I associate our fishing trips with sunlight and the bright fauvist color of the yellowtails, but one trip turns dark. It’s a weekend, and my father’s taken us out on Merritt Island, to a place we couldn’t go except that he works for the government. It’s an old pier that sticks out into the water, some of its planks missing so you have to be careful; the land all around it is jungle, just a little mosquitoey path winding to the pier, which is sturdy even though abandoned. Nothing’s biting, but we persist, still there at twilight, and then something fierce takes hold of my father’s line, which goes waggling and zigzagging all over the place till he exhausts the creature and pulls it in: a black, slick yard of pure muscle, a three-foot eel writhing and rippling on the oily planks of the pier. My mother screams, my father shouts and grabs his machete, and with a quick chop he slices it right in half, but the eel doesn’t stop moving. And he doesn’t stop his chopping; he brings the blade down over and over again, keeps hacking till the thing’s only a scattered mess of the smallest scraps, black little pieces of meat, as if it were the most revolting thing in the world and no one could rest until it bore no resemblance to itself.

Then nobody says a word about it. We pack up our tackle boxes and sit in the front seat of the government truck for the long drive home, and nobody says a word.

I am tap-dancing with a vengeance, and slimming down, so that the trousers of my costume for the dance recital must be taken in already, though they were ordered only a couple of weeks ago. My part of the recital is a performance as Uncle Sam, dressed in flag-striped satin pants and vest and a particularly fabulous blue-sequinned drum-major hat, with a white furry brim and a resplendent, spiky plume of metal foil coming right out of the crown, towering above my forehead. I am the centerpiece of a performance of “Seventy-six Trombones,” and I do my tap routine surrounded by five little girls in sequined outfits like bathing suits dipped in glitter. They march and twirl batons (I am fascinated by batons, but do not have one) around me in shifting patterns. We don’t have to worry about a part for Jimmy Sunderland, who has dropped out of tap school. Perhaps he can’t keep up with my new, chemically enhanced enthusiasm?