Secrets Read online

  The family grew used to seeing him hunched down close to his tying vise, hackle pliers in one hand, thread bobbin in the other. We began to bandy about strange phrases – foxy quills, bodkins, peacock hurl. Father’s corner of the living room was off-limits to the maid because she was too careless with the vacuum cleaner. Who knew what precious bit of calf’s tail or rabbit fur would be sucked away, never to be seen again?

  Because of my father’s illness, we had gone up to our summer cottage on the lake a month early. None of my gang of friends ever came till the end of July, so in the beginning of that summer I hung around home watching my father as he fussed with the flies. I was the only child he allowed to stand near him while he worked. “Your brothers bounce,” he muttered one day. “You can stay and watch if you don’t bounce.”

  So I took great care not to bounce, or lean, or even breathe too noisily on him while he performed his small delicate maneuvers. I had never been so close to my father for so long before. I stared at the large pores of his skin, the sleek black hair brushed straight back from his temples, the jaw muscles tightening and slackening. Something in my father seemed always to be ticking.

  When he leaned over his work, his shirt collar slipped down to reveal the recent scar, a jagged trail of disrupted tissue. The tender pink skin gradually paled and then toughened during those weeks when he took his afternoon nap on our little patch of front lawn. Our house was close to the lake. It seemed to embarrass my mother to have him stretch himself out on the grass for all the swimmers and boaters to see.

  “Sleep on the porch,” she would say. “That’s why we set the hammock up there.”

  “Why shouldn’t a man nap on his own front lawn if he so chooses?” he would reply. “I have to mow the bloody thing. I might as well put it to some use.”

  And my mother would shrug and give up.

  At the table, when he was absorbed, he lost all sense of anything but the magnified insect under the light. Often when he pushed his chair back and announced the completion of his latest project, there would be a bit of down or a tuft of dubbing stuck to the edge of his lip. I did not tell him about it but stared, fascinated, wondering how long it would take to blow away. Sometimes it never did and I imagine he discovered the fluff in the bathroom mirror when he went upstairs to bed. Or maybe my mother plucked it off with one of those proprietary gestures of hers that irritated my brothers so much.

  In the beginning, Father wasn’t very good at the fly-tying. He was a large thick-boned man with sweeping gestures, a robust laugh, and a sudden terrifying temper. If he had not loved fishing so much, I doubt he would have persevered with the fussy business of the flies. After all, the job required tools normally associated with woman’s work. Thread and bobbins, soft slippery feathers, a magnifying glass, and an instruction manual that read like a cookbook. It said things like, “Cut off a bunch of yellowtail. Hold the tip end with the left hand and stroke out the short hairs.”

  But Father must have had a goal in mind. You tie flies because, one day, in the not-too-distant future, you will attach them to a tippett, wade into a stream, and lure a rainbow trout out of his quiet pool.

  There was something endearing, almost childish, about his stubborn nightly ritual at the corner table. His head bent under the floor lamp, his fingers trembling slightly, he would whisper encouragement to himself, talk his way through some particularly delicate operation. Once or twice I caught my mother gazing across my brothers’ heads at him. When our eyes met, she would turn away and busy herself in the kitchen.

  Finally, one night, after weeks of allowing me to watch, he told me to take his seat. “Why, Father?”

  “Because it’s time for you to try one.”

  “That’s all right. I like to watch.”

  “Nonsense, Emily. You’ll do just fine.”

  He had stood up. The chair was waiting. Across the room, my mother put down her knitting. Even the boys, embroiled in a noisy game of double solitaire, stopped their wrangling for a moment. They were all waiting to see what I would do. My fear of failing him made me hesitate. I knew that my father put his trust in results, not in the learning process.

  “Sit down, Emily.”

  I obeyed, my heart pounding. I was a cautious, secretive child and I could not bear to have people watch me do things. My piano lesson was the hardest hour in the week. The teacher would sit with a resigned look on her face while my fingers groped across the keys, muddling through a sonata that I had played perfectly just an hour before. The difference was that then nobody had been watching.

