Priestdaddy

by Patricia Lockwood

  “Did you hear the wonderful news? Dogs can now get into heaven,” Jason interrupts, bounding up from the basement after completing his daily regimen of four thousand vegetarian mind-clenches or whatever it is he does down there. He went breezing right past the pile without noticing it, and has no idea yet that he is doomed. “What?” he asks, unsettled by our silence, glancing first at one of us and then at the other, until realization sneaks up and taps him on the shoulder. “His underwear is behind me, isn’t it. All of his underwear is behind me right now.” It is. “And there’s Rags in there too, isn’t there.” Lifting his eyes, the seminarian gives Jason a look of such pained, eloquent, pure-hearted compassion that I see Christ in his face for the first time.

  • • •

  ORDINATION DAY IS fast approaching, which means that every so often the seminarian rushes into the room squealing, “Look at this chalice!!!” and then shows us a picture of a tall phallic cup studded with suggestive pearl droplets. He prints these pictures off the internet, and again I am seized by the desire to look at his search history: “cup for blood,” “holy cup for precious blood,” “what is best cup for my god,” “i want to drink the crimson blood of lord,” etc.

  He’s trying to choose between three or four different options, all of which are so crusted with ornament that they appear actually diseased, as if King Midas had contracted an STD and then foolishly touched himself. This is a decision of huge personal import, like picking your wedding china. “Which do you like best?” he asks anxiously, handing me a stack of goblet pornography and watching over my shoulder while I flick through it. What he really means is which one is the most magical, and he has correctly intuited that I’m the right person to ask about this. I have what you might call an overdeveloped sense of the significance of objects, which is at its keenest at Christmastime.

  “I don’t like any of them,” I say finally. “I want you to get one where there’s a dragon’s hand holding the cup, and there’s a trickle of blood running down between the dragon’s fingers that’s actually a trail of rubies, and the dragon has been to prison, and it has a tattoo on its knuckles that spells G-O-D.”

  “NO,” he says very sternly, snatching the pictures away and pressing them to his chest. “The dragon’s hand cannot hold the cup.”

  Time is running out. Most of the other seminarians have bought their chalices already. When they get together, they subtly compete as to whose chalice is the most valuable, the most dignified, the most impressive. Returning home after six o’clock Mass, loosening the white collar around his reddened neck, my father peruses the printouts, remarks on the choices, and mentions that his own chalice is not only “inlaid with fine amethysts of the first water,” but had also been “rescued from a hoard of Nazi treasure after the Second World War.” The message is quite clear: his chalice is only marginally less cool than the original Grail. He wins.

  • • •

  “HERE, I’VE MADE US ALL Classic Martinis,” Jason announces on one of these cozy evenings, carrying in a tray and setting it down on the coffee table. He has made a touching effort to drop a curlicue of lemon rind into the bottom of each glass, so the liquid looks like a mobile citrine. The seminarian lifts his with reverence, his mind still on chalices. I sip once, and then again and again, trying to figure out why it tastes so much more uncompromising than any other martini I’ve ever had. Before the drink is halfway gone, I’m slithering down to the floor.

  “How many shots are in these?” I ask Jason.

  He calculates. “About five apiece,” he says.

  “Isn’t that a couple of too many?”

  “Oh no. It’s the classic recipe,” he insists. “This is what Julia Child drank.”

  I make a scoffing noise that is somewhat out of my control, like a runaway choo-choo. “Julia Child was often so drunk . . . that she tried to bake herself as a chicken on the stove.”

  “Would you like one more?”

  “Yes, thank you,” I say very politely. “It tastes like being thrown through a window.”

  He trots out to the kitchen and shakes up another round with audible gusto, and in about fifteen minutes the seminarian is just as incapacitated as I am. He starts telling us about “the big and gorgeous domes of Rome,” and then flings open the front door and shouts into the swirling night, “IT’S THE YEAR OF THE PRIEST! IT’S THE YEAR! OF! THE PRIEST!”

  “Shhh shhh shhh. Quiet now. I need to do something . . . incredibly important,” I tell him, in units of varying coherency. “I need . . . to show you my beautiful stomach.”

  My drunkenness goes in six stages. There is Talkativeness, Dancing, Grammar Derangement, Showing You My Beautiful Stomach, Reading Your Tarot with Such Intensity That Both of Us Begin to Weep, and finally Blessed Unconsciousness. I’ve never hit the fourth stage so fast.

  He crosses his forearms in front of his face—at last I have warranted the celibacy block! “No. No. Why would you do something like that?”

  “Because Jason have roofied us,” I say balefully, flipping my shirt up for one demure second.

  “That doesn’t give you an excuse to show your stomach.”

  “It gives me the excuse to do what I want. It’s like St. Augustine always said . . . Oh God, don’t make me good, not ever.”

  “Augustine didn’t say that.”

  “Oh God, make me a VERY bad boy, who needs a spanking.”

  “No.”

