Priestdaddy

by Patricia Lockwood

  “The embroidery!” the seminarian swoons, on the point of losing consciousness. “Do you see the detail on those lambs?”

  “Dad, did you hear—”

  He cuts me off. “I heard that your mother has creamed a man.” He shakes his head, as if he always saw it coming. “A dangerous woman,” he says with a hint of awe in his voice, smoothing the loose gold threads of his symbols. “An unbelievably dangerous woman.”

  • • •

  THE MACHINERY of book publication soon whirs into motion. 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.” When an author photo is requested, Jason takes me into the front yard, leans me and my Fashion Hitler swooningly against the oak tree, and submits the resulting picture under the name Grep Hoax. We have always run a mad two-person operation, held together with rubber bands, paper clips, and near-rhyme, but I sense with some wistfulness that it will not be mad for much longer. I am about to become legitimate.

  At the height of these absorbing activities, it arises that I need to travel back down to Savannah to get a few of our boxes out of storage. Mom volunteers to take me before I even ask the question, headlights of anticipation shining out of her face. Someone needs to be driven somewhere? This is the moment she was born for. Jason has a job interview scheduled for the next week, and Dad would sooner die than submit himself to ten hours in the car with a woman who prefers to stop at actual physical locations to go to the bathroom, instead of peeing in a bag of beef jerky or whatever it is men do, so it’s just me and my redheaded author.

  We drive southeast toward Tennessee. The highways of Missouri cut through round-shouldered limestone cliffs, buff and cream and foam and gray, dove and scum and chalk, but as we get farther down the interstate, rustic woods start to thicken and picturesque valleys dip down. The landscape suggests gaps and hollers and falls. The water gets lazier, the glitter goes slower, and here and there the air multiplies itself into fog.

  “This scenery really is . . . GORGE-eous,” my mother says slyly. She’s ingesting caffeine at a suicidal rate, and her puns are beginning to overtake her.

  Just at that moment a man in a truck cuts her off. She rolls down her window and calls him, quote, “A Piss!” I slide down as far as I can in my seat; this interchange is all too familiar. My mom’s inability to cuss like a human, as opposed to a prudish extraterrestrial attempting to approximate human behavior, is legendary. In a fit of road rage, she once called a man Mr. Silver Dildo. “Mom, WHY,” I said, aghast. “That silver car is his dildo, Tricia,” she explained. “He’s compensating with that car.” She regularly accuses men of jacking off in their vehicles, despite the fact that she doesn’t know what the act of jacking off physically entails. She just thinks it’s an extra-bad kind of wasting time, of the sort practiced in prison yards, public schools, and Washington, D.C.

  “Don’t mess with me, bud!” she yells now at the man in the truck, who is refusing to take her homicidal hints. “Cops compliment me on my driving every day! I will run you off this road!” Sensing the white-hot force of her disapproval, the truck turns off at the next exit, and she nods with satisfaction while reciting his license plate number out loud in order to commit it to memory. She never forgets a bad driver, and she never forgives one either. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn she prowled through parking lots at night, castrating the Truck Nutz off of vehicles that had crossed her.

  I turn the radio to the only hip-hop station I can find, and my mom experiences “being in the mix” for the first time ever. It is no exaggeration to say that The Mix blows her mind beyond repair. Every time the song switches out before it’s finished, every time someone blows an air horn, she gasps. She looks like she’s been reading Borges. When the DJ asks if we’re ready to party, she unconsciously nods her head. As we drive deeper into the valleys, though, that radio station fizzes and goes out, and all we can find is a classic rock station playing “Imagine,” which is my mother’s enemy in song form. “Imagine there’s no heaven?” I don’t think so. “Imagine there’s no countries?” Then we would be France. Sure enough, one verse in and she becomes enraged. She shifts gears so murderously my organs all relocate one inch to the left.

  “I can’t stand it how every Sunday the radio plays this and that’s the religion for the day!”

  I check my phone. “Mom, it’s actually Monday.”

  “Oh.” She is placated and takes a long magnanimous pull of iced tea. “Well, that’s all right, then. John Lennon was truly a wonderful lyricist before he was murdered.”

