Priestdaddy

by Patricia Lockwood

  • • •

  KEEP THE CHRIST IN CHRISTMAS or else my mother will leave the planet. The day after Thanksgiving, I noticed an unfamiliar magnet had materialized on the refrigerator: a black square showing the silhouette of Mary kneeling over a swaddled bundle in the manger while the various elected representatives of livestock looked on. KEEP THE CHRIST IN CHRISTMAS, its slogan begged me.

  Now that December is under way, the situation has become urgent. The spies of Kwanzaa surround the house. Assassins hide in our hedges, holding machine guns in the shape of menorahs. “Get the Christ out of it!” the enemy orders his troops, red and green lasers shooting out of his eyes. My mother isn’t having it. She would slit the throat of Baby New Year himself if he tried to say “Happy Holidays” to her. She has heard distressing rumors that young people now just “put a pole in their house for their tree” and “donate goats to each other” for their presents. Surely this is the mark of a degenerate age.

  She engages in strategic maneuvers while the rest of us are sleeping. She hangs fir wreaths and clusters of holly, winds garlands up the banister, and arranges and rearranges the components of her Dickens village. Dishes of nuts appear in odd places, and the number of gold balls in the house increases exponentially. Late one night we creep downstairs in search of cookies and find her gazing at her preferred erotica on the internet: authentic German Christmas handcrafts, carved from the finest wood.

  “Mom, what on earth is this website?” I ask. I have no idea where she finds these places. I am willing to posit the existence of a Dark Internet only mothers can access, as much a threat to American law and order as those shady networks where hackers in fedoras buy synthetic drugs called, like, Dust and Aligatür.

  “You’re telling me you’ve never been to Erzgebirge-Palace?” she asks, incredulous. “Dot Com? It’s famous!”

  I admit that I haven’t. I lean over her shoulder to get a better look and see that the sidebar shows a smiling Aryan woman calling their twenty-four-hour customer support line—not to complain, but to express the pleasure that Erzgebirge-Palace’s products have given her over the years, perhaps accompanied by some tasteful heavy breathing.

  “See, sometimes I teach you something,” she says smugly. “This website has everything. Look, there’s Nutcracker Forest Man with Squirrel; Large Egghead . . . Only Legit with the Red Nose; Natural Santa; Cinnamon Dwarf; Snowboy with Violin; Mini Gnome with Package (6 Inches); and something called Music Box: The Birth.”

  “The craftsmanship . . .” Jason breathes, his glasses reflecting the rotating pageant of items. Despite ourselves, we are succumbing to the lure of Erzgebirge-Palace. Perhaps it was inevitable. After all, I am a person who once had an extensive gnome collection, and he is a person who wore a pair of knee-high silver boots to school every day until he was eight, like a sugarplum fairy.

  “Get a load of these NUTCRACKERS,” my mother says, overawed, and then reads aloud: “‘Often the Nutcracker is the image of authorities from the past. Especially kings, soldiers and gendarmes are often used as a model. At that time the population was dependent on the benevolence of the authorities and tried to express some protest by giving the Nutcrackers a grim look. His energetic face makes him look very powerful.’”

  I venture to suggest to Germany that making its nutcrackers in the shape of “authority figures of the past” is not the best idea? A small figurine in the likeness of Charlie Chaplin also seems misguided. But my mother is not listening. She has returned to perusing the nativity scenes, settling at last on the largest and most expensive. Her lust for nativity scenes is a hole that cannot be filled. She is convinced that someday she will find one that falls just short of the scene itself: the camels humped within a hair of real life; Joseph a patient shadow, cucked by God; the baby with its skull shaped like a lightbulb, like an idea the world is about to get.

  This is not that good, but it is good. “That’s a cute little Christ,” Jason says sincerely.

  “Damn, and Mary’s not so bad either,” Mom says, appreciating the generous curves of her halo. She pauses and gives us a sly pregnant look. “You know, before Jesus was born, Mary got an ass ride.”

  • • •

  MOM SEES THE NOTEBOOK sitting next to me on the table and asks where I’m at now, as if a book is a kind of verbal America that can be driven across in a car: one week you’re in Connecticut, the next in California. “I’m writing about all your babies,” I say, and read from my latest paragraph.

