The human body without clothes, the ones that featured in the art books my father kept on display in his library, disturbed me. 'Artists like to show it off.' I could not agree. 'The human body is beautiful,' my mother said. Why was Atlas naked? I asked my mother, one day. The nuns encouraged us to slide a penny onto Sambo's tongue and when you pressed a lever at the back, the penny disappeared.
The bronze cast gave his skin a dark complexion as if he were from some place like Africa, some place I had learned about at school where we prayed for and helped the missions through the metal black Sambo in his straw hat and red jacket who sat on top of the teacher's table.
On the wall of my parents' bedroom that faced the front window was a print of a bronze cast of Atlas hoisting the world globe above his shoulders. It was both exciting and terrifying to breach my father's territory, all the time hovering on the edge of being caught. I liked to try them on for size, too, careful to place my toes in such a way that no part of my body touched the leather. On the floor my father's black shoes, dulled by walking and age, spread before my feet like open boats. That way I could see my front and back reaching to infinity. I liked to pull together the two outer wings and sandwich my body in between. Above the single drawer and tabletop were three rectangular mirrors held together by hinges. On the wall opposite the bed my parents put my mother's Queen Anne dresser. The spread was too heavy for regular washing and gave off a musty smell. She had dyed the bedspread the colour of dried blood, to hide the stains on what was once a white bedspread, which she had brought with her from Holland. My mother made up my parent's bed each day by dragging a thick maroon cover over the top to hide the rumpled sheets and blankets. Even so, I was drawn to this room, as if to danger, a wish to pit my puny strength against my father's, whose every command was law. There was a smell to the room, of stale perfume, my father's cigarettes and of bodies. THERE WAS NO sign on the door of my parents' bedroom that said 'keep out', but I knew it was not a place to visit, at least not for long.