  “… so we’ll start you off with a big hook.” He had been talking for some time. How much had I missed already?

  “Ready?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “All right then, clamp this hook into the vise. You’ll be making the golden darter, a streamer. A big flashy fly, the kind that imitates a small fish as it moves underwater.”

  Across the room my brothers had returned to their game, but their voices were subdued. I imagined they wanted to hear what was happening to me. My mother had left the room.

  “Tilt the magnifying glass so you have a good view of the hook. Right. Now tie it on with the bobbin thread.”

  It took me three tries to line the thread up properly on the hook, each silken line nesting next to its neighbor. “We’re going to do it right, Emily, no matter how long it takes.”

  “It’s hard,” I said quietly.

  Slowly I grew used to the tiny tools, to the oddly enlarged view of my fingers through the magnifying glass. They looked as if they didn’t belong to me anymore. The feeling in their tips was too small for their large clumsy movements. Despite my father’s repeated warnings, I nicked the floss once against the barbed hook. Luckily it did not give way.

  “It’s Emily’s bedtime,” my mother called from the kitchen.

  “Hush, she’s tying’ in the throat. Don’t bother us now.”

  I could feel his breath on my neck. The mallard barbules were stubborn, curling into the hook in the wrong direction. Behind me, I sensed my father’s fingers twisting in imitation of my own.

  “You’ve almost got it,” he whispered, his lips barely moving. “That’s right. Keep the thread slack until you’re all the way around.”

  I must have tightened it too quickly. I lost control of the feathers in my left hand, the clumsier one. First the gold Mylar came unwound and then the yellow floss.

  “Damn it all, now look what you’ve done!” he roared, and, for a second, I wondered whether he was talking to me. He sounded as if he were talking to a grown-up. He sounded the way he had just the night before when an antique teacup had slipped through my mother’s soapy fingers and shattered against the hard surface of the sink. I sat back slowly, resting my aching spine against the chair for the first time since we’d begun.

  “Leave it for now, Gerald,” my mother said tentatively from the kitchen. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see her sponging the counter with small defiant sweeps of her hand. “She can try again tomorrow.”

  “What happened?” called a brother. They both started across the room towards us, but stopped at a look from my father.

  “We’ll start again,” he said, his voice once more under control. “Best way to learn. Get back on the horse.”

  With a flick of his hand, he loosened the vise, removed my hook, and threw it into the wastepaper basket.

  “From the beginning?” I whispered.

  “Of course,” he replied. “There’s no way to rescue a mess like that.”

  My mess had taken almost an hour to create.

  “Gerald,” my mother said again. “Don’t you think –”

  “How can we possibly work with all these interruptions?” he thundered. I flinched as if he had hit me. “Go on upstairs, all of you. Emily and I will be up when we’re done. Go on, for God’s sake. Stop staring at us.”

  At a signal from my mother, the boys backed slowly away and crept up to their room. She followed them. I
felt all alone, as trapped under my father’s piercing gaze as the hook in the grip of its vise.

  We started again. This time my fingers were trembling so much that I ruined three badger hackle feathers, stripping off the useless webbing at the tip. My father did not lose his temper again. His voice dropped to an even, controlled monotone that scared me more than his shouting.

  After an hour of painstaking labor, we reached the same point with the stubborn mallard feathers curling into the hook. Once, twice, I repinched them under the throat, but each time they slipped away from me. Without a word, my father stood up and leaned over me. With his cheek pressed against my hair, he reached both hands around and took my fingers in his. I longed to surrender the tools to him and slide away off the chair, but we were so close to the end. He captured the curling stem with the thread and trapped it in place with three quick wraps.

  “Take your hands away carefully,” he said. “I’ll do the whip finish. We don’t want to risk losing it now.”