  “Oh God, make me the member of a motorcycle gang, who has to kill an old lady for my initiation.”

  He claps his hands over his ears. I suspect we are not handling our liquor well, but when we turn to look at Jason, he appears to be completely unaffected. He snaps off the end of a candy cane and sucks it thoughtfully, humming “Please, Daddy (Don’t Get Drunk This Christmas)” under his breath. He stares in rapt wonderment at the lights, twinkling on their green plastic vines.

  “God, your mother’s trees are so perfect,” Jason says. “How does she make her trees so perfect?”

  “Because she cares about our experience!” I yell. “Because she cares about the Christmas experience we are having here tonight!”

  “What’s that big package?” he asks, brightening, hoping against hope that it might contain a scale that tells him when he’s going to die.

  Not the big package . . . not the big package for husband! “Now listen to me very much,” I say, tears of remorse beginning to stream down my face. “I am sorry to put you in the trash for God’s birthday.”

  He has no idea what I’m talking about, but he’s never let that stop him before. “Don’t be sorry. It’s just what God wanted,” he soothes me. “Would you like another Classic Martini?”

  I am long past the point of being able to feel my face. My face is not even my face anymore—it’s your face. “Yes, thank you, I would LOVE one more. It tastes just like the Wonder Woman’s invisible plane.”

  I lift my shirt up again at the seminarian, just in case he didn’t get a good enough look before, and drum my fingers on it to remind him of jazz. This is my present for him—that and the bottle of Bombay gin that I set under the tree with a baby-blue bow around its neck. “Oh, isn’t Christmas your FAVORITE holiday?” I ask him, with the broadness of a truly drunk person, snatching my third drink from Jason and raising it high into the air to toast its breathability.

  “To be very honest with you, no, it isn’t,” he replies, with his handsome face downcast. “I like Easter. I like it when he is resurrected. I like when we all eat ham.”

  “Don’t you love to get the gifts, though?” I cry, but even as I say it I know what he is thinking, what he believes. You get a gift on Easter too—a trash can that looks like a tree, to throw all your sins into.

  “Christmas is lonely,” he says. “You come home and the house is chilly and closed up and dark and there’s no family. No one’s here, your mom’s not here, it’s just your
father and me, and we eat dumplings and watch TV. It’s not like this. It’s nothing like this at all.”

  • • •

  IT IS ONE OF THOSE NIGHTS when you can feel the life in your house to be as warm as it looks from outside. The seminarian and I walk out to see if the magic still holds. The electric candles glow in the frames of the windows. The icicles hanging from the roof look so dangerous that I wish my mother could see them. We weave in and out of each other’s paths, leaving one extremely intoxicated set of footprints. “Haha,” I shout, spanking my hands together, “it was then that I carried you!”

  The white silence is like the inside of a sleigh bell; it restores us somewhat to our minds. “It wasn’t always so lonely,” the seminarian says, as we smoke his brown-papered Nat Shermans. His right shoulder inches up toward his ear, the way it always does when he talks about tradition. “There used to be a system. There were women who would keep house for priests after their husbands died. It was a sort of vocation. They never married again. It was better then—there were places for people—but no one does that anymore.”

  A system, places for people, women who kept house for priests. In some dim corner I can still see those women, dressed in drab and black, moving on soundless rubber soles in and out of rooms, illuminated from above by light fixtures in the shape of dogwood blossoms. In their grief, nearly all of them had cut their hair. Jesus left ex-wives and widows all over the world. I remember—I was one of them.

  It is probably the last conversation like this the seminarian and I will have. After his ordination, particular friendships with women will be discouraged. I understand why, but in a wider sense, it is frightening. If you are not friends with women, they are theoretical to you.

  The snow falls in cartoonish heaps, and I think blurrily of how forms are destiny: how the rain is destined for its torrents and the snow for its drifts, and the poems for their sheafs and me for the poems. Something seizes me and I break into a sudden run down the silent street. “I am fast,” I always insist to my husband, lying motionless and stubborn in the middle of the bed. “I used to be so fast, until I grew up and got boobs.” He never believes me, but look now, I am fast again; I’m running in between the snowflakes. The unrepeating fingerprints fall all around me, into great indistinguishable peaks and slopes. The stars look like cusps, everything looks like a cusp. The streetlights still flow, the night smells like a new dime, and the mailbox seems to shine with the accumulation of all it has ever received. The seminarian is laughing and waving me toward the open door, but I am not cold and I am not coming back just yet. Places for people, wide spaces and small, little bodies floating down into their forms.

  I run even toward the church, till I can see the Marian grotto hidden on one side where the garden is pinched out like a series of matches. It is almost Christmas Eve. Tomorrow, in that church, the songs I like best will flame out their brief lives, there and then gone, while the people hold soft and slumping candles under their chins and circles of cardboard catch the notes of hot wax. They will return again next year.

  14

  VOICE

  The best way to write poetry, in my experience, is to first fail spectacularly at singing.