  We are intrigued by the Tennessee natives, who sit idle in rocking chairs on their porches. They look like they do stuff to logs in their spare time. I think about those cartoons where someone swings an axe in thick woods and all the timber falls down into a cabin with a tinkling xylophone noise. The landscape is dotted with pristine lakes where feral eighties Jet Skis run loose, and gas stations begin to sell fresh crickets. Staring contemplatively out the window, I bite into an extra-long beef stick called The Sasquatch.

  I can feel the country turning into the South—a slight shift in the air, in accents, faces, birdsong. She must feel it too, because she asks, “Do you miss Savannah?” I do, with an intensity that surprises me. I miss the walking and the sherbet-bright azaleas and the ghost tours outside my window just at dusk, and I miss working in that lusciously monastic room with five windows. Above all I miss the food: split biscuits with honey, coarse ribbed greens cooked with pork, ornate gold fried chicken, sweet potato casserole and brisket sliced against the grain, oysters so creamy they tasted like the absolute center of the sea. And the ocean so close, and the sun buttering the blankness of my mind, and my hands unknotting knots in the warm, uncomplicating water.

  She pats my arm. The South is devoted above all else to iced tea, so she understands. “Still, it’s good you moved away from the South when you did,” she comforts me. “According to a website I was reading about gators who kill, more and more gators are becoming killers. One gator, they opened him up, and they found twenty-two dog collars inside.”

  A pause.

  “Mom, that doesn’t sound . . .”

  “No, it doesn’t sound real at all, now that I say it out loud.”

  “Is your head just full of things like . . . gator killers . . . we swallow seven spiders every night . . . rainbow parties and jenkem . . . money is covered with cocaine . . . a dangerous new game called ‘chubby bunny’ . . . men hide under cars in mall parking lots and slash your ankles with a razor when you walk by . . . Satanists have a new plan to eat the pope . . .”

  “Promise me one thing, Tricia,” she begs me. “Promise me you will never play that deadly game called Chubby Bunny.”

  We pull into a rest stop nestled against blue, hazed hills, and Mom leaps from the car and speed-walks past the picnicking families while yelping, “Emergency!” Sometimes it strikes me that when my mother is gone, I will remember her most vividly in rest-stop bathrooms, rubbing her hands under the keening dryer, smiling at me adventurously in the warp of the mirror and fluffing her hair with her fingertips; I will think of her cross-country, still in the middle of a trip we are taking together. Turning to me and speaking, repeating beautifully and always like a villanelle.

  • • •

  MY MOTHER’S FEMINISM goes on four wheels. Don’t get me wrong, she would never actually describe herself as a feminist. Sometimes, after consuming large bars of chocolate, she comes dangerously close to advancing the opinion that women should not be allowed to vote. Here in the rarefied space of the car, though, it’s different. The song of the summer comes on, a particularly disgusting selection that pretty much goes, “Girl, I am going to freak you to death, whether you like it or not.” She hesitates. She tries something out. She says, “I think this song is sexist.”


  “It is sexist!” I cry. “I think it’s sexist too!”

  “Why doesn’t he just go stick it in a HOLE in the ground,” she says, stabbing the air with one finger for emphasis. That escalated quickly, probably because we’ve had so much caffeine that we’re on the verge of escaping our bodies. Our hearts have sped up to pass. We’ve had so much caffeine at this point that we’ve become geniuses.

  The sky has gone pink and white at the very rim, like watermelon rind. I regard it with a certain watchfulness, just as I regard The Stobart. Perhaps if I had been born in more secular circumstances, I would not think sunsets look so Christian. It’s so spectacular it can mean only one thing: my mother is about to ask me how I “give birth to a poem.”