  I did as I was told, sat motionless with his arms around me, my head tilted slightly to the side so he could have the clear view through the magnifying glass. He cemented the head, wiped the excess glue from the eye with a waste feather, and hung my golden darter on the tackle box handle to dry. When at last he pulled away, I breathlessly slid my body back against the chair. I was still conscious of the havoc my clumsy hands or an unexpected sneeze could wreak on the table, which was cluttered with feathers and bits of fur.

  “Now, that’s the fly you tied, Emily. Isn’t it beautiful?”

  I nodded. “Yes, Father.”

  “Tomorrow, we’ll do another one. An olive grouse. Smaller hook, but much less complicated body. Look. I’ll show you in the book.”

  As I waited to be released from the chair, I didn’t think he meant it. He was just trying to apologize for having lost his temper, I told myself, just trying to pretend that our time together had been wonderful.

  But the next morning, when I came down late for breakfast, he was waiting for me with the materials for the olive grouse already assembled. He was ready to start in again, to take charge of my clumsy fingers with his voice and talk them through the steps.

  That first time was the worst, but I never felt comfortable at the fly-tying table with Father’s breath tickling the hair on my neck. I completed the olive grouse, another golden darter to match the first, two muddler minnows, and some others. I don’t remember all the names anymore.

  Once I hid upstairs, pretending to be immersed in my summer-reading books, but he came looking for me.

  “Emily,” he called. “Come on down. Today we’ll start the leadwinged coachman. I’ve got everything set up for you.”

  I lay very still and did not answer.

  “Gerald,” I heard my mother say. “Leave the child alone. You’re driving her crazy with those flies.”

  “Nonsense,” he said, and started up the dark wooden stairs, one heavy step at a time.

  I put my book down and rolled slowly off the bed, so that by the time he reached the door of my room I was on my feet, ready to be led back downstairs to the table.

  Although we never spoke about it, my mother became oddly insistent that I join her on trips to the library or the general store.

  “Are you going out again, Emily?” my father would call after me. “I was hoping we’d get some work done on this minnow.”

  “I’ll be back soon, Father,” I’d say. “I promise.”

  “Be sure you are,” he said.

  Then, at the end of July, my old crowd of friends from across the lake began to gather and I slipped away to join them early in the morning, before my father got up.

  The girls were a gang. When we were all younger, we’d held bicycle relay races on the ring road and played down at the lakeside together under the watchful eyes of our mothers. Every July, we threw ourselves joyfully back into each other’s lives. That summer we talked about boys and smoked illicit cigarettes in Randy Kidd’s basement, and held leg-shaving parties in her bedroom behind a safely locked door. Randy was the ringleader. She was the one who suggested we pierce our ears.

  “My parents would die,” I said. “They told me I’m not allowed to pierce my ears until I’m seventeen.”

  “Your hair’s so long, they won’t even notice,” Randy said. “My sister will do it for us. She pierces all her friends’ ears at college.”

  In the end, only one girl pulled out. The rest of us sat in a row, with the obligatory ice cubes held to our ears, waiting for the painful stab of the sterilized needle.

  Randy was right. At first my parents didn’t notice. Even when my ears became infected, I didn’t tell them. All alone in my room, I went through the painful procedure of twisting the gold studs and swabbing the recent wounds with alcohol. Then, on the night of the club dance, when I had changed my clothes three times and played with my hair in front of the mirror for hours, I came across the small plastic box with dividers in my top bureau drawer. My father had given it to me so that I could keep my flies in separate compartments, untangled from one another. I poked my finger in and slid one of the golden darters up along its plastic wall. When I held it up, the Mylar thread sparkled in the light, like a jewel. I took out the other darter, hammered down the barbs of the two hooks, and slipped them into the raw holes in my earlobes.

  Someone’s mother drove us all to the dance and Randy and I pushed through the side door into the ladies’ room. I put my hair up in a ponytail, so the feathered flies could twist and dangle above my shoulders. I liked the way they made me look – free and different and dangerous, even. And they made Randy notice.

