Read Antarctica for Free Online

can’t, love. Your lake’s too dark and muddy; the bottom isn’t sandy like the ocean, it’s mud. Mud deeper than two grown men standing one on top of the other. Way too dangerous for diving.’
    The boy turned quiet for a while. Quarter horses in the meadow whinnied and cantered down the hill, snorted to a stop at the water’s edge.
    â€˜Let’s play “What’s-it-like?”’ she said and slapped a bug on her arm.
    The boy shrugged. ‘Okay.’
    Shewent first: ‘This boat is like one half of a big Brazil nut.’
    â€˜Your head is like a cabbage.’
    â€˜Your eyelashes are the colour of a palomino’s mane.’
    â€˜What’s that?’ the boy asked.
    â€˜A horse. I’ll show you a picture some time.’
    â€˜I’ve eyes like a horse?’
    â€˜Your turn.’
    â€˜Your farts are like baked beans.’
    â€˜Your farts are like deadly silences,’ she said.
    â€˜You’re like a mama,’ he said, and looked into her eyes.
    â€˜Speaking of mamas,’ she said, ‘your mama should be back soon. We better get on home.’ She gripped the oars and rowed them to the shore.
    *
    Easter is coming. Before dinner they sat on rugs in theden and made cards out of thick, expensive paper his mama bought downtown and called each other partner: ‘Merry Easter, partner. Eat lotsa eggs,’ his card read. She held his hand, wrote the letters for him, but he told her what to write. He drew the ‘X’s on the bottom by himself . On the front, in crayon, he drew two stick figures on a brown background.
    â€˜What are those?’ his father asked. A big, red-haired man with Irish ancestors and eyes an unrelenting shade of blue. He was smoking a cigar, watching CNN with his feet up.
    â€˜Scuba-divers,’ the boy said.
    â€˜I see.’ His papa smiled. ‘Come here, son.’
    The boy rose and climbed up on his father’s lap.
    â€˜Take a break, sweetheart,’ the man told the au pair.
    She got up. She passed the dishes in the kitchen sink, walked out into the night and slammed the door.
    *
    Down at the lake the au pair hears the toilet flush, then the swash of bathwater in the pipes. Bedtime. The boy’s mama, a tall, blonde woman with high cheek-bones who runs a real-estate agency downtown, always puts the boy to bed. That is the arrangement. She bathes the boy, reads
Green Eggs and Ham
or
Where the Wild Things Are
. His mama is well educated. Sometimes she reads from a book of poems by Robert Frost and plays Mozart on the stereo. Later, the au pair will go in and see if the boy is still awake, kiss him goodnight.
    *
    Last winter they travelled north, a three-hour flight to New York City for a long weekend. They stayed in a hotel suite nineteen floors up with a small balcony and a view of Manhattan. That evening the boy’s mama dressed up in a loose silk dress and a mink jacket, took her husband’s arm and they went out to dinner. The au pair ordered a pizza funghi and Coca-Colas from room-service , played snakes and ladders with the boy. He threw the dice, and they climbed and slithered up and down the board till bedtime. The au pair stayed up, took a hot shower and wrapped herself in the fluffy dressing gown with the hotel crest impressed on the lapel. She opened the balcony door and from the armchair watched the skyline, the evening bleeding into darkness behind the tallest buildings; but she didn’t dare go out and look down. Instead she wrote letters home, saying she might not be back for Christmas after all, how she missed the ocean, but they were good to her; she wanted for nothing.
    It was late when they got back. She’d dozed off in the chair, but woke to hear them talking in the bedroom. Then the talking stopped and the man went out on to the balcony. Cigar smoke and freezing cold air drifted back into the room. He bolted the balcony doors and came back in and sat on the edge