Priestdaddy
Page 29
Next to me, Jason blinks, and I see the artificial lens in his left eye sparking like a mermaid scale, a point of contact between the seen and unseen world. I drop into the multicolored water, here cold, there warm, and float on my back until I cannot feel myself. The sun, when it is so direct, has something to tell you. But find a fluent current, and it will let you speak.
• • •
WE’VE BROUGHT ALONG another picnic—firm mahi-mahi starred with cilantro, roasted pork with caramelized onions, prawns on a fluffy split roll—and begin setting the food out on a table under the fine-needled pines. “You want a pineapple juice?” I ask my mother, pulling a can out of my bag.
She gives me the keen look of a king whose taster has just dropped dead from poison. “Tricia. When you were on the elimination diet, the day that you had pineapple, most of you wet the bed.” She pauses. “I almost wet the bed myself.”
She begins scrolling through the pictures she took of us exploring the coral island—two hundred of them, according to her count. “Here’s a GREAT one of you from behind,” she says with excitement, and shows me a picture that might as well have been taken on a whale cruise, so violently is my tail punishing the water. Just above me, in a turquoise the color of heaven, bent over and dead center, is the interested girl’s butt.
We sit sipping heinous coladas out of coconuts under the lizardy dapple of the trees for the rest of the afternoon. Then, just as we’re leaving the beach, I spy an iguana flickering his way up a trunk, darting here and there between the lips of the leaves, quick as his own tongue. My mother drops all her belongings and spends the next twenty minutes clicking her long black camera at him. He likes a high-pitched singing that Jason makes, and turns his head down to us and blinks one gold eye. Isak Dinesen wrote:
Once I shot an Iguana. I thought that I should be able to make some pretty things from his skin. A strange thing happened then, that I have never afterwards forgotten. As I went up to him, where he was lying dead upon his stone, and actually while I was walking the few steps, he faded and grew pale, all colour died out of him as in one long sigh, and by the time that I touched him he was grey and dull like a lump of concrete. It was the live impetuous blood pulsating within the animal, which had radiated out all that glow and splendour. Now that the flame was put out, and the soul had flown, the Iguana was as dead as a sandbag.
He is, for us, the only iguana that has ever existed. We must have him, and we do. But the thing that sighs out all its color here is not the iguana itself, which you can picture down to the last green enamel scale, but my mother’s jewel-like joy as she shot him—badly, badly, badly, and then finally, just as he was. The photo, when we marvel at it later, sees everything there is to see about him, knows everything there is to know. His own gold lens looks back and acknowledges her. She, too, had been an Interested Person. She, too, was called back to it in paradise.
• • •
IT IS OUR LAST NIGHT, and my mother is drinking champagne. It rises glittering to the top of her head like a tiara, something gold and incorruptible set free from the Spanish galleons. Her benevolence shines on everyone; it is motherhood itself. “All children are my sons!” she cries. “That are men. They’re really children between the ears, and yet physically they’re men!”
When her champagne runs out, I give her a taste of my vodka. “Tastes like jet fool,” she says, practically spitting. She sits with it for a while, feeling the burn, and then ventures, “This is not affecting me at all, though maybe it is making me psychic.”
“Can you read Jason’s mind?”
She turns the full fire hose of her power on him. “Yes I can. I think he’s contemplating. I think he’s meditating. He’s monknatious. He processes and he takes it in, sunrise to sunset. He’s not time-pressured. On a scale of ten, he’s sixty-six and two-thirds of not caring. Wait a minute, is he writing down everything I say?”
“I am,” he says, “because it is literature.”
“Do you want another drink?” I ask her, because why slow a woman when she’s on a roll?
“No I DON’T want another drink. It’s calories. It’s dehydration potential.” Then, drunkenly, “I love language!”