  “I’ve never seen earrings like that,” she said. “Where did you get them?”

  “I made them with my father. They’re flies. You know, for fishing.”

  “They’re great! Can you make me some?”

  I hesitated. “I have some others at home I can give you,” I said at last. “They’re in a box in my bureau.”

  “Can you give them to me tomorrow?” she asked.

  “Sure,” I said, with a smile. Randy had never noticed anything I’d worn before. I went out to the dance floor, swinging my ponytail in time to the music.

  My mother noticed the earrings as soon as I got home.

  “What has gotten into you, Emily? You know you were forbidden to pierce your ears until you were in college. This is appalling.”

  I didn’t answer. My father was sitting in his chair behind the fly-tying table. His back was better by that time, but he still spent most of his waking hours in that chair. It was as if he didn’t like to be too far away from his flies, as if something might blow away if he weren’t keeping watch.

  I saw him look up when my mother started in on me. His hands drifted ever so slowly down to the surface of the table as I came across the room towards him. I leaned over so that he could see my earrings better in the light.

  “Everybody loved them, Father. Randy says she wants a pair too. I’m going to give her the muddler minnows.”

  “I can’t believe you did this, Emily,” my mother said, in a loud nervous voice. “It makes you look so cheap.”

  “They don’t make me look cheap, do they, Father?” I swung my head so he could see how they bounced and my hip accidentally brushed the table. A bit of rabbit fur floated up from its pile and hung in the air for a moment before it settled back down on top of the foxy quills.

  “For God’s sake, Gerald, speak to her,” my mother said, from her corner.

  He stared at me for a long moment as if he didn’t know who I was anymore, as if I were a trusted associate who had committed some treacherous and unspeakable act. “That is not the purpose for which the flies were intended,” he said.

  “Oh, I know that,” I said quickly. “But they look good this way, don’t they?”

  He stood up and, across the top of the table lamp, considered me in silence for a long time.

  “No, they don’t,” he finally said. “They’re hanging ups
ide down.”

  Then he turned off the light and I couldn’t see his face anymore.

  I Don’t Have to Tell You Everything

  Loris Lesynski

  What was it the school secretary was saying? I wondered. Fudgey or Fi-ji? No, it was 5-G. That’s where I was being dumped. This was back in April, when my mom and I had just moved here. Or, run away from home was more the way I saw it.

  All the other grade fives were full. The secretary triple-checked my name, Ruthie Naimie, as people always do. The computer entered it into the 5-G class list and that was that.

  I soon found out that the 5-G room is in the furthest corner of this crumbling, ancient school. Dozens of cardboard boxes and eleven broken desks are jammed together at the back, with the seventeen students at the front.

  The 5-G class turned out to be a real mishmash. Some of the kids are school-haters, who jeer loudly or doze off, like Steven – “Stooge” – who has done grade five at least once before. I bet he’s close to thirteen. Then there’s a handful of techno-geniuses, who must have got lost on the way to the gifted class. (Do gifted kids get lost?) And eccentrics like Eustace, who looks like a second-grader and has all kinds of gear hanging from his belt. The two girls at the back spend all day trying on lip gloss and eyeliner, and the ESL kids only talk to each other, which is weird because all their first languages are different.

  Like I said, a real mishmash. Maybe 5-G took in all the leftovers. There was no one I could imagine being friends with. Luckily I wasn’t interested in new friends.

  The one good part about not making new friends is not having to talk about any of the personal stuff going on in my life. And luckily Miss Goatherd isn’t like some teachers who make you write a journal as part of your schoolwork and then read it aloud. This is sure fine with me.

  Sometimes I’d find myself trying to join girls in another class. Until the time one of them pointed at me and loudly informed the others that I was a 5-G-er, “You know, the garbage class.” I stopped fast. Garbage class? How totally insulting. And that girl thought I was like them! I marched away. Who’d want to be friends with someone like her, anyway?