I AM ONLY A VISITOR IN THIS HOUSE

I am sixteen and dressing for a date. It’s the first time I’m going out with Melanie who is pretty and popular and who I didn’t think would go out with me at all. My mother tells me I look handsome like my father. I shudder. She shows me a picture of him when he was young, a picture I’ve seen too many times. She must have been trying to think of better days and at the same time, forgot how, when he opened a door for himself, he let it swing back on her. My father is short, heavy set, legs like piano legs, powerful arms, a neck barely contained by his collar. He is wearing a blue, double-breasted suit and somber maroon tie--he looks like an enforcer for the mob. I don’t want to see any resemblance to me. I was afraid that if I looked like him I might be even a little like him. He isn’t a bad looking man. Sometimes I allowed myself to think that he was handsome because, I suppose, embarrassing as it is to admit, I wanted to believe that I was handsome too. Still, I am afraid my date will think I am like him. I didn’t know why she should think such a thing but I feared she would and I decided that I wanted to look different, be different. I didn’t know how I should be.

My father grew up on the lower east side with looming black tenements where traffic squeezed through narrow streets. He says I have it easy. When he tells me the noise was deafening--horns, hawkers, dogs barking, women calling out of windows, children crying and that it smelled of horse manure and people who bathed in kitchen bathtubs, I want to tell him that it wasn’t my fault. But then, he didn’t blame me, or, did he just feel resentful that he’d worked hard and thought I had it easy.

He prospered and bought an oriental rug with dark maroon and blue designs. I am six years old and some designs look like witches, some like snakes coiled around an animal or a child, and others like giants shaking huge fists at me. I am standing on that rug near my father’s chair with my hands up like a prize fighter, a six year old prize fighter. My father has gotten up from his chair and is down on one knee. He has put his enormous hands up in front of me and above me. He is a huge monster towering over me. I edge back and back but he keeps moving toward me until I fall over a footstool. I hear him laugh, “Now I’ve got you!” I scramble up and hide behind the chair. He taunts me, “Oh so now the brave man is really a chicken,” then mocks me with “cluck, cluck” chicken noises. I come out and put my hands up in front of me. The light glances off his tinted glasses so I can’t see his eyes, but I smell the sweet-acrid smell of cigar smoke on his clothes, look up at his gray wavy hair, his looming round face, his big rough hands with wild tufts of hair on them, his broad nose with hair curving out of his nostrils like small tusks, his full lips mocking me, “Okay tough guy hit me,” as his hand shoots out and pokes me in the chest again and again so that I feel his fingers jabbing at my ribs.

I’m not sure how we got to that point, but it must have been because I was humiliated and angry when he called me a “momma’s boy.” I didn’t know the word, “humiliated,” then. Or, maybe my anger slipped out and I called him a name or I demanded, “Stop being mean to Mommy,” and he challenged me to a fight saying, “Oh you think you are a tough guy, well let’s see how tough you are.” Or did he? I can’t imagine him doing that any more than he would have gotten down on the floor–something he’d consider beneath his dignity--or maybe I challenged him but that too is impossible. And it is equally impossible that I just made this all up. And of course I will never know—I certainly couldn’t have asked him about it since he’d either pretend it didn’t happen or say something like, “You were such a cry-baby.”

He pokes me yet again—his fingers are thick with jagged nails; the nail on his right ring finger is twisted from being slammed in a heavy door. I imagined that that agony was the source of his meanness. The newspaper he was reading falls off the chair and onto the floor; he glances over at it; his gold cuff links are like two yellow eyes; he is still wearing his vest. Now he shifts so he is on both knees, closes his hands making enormous fists, his eyes narrow looking down at me, his face red, his teeth clinched; when I back up and cover my face in fear, he taunts me, “Come on. What are you, a pansy? Are you afraid?” and he punches me in the shoulder. I am angry, I will not admit fear and hold my fists up like a fighter. When I punch at him, my hands make a faint slapping sound against the rough skin of his hands and arms. He puts his left hand behind him and laughs sarcastically while he pokes with his right, “Oh ho, that was some punch!” I become angrier and I want to hurt him. I swing again but I miss on purpose afraid of what he’d do if I actually hit his face or body.

I thought that I had the power to hurt him, even kill him, but I was afraid to use that power. I was afraid he’d lose his temper and he might kill me like I wanted to kill him before he mauled me.

He grabs both my hands in his right hand. His fingers are rough. He is holding my hands so tightly that he is hurting my wrists. He is very strong. I can’t move. He holds my shoulder with his left hand, and when he hits me with my own hands, I feel them slapping and jabbing my face and chest. I felt like he was hitting me with the lifeless hunks of meat which hung on hooks at Palmieri’s Butcher shop so that my hands became a strange force, like they were not part of me and that I was powerless against them. I wanted to disown my hands.

My mother comes into the room. I imagine she wants to see what the commotion is about. I catch a glimpse of her wiping her hands on her apron; I glance at her face and see only the faintest smile. Did she think we were father and son just horsing around or did she really understand what he was doing and was afraid to say anything? I am angry at her and want her to help me but I am afraid to ask.

My hands make dull thudding noises as he uses them to hit my chest and my face. I thrash and squirm trying to kick his legs, but mine aren’t long enough to reach. I panic and cry. The door swims. He laughs and now the whole room turns to water and I can’t breathe. I felt like he was holding me under water at the Aquacade pool where wide steps led into the shallow end which quickly sloped down into deeper water. I felt hate for the first time. I felt shame too but I didn’t know those words back then.

I want to run and hide forever. He holds my hands and keeps hitting me with them until at last he lets me go and stands up. I hear his derisive laugh at my tears, and he says to no one, “And the little fella thought he was a tough guy,” as if I weren’t even there, as if I were invisible.

I take my date to the movies. She says she heard that The Great Santini is a good movie; Robert Duvall plays the tough Marine father. At the scene when he plays basketball with his son Ben, and then follows him into the house and up the stairs hitting him in the head repeatedly with the ball after Ben wins, the ball making a hollow sound as it hits Ben’s head, I again feel how my father kept poking me in the chest and then hitting me with my own hands when I was little and I run from the theater shaking. I am ashamed to tell her why and I just take her home. When I get to where I live, I have to walk though the darkened living room where the smell of his cigar smoke still hovers. I walk around that painful place on the carpet and up the stairs to my room. I am only a visitor in this house.