• • •
BEFORE WE DRIVE to the airport, we stop by the Basilica of St. Mary Star of the Sea. It is bleached as a conch, and the side doors are all flung open so the stroke of a crosswind can enter. It’s a kind, ministering wind that suggests someone is combing your hair, though mine has been short since I was thirteen.
At the front of the church, there is a doll of Christ dressed in a long dress like the baby Hemingway, promising to deliver us from the condition of being bitched from the start. Look-alikes even here. He gets a much prettier dress than his mother, but she gets to be Star of the Sea. Some corner of my memory has stored the fact that that fine name, Stella Maris, is the result of a transcription error. St. Jerome called her Stilla Maris, which means drop of the sea, not star. Later someone wrote it down wrong, as someone is always doing.
Outside, we wander over a series of rosy circles in the grass. “They are a rosary,” my mother says after a minute, surprised. “You’re supposed to step on one and say a prayer, and step on the next and say another,” and sure enough, there is a knot of people making a steady pilgrimage from stone to stone and reciting together in the same voice. I could join them; I still remember how a rosary is said.
To escape them, we step into the nuns’ courtyard, and my mother breathes not one word of her avowed hatred. She walks around taking pictures of the Stations of the Cross, which are mosaic scenes with gilt skies. At the center of the courtyard is a fountain, with an overblown white rose floating just at the lip of it. Jason gazes at the fountain with sudden desire. “I’m tempted to splash fountain water on my head,” he says. “Would that be all right?”
“Oh, I don’t know . . .” I begin, worrying that the Drop of the Sea might not like it.
“Of course, of course!” my mother laughs, and he dips his hand and sprinkles his bald head all over.
“That’s the most religious thing I’ve ever done,” he says with satisfaction, “but really it’s just because I was hot.”
Religion flows to every corner here, as it does in every place. In the Audubon House, I read the story of a pirate who claimed to have been converted by doves, whose long liquid cooing throughout the night awakened in him thoughts of his sins. Though perhaps he simply liked listening to them, and thought he might hear them better in heaven than elsewhere.
• • •
WE LIFT UP over the water and fly home, tanned and drowsy and our limbs loosened. When we arrive on the doorstep of the rectory, it’s just chiming midnight, and we tiptoe inside, not sure if my father is sleeping. The scene, as we expected, is one of chaos. The smell of hamburger is so intense and penetrating that it might be a government tactic to flush cult members out of a building. My father’s sacred gowns and underwear are flung everywhere. The dining room looks like a dog just opened a birthday present in it. An enormous cardboard box lies dismembered on the floor just a few steps from where it must have been delivered.
“Greg?” Mom calls up the stairs, tentative. “What’s this package?”
“IT’S THE MONSTRANCE FROM LONDON!” he shouts with considerable finality, and then we hear the surreptitious closing of a door.
Jason’s eyes light up; he thinks he said MONSTER. A religion centered around a MONSTER FROM LONDON might be one he could finally get behind.
“No, no,” I tell him, “a monstrance is a sort of twenty-four-karat-gold sunburst that holds the body of the Lord.” There’s a window at the center and a thousand rays reach out of it in every direction, so it stands on the altar like a permanent dawn. The word “monstrance” means “to show,” and when I read it, up rises that round image of the bread through the glass—bread that my own father has consecrated, at the climax of a metaphor that is more
than a metaphor, at the moment where real time intersects with eternity. How to explain this moment to someone who never believed it, could never believe it? That bells ring, that the universe kneels, that what happened enters into the house of what is always happening, and sits with it together and eats at its table.
“How much,” Jason wonders in a whisper, and, “Where did he get the money,” but we don’t ask him those questions anymore. The size of the box, the wild rips in the cardboard, the far-flungedness of the newspaper packing all tell us that this one must be a beauty—and there is hardly enough gold in the world, after all, for something that holds a slice of the mystery.
“No matter what you do, do not go into the bathroom,” my mother interrupts, bustling past us with a pile of Rags and throwing them straightaway into the trash can. “Something might be dead in there.”
