.
“Don’t make fun,” my mother says when she sees me standing in the hallway with a look of enormous concentration on my face, trying to make sense of one of these performances. “Your father is legit. Back in high school, he played in a very successful band called R & R Circus. They played a show for mentally retarded children in Kentucky once. Your father has always had such a big heart for the . . .”—she hesitates, then lowers her voice to a whisper—“for the mentally retarded.”
“Did the children like it?”
“They were in absolute heaven. You know, it was a ten-piece band with trumpets and trombones. All the members wore crushed red velveteen suits, skintight on the leg. Nothing not to like.”
5
MEN OF THE CLOTH
Did I mention there’s a seminarian living in the rectory too? He’s staying here on and off over the summer, and in the fall he’ll return to Ohio for his last semester of seminary, after which he’ll be ordained. All of this is unremarkable to me, who often saw these young men pass in and out of the house when I was growing up, but Jason is bewildered.
“I still don’t understand what a seminarian is,” he whispers in the privacy of our upstairs room. His understanding of my childhood religion hasn’t deepened much since we first met. As far as I can tell, he considers a priest to be a sort of strict male witch, and he can’t figure out why Catholics want to eat so much flesh all the time. “Please tell me before I mortally offend somebody.”
“Okay. A seminarian is an unborn priest, who floats for nine years in the womb of education, and then is finally born between the bishop’s legs into a set of exquisite robes.”
“You can’t say things like that anymore, Tricia,” he warns me. “God will hear you.”
“That’s not God, that’s Mom,” I say, raising my voice and pointing at the closed door. Outraged silence. Then a soft rodent shuffling and footsteps retreating down the stairs.
I lower my voice again. I know it’s only a matter of weeks before I fall back into the established family vocabulary, in which a wide variety of normal words are considered cusses, but for now I’m putting up a fight. “A seminarian is just someone who’s going to school so he can learn how to be a priest.”
“What kind of school is it? Is it wizard school?”
“No, it’s not wizard school. It’s regular school, but they study the powers of light and darkness all day.”
“Wizard school,” he says under his breath. “What happens when they graduate?”
“There’s a ceremony at the cathedral where all the other priests kiss them on the head—I’m not totally sure why—and then they get to wear special clothes and do reenactments of Christ’s death and resurrection.”
“They seem to love all the same things you do,” he says perceptively. “Cloaks and elixirs and singing elf songs.”
“Yes, but women aren’t allowed. Also, you never get to have sex ever, in your life, unless you’re some earthy European priest who gets tempted by a peasant in an olive grove. For some reason, that seems to be more forgivable than any of the kinds of sex you can have in America.”
He considers this information. “Are the seminarians allowed to look at porn?”
“They are NOT allowed to look at porn, and they don’t even want to look at porn, because it has no respect for the holy nudeness of the bod, which was made in God’s image.”
“What do they do on the internet if they’re not allowed to look at porn?”
“They look at pictures of jewels, and they read blog posts of bishops about how modern swimsuits are bad.”
“Why do they do it? Why would anybody want to do it? Why?”
I shrug. Since the age of six, I have been a poet. “When you’re ca
lled, you’re called.”
• • •
THE SEMINARIAN IS a crotchety young Italian man with a disapproving nose, a black boyish haircut, and eyes the precise shape of watermelon seeds. He was born, like many seminarians, at the age of sixty-five, with a pipe in his mouth and a glass of port in his hand. He is tall, but he hunches slightly under the weight of tradition, and whenever he emerges from the dark rectory into the sunshine, he blinks like an overeducated cave creature who is in the process of evolving away several of his most frivolous body parts. I expect his voice to be ponderous and dignified, to fit this overall picture, but when he opens his mouth he rolls out the broad and hilarious vowels of Chicago. I love him instantly and beyond all reason, in the way you love people you’re going to be able to write about.
He is devoted to three things and three things only: God, Buicks, and Italy. He believes the ideal woman lives somewhere on the Boot, rolling down hillsides in a red-checked skirt with a bottle of wine in each fist, her boobs like perfectly twirled forkfuls of pasta. He will never meet her, but she is there. This allows him to feel content. “It would be very difficult to be celibate in Italy,” he tells me, a muscle leaping in his jaw, probably one of the main ones you use when you eat lasagna. “Here in America, it’s easy.” I sit back and study him. Here is a man who heard a hot woman called a “tomato” once in his boyhood and took it so literally that the course of the rest of his life was set.
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.
• • •
WE READ TOGETHER in the cool, darkened living room in the afternoons, by the stripes of light that fall through the white plantation shutters. He reads a little leather book full of daily prayers, with ribbons to keep his place. He calls the book his wife, which is a sentiment I can respect, and moves his lips when he looks at her. These scenes are the very picture of peace, except for the fact that my father is often electrocuting a guitar in his bedroom, and my mother is often on the phone with my older sister in the kitchen, discussing various imperilments, catastrophes, and untimely deaths. Snatches of her conversation float through the hallways and make meditation of any kind impossible.
“Listen. Listen to me,” we can hear her say. “When Superman first came out, there was a whole era where the kids thought they could fly, and they would get up on their roofs and jump, often to their death. Is that something you want to happen?”
