Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood

Author:Patricia Lockwood
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2017-04-14T12:18:41+00:00

12

MEN OF THE CLOTH II: THE CLOTHENING

The Rag,” Jason whispers to me one night in late autumn, as he’s cocooning himself in the multiple blankets necessary to protect his dainty body against my father’s thermostat. He snuggles down inside them and shudders. “It’s following me again.”

We first noticed the Rag shortly after we moved in, when it appeared one morning without seeming rhyme or reason in the sink of the upstairs bathroom that we share with my parents. Since then it has attained almost the status of a cryptozoological myth. It is a simple unadorned washcloth, but it has a sinister significance. It might be alive. It is always wet. We never, ever feel at liberty to move it.

“Where am I supposed to spit my toothpaste?” Jason asks, the whites of his eyes showing all the way round. “I just swallowed so much that I seriously considered calling Poison Control. If it happens again, I will. The number is on the back of the tube.”

“And how am I supposed to wash my face?” I wonder in my turn. “If I bend too low, the Rag brushes my cheek . . .”

“Like the little finger of a drowned child,” Jason finishes, his voice rising into a sort of wail. A thought occurs to him. “Do you think it’s trying to get revenge on me for drinking all of the bourbon your mother bought for the bishop? Because that was a mistake. A wonderful, delicious mistake.”

Sometimes the Rag even migrates to the shower, where it lurks in a malevolent wad. This means that it can walk . . . or crawl. From the corner, the wad follows our naked movements with invisible eyes. If it could speak, it would call us dirty.

“If Stephen King knew about this Rag, he could write such a scary book,” Jason says. “Where the Rag follows innocent people around and scrubs them against their will.”

“Instead of dressing as ghosts for Halloween, kids would dress as the Rag.”

“The sound of blood dripping would be less frightening than the sound of the dripping Rag.”

“Rip the Rag into a hundred pieces and it throbs under your floorboards like the telltale heart.”

One pavement-gray, sleeting afternoon, we go grocery shopping with my mother. As the year winds down toward the fireside holidays, daily errands with her become almost unspeakably soothing. I avoided accompanying her on them during spring and summer, but I am irresistibly drawn to them now—being with her feels like existing in the overflow of a cornucopia. We go to three different stores looking for the best pomegranates. We have to pick up a copy of Pat the Bunny for my sister’s baby so she “can learn about softness, and not have a deprived childhood.” Cornish hens are on sale at the market across town, and “you know how crispy their little bodies get.” And always, throughout, we must tend to my father’s long and clamoring grocery list.

We are making our way down the breakfast aisle when my mother picks up a box of granola, reads the product description, yells, “Don’t TELL me it’s all-natural.

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