  How many kids should a priest have? One? Two? Three, if he’s Irish? Not even close. How about five. How else will anybody know he’s balls-deep in his hot wife all the time?

  I glance up from the page. “Am I allowed to say that last part?”

  “Well . . .” She weighs the pros and cons. “‘Balls-deep’ is very bad, but I like the part where you say ‘hot wife.’”

  She is excited I have found my subject, even though my subject happens to include her. If I am writing about her, I am with her, talking and laughing and listening to every word, and not locked up in my room waiting for the summons to come. Between books, a writer feels like an angel in that idle time between missions—you are all atrophy and dimpled elbows; you are simply decorative; you are good for nothing. But when the fresh scroll is handed to you, and speed is put back into your heels, and your body re-remembers the straight line, the happiness cannot be described—not in the new book or any other. The feeling is arrowness, nothing else. Hit the apple or split the head, you are happy, you are straight ahead, you are flying.

  While we were growing up, there was another painting in our house: Fra Angelico’s Annunciation. It was one of those paintings that seem to continue outside their own borders and reach into real life; this, I thought, is what “good art” must mean. Two hands stretched out of the sun and shot a streaming gilt tassel into Mary, who bent over the place where she was struck. The angel, with feathers like a fractal quail, delivered his message directly into her eyes. Mary’s face was an unripe peach, not ready, not ready; a little book slid off her right thigh like a pat of butter. Stars in the ceiling pierced down. Far to the left, those two green grinches of sin, Adam and Eve, began their grumbling nude walk offstage.

  When I left home, I hardly ever saw pictures of the Annunciation anymore. I was not expecting this somehow—I thought I would still encounter the messenger angel everywhere. It was the messenger angel who captured my attention, and not the angel with the flaming sword and not the dark-hooded angel of death and certainly not the angel with the regrettable name of Phanuel. By instinct I understood that the most interesting one is the information angel, who carries the newspaper that is meant for you over your doorstep and into your life.

  And how does the good news arrive? It does not arrive in your ears, exactly; it arrives in your face as a great gush of light. It is carried to you, not like a rose but like the symbol of a rose, straight into your understanding. There is no sound. It happens in your bedroom, or in your cave in the middle of the desert, with a lion’s head spreading on your lap, or on top of the pillar where you’ve sat for a hot century. It happens in your study, wherever that happens to be.

  “I should probably tell him I’m doing this,” I say, and pop into his bedroom across the hallway, where he’s spread out on the bed like an outsize pinup model. “Dad? I’m writing . . . well, I’m writing a book about you.”

  “Hahahaha!” he says, throwing back his half-cherubic, half-satyric head. His angel and his demon aren’t even posted on opposite shoulders. They’re standing on top of his neck, making out. “Hahahaha. I’ll murder you.”

  “Don’t say you’re going to murder her!” my mother calls out. “Not nurturing.”

  “Ho

  Re-

  Lax,” he calls back to her.

  “The working title is Priestdaddy,” I say, determined to make a totally clean breast of it.

  Not that my fathe
r believes a breast can ever be clean. “Wait till The New York Times gets a load of that,” he says evilly. Then, turning his attention back to the football game, he bellows, “C’MON, ANDY!” and kicks a meaty leg in the air. He refers to all athletes by their first names, as if they are his sons.

  Jason, editing a story about corn on his laptop, has overheard this entire exchange. “Why are people always having to Get Loads of things in your house?” he asks, exasperated. “Why do Lockwoods have such a rhetorical fondness for the concept of Loads?”

  “It’s how there got to be so many of us,” I say, squinting at the shape of my father on the bed. “He doesn’t seem bothered at all. If my daughter told me she was writing a book about me, first I would scream, and then I would physically suck her back into my body so that she no longer existed, and then I would uninvent sex so that no one could ever have a child again.”

  “That’s because you don’t like to be watched,” Jason says, following my gaze with his own greener, wiser one. “You would wear an invisibility cloak if you could. Whereas your dad . . .”

  “CATCH THE FOOTBALL!” the man in question shouts, and rolls from one decadent haunch to the other.