  She really does want to know. She doesn’t consider herself creative. She follows recipes down to the last half teaspoon and cuts patterns millimeter by millimeter and reads the directions before she begins, but during the meditative phase of a drive, she always wants to talk about it. We first tackled the subject when I was eight and still figuring out how to rhyme decent couplets. We were on a woodsy weekend camping trip, and I had just written a long poem about Narcissus, influenced equally by a glimpse of still white water through the trees and the consumption of a rare soda from the vending machine. I showed it to my mother, and after she finished reading, I burst out, “I feel so pure and so clean—I feel all emptied out,” just those words, without any embarrassment at all, and she said eagerly, “Oh no, I would think you would feel all filled up,” and I laughed, and didn’t volunteer information of that kind again, because after all it wasn’t necessary to tell your mother everything. A kind of stinginess, it seems to me now.

  “Is it ADD?” she asks me. “Your father gave you all ADD, you know.” Sensing that this is not entirely fair, she adds graciously, “And then I gave you ADD as well.”

  “Maybe,” I say, laughing again. It was true I always had trouble listening and remembering, trouble hearing people when they explained simple facts to me. When I read, my head seemed to go diagonal, and I swore I saw things in the sentences—not what I was supposed to see. When I read the words “moonlit swim,” I saw the moonlight slicked all over the bare skin. The word “sunshine” had a washed look, with the sweep of a rag in the middle of it. The word “violinist” was a fig cut in half. “String quartet” was a cat’s cradle held between two hands. “Penniless” was an empty copper outline and “prettiness” seemed to glitter. “Calamity” was alarm bells, and in “aristocrat” there was the sharp triangle of a cravat, and in “sea serpent” one loop of the green muscle. It was as if I could read the surfaces of words, and their real hearts, but not their information. Even “word” had a picture—I saw a blond hostess in a spangled dress turning black and white letters over one by one. When I read, the meaning swam and the images leaped out and the words gave up their doubles. When I wrote, the same thing happened with the paper.

  “You start by thinking sideways,” I tell her. “First you sit in a sunlit room, and you look at the wall but really look through it, and you read your book but really read past it.”

  “Sounds like a recipe for insanity,” she interrupts, tipping back her head and pouring a barrage of chocolate-covered blueberries down her throat, all the while holding the wheel steady with one wrist.

  “Then pretend you’re washing your hair under warm water, and unfocus your vision like you’re trying to see a Magic Eye, and loosen up your hearing like you’re trying to understand Donald Duck.”

  “All at the same time?”

  “Yes.”

  “Better not let Jason see you that way,” she says, alarmed, laying on her horn at a slow Cadillac driven by a ninety-five-year-old man in suspenders. “Hesitation causes accidents!” she calls out as she passes him.

  “And after a while, if something wants to happen, it will happen,” I say, tossing a chocolate-covered blueberry into the air and completely failing to catch it in my mouth, after which I eat it directly off the floor. “When it does, it’s just like getting struck by Pun Lightning.”

  Her brow smooths with recognition. She understands Pun Lightning, that jolt of connection when the language turns itself inside out, when two words suddenly profess they’re related to each other, or wish to be married, or were in league all along. “When it hits you, you know just what to say,” she nods.

  “Right.” I find myself slurping her tea against my conscious will, and note with interest that my voice is operating at nearly three times its usual speed and volume, always a sure sign my metaphors are about to become ludicrous. Rolling faster and faster, the wheels urge me on, saying What is it like, what is it like. “It’s like when the Rain Man looks at the spilled matches and knows without counting how many there are.”

  “The Savants Have Much to Teach Us,” she agrees, shoving a hand violently into her purse and eating a fistful of B vitamins just before gliding smoothly across four lanes. “You know, your dad thinks he’s the reason . . . he doesn’t think I could ever . . .” she says, and doesn’t finish. The scenery blurs by in a great green flash of coherence, the power lines swoop by in their continuous ink, all as if to demonstrate what I’m talking about.

  “No,” I say after a while, “it’s you. Remember the time you said, Fluent is in the ear of the beholder? You could do it, easy.”

  We see the first sign for Nashville. Currents of music begin to run alongside the car; I could reach out the window and dip my hand in them. The lights of the city cluster and grow dense, neon is traveling in every direction, and the night curves over us dark and sparkling, the perpetual entrance to a cave of wonders. We lapse into silence at the same time, the caffeine at last sending our heads diagonal, calmed by the color and clamor outside. Inside the car we feel a very fine companionship, set side by side like two words.

