For the Secrets Issue, we challenged writers to tell us an anonymous story. Here's Writer One with hers. You can buy the issue here or subscribe here.

My mother woke me up the day after my father died by saying, “I have something to confess to you.” I assumed my father was not actually my father. I assumed an affair. I assumed practically everything—except what she told me, which was this.

“This is not my nose.” “How do you mean?”

“You know I told you I had a mole removed from my nose when I was younger? Well, I didn’t just have a mole removed, I had a completely new nose.” “Okay.”

“And I never told your father.” “Okay.”

“And now I feel terrible about it. Because he’s dead and I never told him the truth about my nose. It’s the only secret I kept from him.”

Then she pulled out a plastic bag and I thought, “Oh Christ, it’s her old nose in a bottle of formaldehyde!” Because, you know, my father had just died and everything seemed hyperreal. But the bag was full of photographs Mum had removed and hidden from family albums. The photographs showed my mother with, basically, my nose.

“So you had my nose removed?” “Well, not exactly.”

When I looked at the photos again I could see now that my mother looked exactly like my sister with my nose. I had never noticed a similarity between my mother and my sister before. In the photographs with her old nose Mum looked Jewish, which she was, although with her remodelled little nose you would never have known it.

I said, “Why didn’t you tell Dad?” “I don’t know. But once I didn’t tell him straight away, then I couldn’t.”

It was ironic really because my dad used to joke about my mother’s nose. He used to make fun of the way it poked out into the air, a shiny pointy triangle. He made my mum’s nose seem comical—although, as it turns out, there was nothing comical about the plastic surgeon’s bill.

“Two of your aunts had nose-jobs as well,” my mum said. The scales fell from my eyes. Almost an entire generation of women in my family sported a fake schnozz. But why?

Presumably for the same reason that my grandfather had changed his name from Abraham Lech to Arthur Leek and Anglicised all of his children’s names as well. It was the early fifties and the memory of the six million still hovered over them all. They wanted to assimilate, to pass lightly and unnoticed. And the girls wanted to look like the film stars plastered over their bedroom walls. So the names changed and the noses went and the hair was straightened, and if you saw them on the street you would never have known.

But blood will out and so will noses and so there I was: a shtetl throwback sporting the family nose. Except that I have never once wanted to change it. Perhaps it’s because I’m blessed with being born at a more fortunate moment in history for my race.

My husband makes fun of my nose; it’s clearly a family tradition. But I sport it happily, and I let my hair curl as it should, and I don’t hide secret photographs from my family. Like everyone else, I just delete the ones where I look awful.

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