The seminarian and I cover our mouths to stifle our laughter. Sometimes he even slaps his bare thigh. When he’s off the clock, he strips down to a white oxford shirt, golf shorts, and socks pulled up to his actual knees. The sight of him in these clothes is rather magnificent. He looks like a cult dentist. Occasionally, as we listen, he makes a quacking gesture with his hand to affectionately indicate a woman is talking too much, but the fact is he talks more than anyone I’ve ever met. When he has to be quiet for any length of time, he grips both arms of his chair and trembles with suppression like a friendly teakettle. He doesn’t mind our chatter at all, or the ongoing female background sound, and some human need will go unfilled when it is gone. “Where is your wife?” he asks Jason when I don’t come downstairs. “Your wife is very fun.”
Somehow we are perfectly comfortable with each other, in the way people who agree about absolutely nothing sometimes are. However, as the weeks pass, it becomes more and more apparent that I am a bad influence. In the course of a conversation about guitars, I accidentally introduce him to the word “wanking.” “What’s wanking?” he asks. “Do you mean, like, masturbating? Masturbating upon the guitar?” On cue, my father begins to play The Riff.
“What would you call that music?” the seminarian asks after a moment of speechless listening. He studied classical piano himself for a long time and knows there is something amiss here. “Is there a name for it?”
I weigh and reject the term “priestcore.” “Technically speaking, I think it’s just ass rock,” I say.
“Ass rock!” he cries. It’s clear he’s never heard the phrase before. “That’s very funny. Ass rock!”
• • •
I BEGIN TO SUSPECT I’m being fattened for eventual sacrifice on top of a mountain. My mother is cramming me with five or six meals a day, and slides cookies underneath my door when I don’t answer her knocks. Not to be outdone, the seminarian tiptoes up to me one evening when I’m napping on the downstairs couch and wakes me by dangling a slice of ham over my lips.
“NO!” I shout, because that’s what they teach you in kindergarten: don’t let anyone touch you with their ham unless you say yes.
“But it’s such good ham,” he pleads. “And you’re really too skinny.”
“Why, how much do you think I should weigh?”
“One hundred and ninety pounds,” he answers instantaneously. Evidently this has been much on his mind.
I prop myself up on one elbow and stare at him. “Have you ever considered that you might be a feeder?”
“What’s a feeder?”
If sex education has failed him, it’s my job to fill in the gaps. “It’s a sort of food daddy, who feeds a woman until she becomes plump enough for his erotic delectation. He gives her cookies and ice cream and second lunches and midnight snacks and eventually all her clothes rip off and both of them get excited.”
His eyes widen. Voluptuous vistas are opening before him. “You can make her as big as you want?”
I picture a woman shooting up into the sky, bursting out of her dress, and raising her leg to crush St. Peter’s Basilica. “As big as God will let her be,” I promise.
He gives me a look of intrigue, second only to the look of intrigue once given to me by a surrealist poet when I told him some men desire above all else to watch truckers have sex with their wives.
“See, I need to know these things,” he says, with the brisk attitude of a man filing information away for future use. “I just found out what a furry was. My friend told me and I was very surprised.”
A wave of pleasure washes over me as I imagine this encounter: two young men, tall with theological purpose, discussing people who dress up as stuffed animals and scritch each other’s bellies at conventions. “Why on earth do you need to know about furries?”
“Because people will confess to me about them. Someone will confess to me ‘I am a furry,’ and I need to know what that is.”
It almost makes me want to turn Catholic again, just so I could go to confession sometime and lay a big, eloquent paw up against the screen right as he asked me what my sins were.
• • •
SOMEHOW OR OTHER, the seminarian has heard about milfs and he is haunted by the concept. He fears hordes of milfs are roaming the plains of dating, simultaneously breastfeeding and trying to trick young men into having sex with them. “Are milfs something that’s popular in secular culture for guys in their twenties to go after?” he asks.
“Yes,” I say gravely, signaling Jason across the room to write that quote down word for word. “Very, very popular. The most popular thing now.”
His eyes widen and he crosses his legs, as if to protect his holy jewels from the very notion of a milf. I consider other possible lies to tell him.
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.
The wine of Italy is stomped out by milfs, so when you taste the wine, you are tasting
their desire.
During the full moon a milf lactates a powerful sex milk that is instantly addictive to any man who tries it.
He interrupts my reverie to explore the subject further. “What’s the difference between a milf and a cougar?”
“Cougars are . . . hornier,” I say, thinking fast. “A milf doesn’t have to be horny at all, it just has to be a Mom You’d Like to F, but a cougar is horny, and it prowls.”
“So disordered,” the seminarian breathes. Calling people “disordered” is practically his favorite thing to do, and a tawny animal woman who chases after tender cubs is about as disordered as it gets. “I hope I never meet one.”
I get very close to his face and fix him with my most feline expression. “Too late, buddy. You already have.”
• • •
I WANT TO TAKE the Gay Inkblot Test so bad I can taste it. According to my father, they administer an inkblot test to all the men who are studying to become priests in order to determine whether they’re possessed by the handsome little demon of Same Sex Attraction. (He refers to it as SSA, both for jauntiness and to save time.) I’m not sure whether the inkblots themselves have been somehow designed to be gay—balls everywhere, kaleidoscopic bursts of abs, the words “I’M GAY” doing backflips in the ink, a dong on the classic Rorschach butterfly—or whether they just expect people to see gay things in them. Either way, the test cannot be categorized as either scientific or sane, but my father places great faith in it.
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