Words To Look Up (To)

One time my father hit me. One shot across the head with a dictionary. And then, silence. Then tears, not mine though, his, then mine.
His tears looked like they rippled inside him instead of down his face. He had a gaze for a moment like the walls around us weren’t those of our new house, but those of his childhood home in the Bronx. More, a familiar feeling, maybe a memory of his mom yelling at him and shuffling him around the apartment in what order she could think of before going down to her card game.
I had a sense this was more about him than me for I had committed far worse household crimes than this one. I don’t even remember what I did that day to warrant a dictionary across my 13 year old head. Hey, what the hell was my dad doing with a dictionary at 9:30 at night in the upstairs hallway anyways? And why, the one time that he had the impulse to smack me did he have to be holding the biggest book in the house. It was a red dictionary. One with the thumb cuts marking the beginning of each new letter. My sister and I had colored certain letters on the cover black as well as several hundred pages and most of the thumb cuts.
I stood looking at his left hand now dangling by his side. He was still holding the dictionary. His index finger was lodged somewhere between L and Q. Maybe he was looking up “lonely”, or “money”. He was mad at himself, so he whacked me. Makes sense like all things make sense.
So we stood in the hallway facing one another and crying. I could tell as he hugged me that my father wanted so badly to take back what he had just done. I did not wish him to have it back though. We could have looked up “regret”.
Now normally this type of thing would escalate into a family issue with my mom calling from downstairs and my sister peeking out into the hallway. At this age the house still just felt like one big room to me. No sound, nor light, nor carpet could be contained by the walls as we cycled through our room to room activities, but somehow, this moment was kept between me and my dad. It was a moment deserving of our uninterrupted attention, one rich in the passing of generational dysfunction, and even though it was an isolated incident for us, I wonder if I will have such a moment with my own son some day.