  Because my father abused six-strings when my mother was pregnant, my sister Christina was born with a musical instrument lodged halfway down her throat. This instrument needed tending, and tuning, and practice, so for a long time when we were teenagers, we took voice lessons together. That’s what we called it, just: voice.

  So send yourself back to piano lessons, or flute or cello lessons, or drum corps or baton-twirling or ballet or gymnastics, or practicing free throws by yourself in a parking lot at night under the glow of a single streetlight, or throwing a tennis ball over and over at a square on a garage door. Send yourself back to the time when you practiced, when you did scales and suicides and drills, when you figured out where the sweet spot in your bat was, and your bat was your body.

  Unfortunately some of us had no sweet spot at all, and I was one of them.

  This was the great tragedy of my life. If I could sing, I wouldn’t be here—I’d be living in an apartment in Vienna eating small cakes with my fingers and drinking cologne on purpose and petting a pale castrato on a golden couch. If I could make that white sound I wouldn’t need paper. But I couldn’t sing, so here I am.

  I couldn’t read music but music could read me. It went through me line by line and scene by scene, with one finger down the middle of the page, highlighting me recklessly. Its comprehension was so complete it was even horrifying. No meaning in me was hidden from it, but it was totally closed to me.

  I didn’t understand phrasing and I didn’t understand breath support and I didn’t understand how to not make my face look like a dead doll when I was going for a high note. Also, I didn’t understand time signatures. No huge surprise for a person who is living in a world of melted clocks.

  Also my sense of pitch was off. Sense of pitch is not considered one of the five. It is not even considered the sixth, somehow.

  Let me be honest: my voice sounded like the final cry of someone killed by a falling piano.

  But my sister could sing, she could really sing. All her words were set to music. She had height, white sound, and roundness—when she opened her mouth the forward curves of doves came out. When I listened to her, my hearing flew out of the coop of my head and then came home. I knew it was art because it drew the senses slightly out of my body, and they leaped to meet the art in the middle of the air.

  Why her and not me? It probably had something to do with the fact that my sister was named after Jesus, who was constantly surrounded by harmonizing angels, and I was named after the sort of Roman politician who loved to stand up and bore everybody with long speeches.

  We often sang together at church because our voices sounded related, though mine was obviously the humpbacked insane relative who lived up in the attic and only descended for meals. Still, to harmonize with her felt as transcendent as finishing a bird’s sentence, or standing an inch off the ground at the butterfly house. It was an exhilaration only possible in nature.

  When I sang with her I felt on the verge of physical translation. They were not words, exactly, that were coming out of us then. It was whatever words were filled with, the liquid or the plasma or the perfume of them, spilling out of us and eager to be free.

  This was thrilling, because it meant there was a whole realm of existence where words were not meaningful in themselves, but rather the man-made lakes that held music.

  On Tuesdays and Thursdays we took chorus together at school. Christina was two grades ahead of me and everyone stood in awe of what she could do, so I must have gotten into the chorus just on the strength of my last name.

  The best singer in the chorus was not my sister, though. The best singer in the chorus was Truenessia, who took the stairs two at a time compared to the rest of us. She was tall and had close-cropped curls and tipped her face back when she sang, as if she had a flower tucked behind one ear. Truenessia told us when we couldn’t hit notes to think our voices higher or lower—to think a second story into our sound, or a basement.

  This made sense to me. Singing was full of hidden passageways, and sealed-up staircases, and secret rooms. Most of the time I couldn’t find them, but once when I was doing scales a roof lifted off and my voice jumped an octave above anything. It was off the piano completely, and I sailed for a second above the city of singing. I didn’t know how it had happened and I was never able to do it again. It had come from the other side of the world.

  The teacher who taught chorus was a redhead with a face like a crag, windswept and stony and shaped by nature, a face that though one thousand miles away seemed to participate in Big Sur.

  She carried herself as if she were fragile, as if she had more nerves to the inch than other people. She was incapable of being ridiculous, even though the whole school knew she had once dated a Ronald McDonald.

  Between cla
sses we tried to imagine this Ronald McDonald relationship. How would you even kiss Ronald McDonald without getting clown makeup all over your face? And when he looked at you with an expression of lusty intent, wouldn’t you just feel like a hamburger?

  The redheaded teacher sang through migraines, cramps, and all other forms of female suffering. Occasionally she crossed her arms over her belly. Occasionally she touched two fingers to her temples. She was a sharp note rather than a flat and her mouth was thinner and straighter than the bottom line of the staff.

  She taught us the interior smile, since you couldn’t actually smile when you were singing. You had to arrange your face as if you were smiling except completely subtract the smile. It was impossible, but singing was full of things like that. Singing was worse than Buddhism. It was no wonder so much of it was done in churches.

  Here’s another one: “Open up the barn door in the back of your head.” This is what I’m talking about! It meant nothing but you knew exactly what it meant, same as poetry.