  “Would wear an extravisibility onesie,” I finish.

  “Exactly. I think your dad has been waiting for someone to write a book about him his whole life. One with submarines in it.”

  “Just don’t tell any secrets,” my mother says. “Like about the time he shot the German shepherd that bit his bare legs in their little jogging shorts, or the time I got so mad at that priest who insulted my interior decorating that I told him I was going to come down so hard on his dick.”

  “It’s all secrets, top to bottom,” I say, with despair at the magnitude of the task before me. “Everything that ever happened in our household should probably be a secret. Whenever I call Mary, she asks if I’m going to talk about the time Dad almost killed her because she accidentally turned off his computer with her foot. Whenever I call Paul, he asks me if I’m going to talk about how Dad used to take him into the backyard and throw baseballs at him.”

  “What?” Mom exclaims. “Why did he do that?”

  “To cure him of his fear of baseballs.”

  The sky has turned as black and bracing as coffee and the air is taking on the scent of a feast, so we go into the kitchen and I begin to stir a lemon and rosemary sauce for the pork tenderloins we’re roasting. I whisk in little pats of butter to silken it, while Jason rustles through the refrigerator for a vegetable that might be acceptable to my father.

  “Asparagus?” he asks, holding out a bunch with purple-tipped stems.

  “Oh no. Your father refuses to eat asparagus, because it causes impotence,” my mother informs us.

  “Too late,” Jason says solemnly, gesturing with the asparagus to a portrait of the five Lockwood children posing in front of an immaculate Christmas tree, with its feathery boughs cradling dozens—maybe hundreds—of gold and silver balls.

  She looks at the picture and laughs, partly at the joke and partly at the absurdity of what happened to her: married at eighteen, no degree, no job, no fixed address, and five children scattered across North America. “I chose it,” she says with great stateliness, the way she sometimes does. “If I hadn’t, you’d still be out there.” Still out there, somewhere in the night—an idea that just missed her, an undelivered piece of mail.

  An angel appears to announce: a child will be born. “Mom, let’s be real about this,” I say, squinting at her. “Was it weird when I came out of your vagina?”

  “No,” she says, her voice turning suddenly wonderful. “No, it wasn’t at all.”

  • • •

  SHE LEAVES A FEW DAYS before Christmas to race around the Midwest visiting all of her far-flung descendants. She invites us to come along with her, but we decline, recalling one notorious Christmas Eve when we got stranded on an iced-over highway with her for six hours. Jason had to excuse himself from the car and pee his name into a snowbank, and I had to crawl like a snake through the backseat and force one of the seat backs down so I could retrieve a bottle of wine from the trunk, and my mother meanwhile was raising all the questions about art, philosophy, and ethics that humankind had found no answer for yet. This was her established practice. If we refused to discuss the issues with her, she simply called my sister Christina and talked to her on speakerphone for forty-five minutes about euthanasia in Canada. The day flashed almost unbearably outside the windows. Every twig and blade of grass was coated in ice, and icicles hung from the shelves of rock by the roadside, so that everywhere we looked were penknives, daggers, letter openers. Tinsel.

  “Please water the tree,” she tells us before she departs, “or else it will die, and this is how fires on Christmas get started. People go to sleep thinking everything is fine, and then melt in their beds like pieces of candy.”

  Soon after she’s gone, the seminarian returns for a visit, accompanied by his black overnight bag and the book of prayers he calls his wife. We congregate in the living room again, listening to the coziest and crackliest old Christmas records we can find. He has taken to wearing Grey Flannel as his signature scent—the closer he gets to being a priest, the more poisonous he is trying to smell, in order to create a wide radius around him where women will not wish to enter. “A priest should smell nasty,” he tells me. “A priest should smell SO nasty. You know what I really want to get, though. This scent that Pope Pius IX used to wear. Very subtle, very nice. They formulated it from his secret recipe.”

  “What does it smell like?”

  “Orange blossoms. It’s VERY chaste.”

  “And what’s that called?” I ask. I can guess what the answer will be, but I want to hear him say it.

  “The Pope’s Cologne.”

