Read Antarctica for Free Online Page B

whispers. ‘There, there.’ She rocks him and he rests his head on her shoulder for a long, long time, feeling her chest fall and rise. She kisses the silk of his hair; his eyelashes brush against her collarbone. The au pair holds him until their heartbeats slow and a woman’s voice calls out the boy’s name. Then she carries him back up to the lighted house and gives him to his mama.

The Ginger Rogers Sermon
    Don’t ask me why we called him Slapper Jim. My mother stamped his image in my head, and I was at an age when pictures of a man precede the man himself. The posters verify: Thin Lizzie with a V of chest exposed, Pat Spillane’s legs racing across my bedroom wall, the ball poised. I was the girl with the sweet tooth and a taste for men. And pictures.
    I have a photographic memory. I can see every tacky page of my cousin’s wedding album, the horseshoe on the cake with the man slightly taller than the woman and their feet stuck in the frosting. I parcel out my life in images the way other people let the calendar draw a line around them every month. That time of Slapper Jim was the time of the strangest pictures.
    We killed pigs around then, ate pork cracked in its own fat with a pulpy sauce. Plasticine-grey and apple-green , those were the colours of my home. Ma held my dinner plate with the tail of her skirt and talked through her day while I tucked in:
    ‘You should see the new lumberjack your da hired. Slapper Jim, they call him. A great big fella he is! Walked in here and I’ll tell ya nothing but the truth, he leaned up against the partition there and I thoughtthe whole yoke was going to cave in.’
    My brother, Eugene, quacks his hand behind her back. I spear a slice of pork and in my mind see a giant, the earth tremoring where he walks. A man who doesn’t know his own strength. That can be dangerous. I’ve seen my father crack a cow’s ribs with his fist, just trying to slide her over in the stall.
    ‘I gave him his bit of dinner and he was able to reach over for the handle on the saucepan without getting up. Ate eleven spuds. Eleven spuds if ya don’t mind! Yer lucky there’s aer a one left.’
    Ma rummages in the cutlery drawer for a spoon. Tapioca and stewed apples, I suppose. I hope for sherry trifle , gooey caramel, dollops of ice-cream.
    ‘What’s for afters?’
    *
    They leave me alone here on Saturday nights. Eugene goes too, even though he doesn’t dance. Him staying home with me is a sissy thing to do because he’s so much older. Seven years older. I was made out of the last of my father’s sperm. I found that out just recently. My mother says I am The Accident in the family. My father tells people I am The Shakings of the Bag, which I suppose is much the same thing.
    Dance mad, my parents. Ma says a man who can’t dance is half a man. She’s taught me the harvest jig and the waltz, the quickstep and the Siege of Ennis in the parlour. She says dancing is good therapy, makes her feel like she’s in time with the world. Mostly we movewhere we’re put, stooping under the rain and such, but dancing frees her up, oils her joints, she says. Everyone should know how to move in their own time. She puts the record on, I shake Lux across the lino, and we whirl around the parlour floor like two loonies. I am the man loony. I pretend I don’t see her watching her reflection in the mirror of the sideboard as we pass. The Walls of Limerick requires two-facing-two, so we hold our hands out to imaginary partners and move them into the places they should go. I like this, knowing what Ma will do, where she’ll go before she does, not having to think about it.
    Saturdays smell of girls: wet wool, nail-polish and camomile shampoo. In the kitchen, Ma sets her hair. We call it The Salon. I hold the pins between my lips and roll her hair around the spiky curlers, stiffen it with setting lotion. Her head goes into the net and she sits in under the hood of the dryer we bought down at the