Free The Palace Thief by Ethan Canin Page B

other. Then she said, “Come here, little brother,” and slid over on the cot. She lowered her voice. “I
had
to move here,” she said. “It was my only choice.”
    I nodded. “I hear you,” I said. This was a phrase of Clive’s.
    She looked at me. “You do, don’t you?”
    I nodded again. Her skirt was threadbare at the knees, and I remembered that her parents were divorced.
    “You know,” she said. “I’ll tell you a secret.” She pulled back her hair, then let it fall again. “I like you, little brother.” She smiled at me. “That’s the secret. You and me, we have this connection, because you know more than everybody thinks.”
    “I can bring you food, Sandra.”
    She let out her breath. “That would be really cool,” she said. “You know?” She stood, slid open the small, clouded window next to her, shook a Virginia Slims from the pack and lit it. “I wish Clive was as cool as you.” She set the cigarette in an ashtray on the sill so that the smoke lifted out into the yard. “I wish,” she said.
    “I’m not that cool.”
    “Yes, you are.”
    “Maybe,” I said.
    She dragged on the cigarette again. “Question,” she said. She exhaled. “Does Elliot ever bug you?”
    “Me?”
    She looked around. “Who did you think I was talking to?”
    “I don’t know,” I said. “Not really. Sometimes.”
    “Well, he bugs
me
.”
    “Is that right?”
    “Yeah, Clive is so superior to him. Clive’s a genius, and Elliot’s the last thing from one.” She thought for a moment. “There’s probably a word for what Elliot is.”
    “I hear you,” I said.
    She dragged on her cigarette and offered it to me. “By the way,” she said, exhaling, “Did Clive ever tell you about us?”
    I pretended to inhale. “About who?”
    “About he and I.”
    “No.”
    “He didn’t?”
    I exhaled. “No.”
    “You’re not going to tell your parents about me, right?”
    “No way.”
    “All right,” she said, “then I’ll tell you.” She met my eyes. Then she blew a smoke ring, and as it rose above her, she pierced it with another, smaller, whirling one. “I’m Clive’s lover,” she whispered. The smoke rings spun up toward the ceiling like galaxies. “It’s a big secret,” she whispered, “but now you know.”
    It was the year the Vietnam War ended, Spiro Agnew resigned, and the Indians took over Wounded Knee. It was the year lines formed at gas stations and Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize. It was the year our parents forsook their religion,the designated hitter stepped up to the plate, abortion became legal, and our father wore bell-bottoms and purple ties. It was the year my brother spoke in his own language, won championship after championship, and began drifting away from us, until we began to fear that one day, like a branch in a storm, he would snap off completely.
    Our parents were now Quakers. Our father came from a line of conservative Jews in Chicago, and our mother from Zionist farmers emigrated to Cleveland from the Negev desert, but now they went together two nights a week to Friends’ meetings. They had spent a good deal of time that year adapting to the changes that were coming at them from every quarter, so that at home sometimes the world seemed utterly different from what it had been a few years before. They had forbidden Clive and me to watch anything on television but the news, and one night that summer when they returned home after a peace march and found us watching
Mannix
instead, they took us both downtown and made Clive get out of the car and hand the television set to a bum in a doorwell.
    From then on we listened to radio news. That year it was bad. Gunmen with black stockings over their faces appeared at the Olympic Games. Israel was invaded. George McGovern, for whom our parents canvassed door to door, won in Massachusetts and nowhere else. In Paris there was a long debate over the shape of the peace-negotiations table. The day the negotiations started,