  Of course she could do it, I think. She could write the whole next chapter.

  9

  THE CUM QUEENS OF HYATT PLACE

  All year long I have found myself as ubiquitously in hotel rooms as the Gideon Bible. I have stood in the light of hotel lamps and switched myself on and observed. I know all the soaps. I know all the showerheads. I know that the most popular hotel paintings are: beach after everyone is dead, beige interpretation of the rage of a cat, squares going wild, a rose’s period. One by one I have pocketed the complimentary pens, and one by one I have memorized the mottoes on the stationery. LEAVE A TRAIL OF GENIUS, the Marriott notepaper tells me, which is so optimistic it’s actually touching. All year I have sat in hotel rooms and nothing has happened to write home about, which is the beauty of hotel rooms, really. Tonight, however, is different. Tonight is different, because:

  My mom believes there is cum on the hotel bed. We are in Nashville and it is midnight and my mom believes there is cum on the hotel bed. We were looking forward to an innocent Christian visit in the city of rhinestones and cowboy boots and blond hair and wholesomeness, and have instead found ourselves in the cum capital of America.

  It happens this way: after driving all day, after getting lost on our way into town, after a steak dinner at a local roadhouse staffed entirely with aspiring country singers, we feel we have earned our rest. We check into our room at the Hyatt Place, and we wash our similar faces and change into our respective pajamas and yawn identical yawns and then, and then, as it sometimes does, the whole world stops spinning on a single second. My mother turns back the blanket and gasps. From the look on her face I can tell she has seen cum.

  She throws back her head and howls, and the sound chills me to the bone. It is the consciousness of a thousand cums crying out for a body. This is a Catholic’s worst nightmare: souls all over the bed.

  “Touch it!” she commands. “Touch it and tell me what that is!”

  I silently beg the fourth commandment to release me, just this once, from its power. Is this how God wants me to honor my mother—by touching half of a stranger’s bab
y on a hotel mattress? When Moses came down from the mountaintop, did he make the people touch it? I pause so long I get something pregnant.

  “Mom, I’m not going to touch cum.”

  “Just touch the cum and tell me if it’s cum.”

  “Please don’t make me touch the cum.”

  “If I hadn’t touched the cum . . . then you would never have been born.”

  One look at her tells me I have no choice. I reach out a trembling hand and suddenly she changes her mind.

  “No no no, wait! Before you touch it, get on your internet and google How long does cum stay alive?”

  “Mom, you’re a Catholic! Isn’t that one of the main things you’re supposed to know? Haven’t you guys written entire books about how long cum lives?”

  “I can’t remember! Look it up, we need to know!”

  According to the internet, there are two possibilities. Sperm either die shortly after they leave the body, or else they live eternally, first on earth and then in heaven, banging themselves adoringly against the great gold egg of God’s face. No one can decide.

  I can’t handle this on my own, so I head over to Twitter and start sending out bulletins about my current situation as fast as I can type them. I start at the beginning and waste no words. “MY MOM BELIEVES THERE IS CUM ON THE HOTEL BED AND SHE’S TRYING TO MAKE ME TOUCH IT, TO VERIFY THAT IT IS CUM. NO, MOM, I WILL NOT.” Immediately one of my friends responds, “Touch the cum. Touch the cum with your mom.”

  Pathetic fallacy is real, so just at that moment a storm begins to beat itself against the window. Thunder bares its crack to us and raindrops wiggle their long tails down the glass. Lightning shoots down the sky and illuminates us, and I see that my mother has undergone a change. Her eyes are open so wide it is impossible to imagine them ever closing. Her hair runs in wild locks away from her forehead. She looks like Edgar Allan Poe, haunted by cum, chased through the slick streets at night by cum. She shivers, as if someone just came on her grave. An unmistakable look begins to tiptoe across her face. I know that look—all of her children know it. We saw it bending over us tenderly when we were babies in our beds.