Silence upon silence from upstairs. Then, like music over the closing credits, the most objectionable American guitar riff I’ve ever heard begins to somersault down the steps, shirtless and wearing the tightest possible jeans, signaling that it’s time for us to leave.
“Isn’t he even going to say hello? Or good-bye? Safe travels? Sleep tight?” Jason asks, as puzzled by this as he is by the twenty-four-karat monster. “Isn’t he going to come downstairs at all?”
I repeat the same sentence that ran unbidden through my head the night my mother called him: I can only write down what you say, what you do. Please give me something, anything: a crumb of the bread that you stand in front of the people and change, a word of the absolution that flows out of you toward anyone who needs it. Forget your gold sunburst and come downstairs, I think, but whole Bibles have been written about the man who wasn’t there, who appeared for some and never others, who was thunder in a cloud.
“He is who he is and that’s all he’s ever gonna be,” my mother says, picking up pieces of revenge garbage with a pair of tongs, and it sounds so much like a fresh, confused entry in the litany of names of God that I almost laugh. “He alone is his very being, and he is of himself everything that he is,” I think, and am somehow comforted. Who among us is not the great I AM? Who among us doesn’t live in a nightgown or some other bare-ass outfit at the center of his own wide sky—shining, unchanging, without beginning or end, a word in the east and a body in the west? A people who cannot change, crying out to a power who does not: please, and come downstairs, and be a human being. As soon as I have unpacked and showered off a bright blue week’s worth of salt, I know I will absent myself just as he is doing right now; I know I will shut myself up again as if to pray, alone with my shapes and my symbols and my self, calling on the message to appear in my midst, to walk toward me looking terrible and saying be not afraid.
“Is that Cheap Trick?” Jason exclaims. I startle, thinking he is referring to my internal rhetoric, until the words “I want you to want me” come floating down over the screech of the guitars, and it’s impossible not to hear it as coming from heaven, impossible not to hear it as God’s own song.
“Oh, it was so fun,” my mother whispers, holding me. Then she walks with us to the doorway and waves to us until we disappear, standing outlined at the center of a warm gold page, her face appearing to pour forth light.
• • •
AS WE SET OFF on the road that stretches home, my petition is forgotten, my Please, give me something. Radiance still sits in my skin, warm color still pulses in me, and I understand that what I have is enough. 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.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A thousand thanks to the people who made this book possible: To my tigress of an agent, Mollie Glick, and to my editor, Paul Slovak, who is as graceful and insightful with prose as he is with poetry. To the team at Riverhead, particularly Geoff Kloske and Jynne Martin, who sent me whiskey after I was robbed. To Helen Yentus for her work on the jacket. And to Megan Lynch, who championed this book in the first place.
Thanks to my parents, who supported me even as I wrote down everything they did, and to the seminarian, who took everything in the greatest good humor. To my brothers and sisters, who answered my dozens of questions and who propped up my memory where it failed. To the people who read this work in different drafts: Greg, Michelle, Sasha, Jesse.
Thanks to Jason, who is afraid of both “blood” and “sharp things going into people,” yet who gave me huge courage in that house full of crucifixes. To my writing companion Alice, who passed away soon after I turned in my finished draft.
My especial and boundless gratitude to all those who donated so that Jason could get new eyes.
Finally, to my nieces and nephews Wolfgang, Aria, Seraphina, John Paul, Gigi, Gabe, Dreda, and Veronica—I thought you might like to see your names in a real book, as I would have liked it when I was young.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Patricia Lockwood was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and raised in all the worst cities of the Midwest. She is the author of two poetry collections, Balloon Pop Outlaw Black and Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals, a New York Times Notable Book. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New Republic, Slate, and the London Review of Books. She lives in Savannah, Georgia.
facebook.com/patricia.lockwood.39
twitter.com/TriciaLockwood
What’s next on
your reading list?
Discover your next
great read!
* * *
Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author.
Sign up now.