  “Ah,” I exhale with reverence. He has not disappointed me. “You know, Jason wears a really nice fragrance. It smells like a sweating lumberjack chopping down a cedar tree while simultaneously smoking a pipe. Here, I want you to smell it.”

  “Get it away!” he protests, as I wave the bottle under his nose. “That might be fine for a secular man, but it’s too sensual for someone with a vocation.”

  “Sensual” is the worst word he knows. I actually called him a sensualist once, meaning simply that he liked food, music, fine wine, jazz, and cascading lace all over his body, and he nearly cried. It obsessed him for weeks. “What do you mean I am a sensualist,” he would burst out at me, bothered, from time to time as we sat with our books.

  • • •

  A PACKAGE IS WAITING for him on the bottom stair; it’s a present from his father. He slits it open and lifts out a mason jar full of grass, containing a picture of him kneeling on an altar in gold vestments and a card that says PURIFY AND CLEANSE. I feel justified in saying it is the greatest gift anyone has ever received. It’s better than the stuffed-cat radio by far. It sounds like a craft project you would read about in one of those pastel magazines for women on Valium, but I’ve been assured that the seminarian’s father is a butch and monosyllabic man who built himself a pizza oven in his own backyard.

  “Am I supposed to open it?” he wonders, turning it over in his hands. “Is it, like, an art installation?”

  I have no idea. “Are you sure the grass isn’t weed?” I ask. “It would be such a waste if that jar were full of weed and we didn’t open it because we thought it was art.”

  “Weed has ruined lives,” he reprimands me, but he doesn’t allow it to interfere with his holiday mood. He surveys the shining apparition of the tree with satisfaction. It is hung with modest white lights and red candles and special candy canes made by superannuated German confectioners. The angel of messages is perched on top, arms held wide and sleeves flaring like bugles. All of this is as it should be, but as he looks closer, a large, horrendously wrapped package with the words “FOR HUSBAND” written on it in black marker catches his atten
tion. “What did you get for Jason?”

  “I got him . . . a trash can,” I say after a short hesitation. This looks bad on paper, I know, but we’re still putting every extra penny into our escape fund, and I couldn’t bring myself to buy anything we didn’t urgently need. “It’s a pretty nice trash can. It’s printed with a tree-bark design so when you use it, you can imagine that you live in the forest and are throwing your trash into a hollow log. We’re going to need it when we move out.”

  “Why didn’t you just get him what he wanted—you know, something off his Christmas list?”

  I shake my head gently. “You don’t understand. You can’t just get Jason what he wants. The two things he desires more than anything else in the world right now are a scale that tells you the Real Age of Your Skeleton and something called a Brain-Sensing Headband.”

  “So you . . .”

  “So I got him a trash can instead.”

  The seminarian steeples his fingers skeptically. You do not treasure a man by getting him a trash can for Christmas. You send him the message that husbands are garbage. You send him the message that later he might find his own dismembered pieces in it. He picks up the jar again and returns to studying it, perplexed. I can’t make heads or tails of it either. If someone mailed me a jar of grass that exhorted me to PURIFY AND CLEANSE, I would probably stuff a pair of my panties in there and mail it right back to them.

  “Where’s J?” my father asks, swaggering belly-first around the corner with a large container of out-of-season raspberries in his hand. “Now that your mother is off gallivanting around across the country . . .” (my father has always held that the female sex’s primary mode of transportation is gallivanting) “. . . he’s gonna have to take over Laundry Patrol.” He points toward a pile of underwear in the hallway that is taller than I am, that is possibly more underwear than I have ever worn in my lifetime. There is a gang of Rags loitering wetly on the top of it, wrung out from a long week of washing legs. “Tell him I’ll need those in time for morning Mass,” Dad says, with a note of sincere thankfulness and apology in his voice, before popping ten plump raspberries into his mouth and disappearing into his bedroom to shout at athletes who can neither hear nor respond to him. The seminarian gasps as soon as he is gone, both at the enormity of his request and the fact that I, a card-carrying woman, was not called upon to fulfill it. If I used my psychic ability to enter his head right now, I know it would be filled with the single flashing phrase IMPENDING EMASCULATION OF MY TESTOSTERONE BROTHER accompanied by the sound of sirens.