Our mother’s cut herself by using a bare foot to swipe with her toes under the washer thinking she’s swiping out a piece of plastic but really it’s a thick shard of glass.

“Hold still, Mom,” we say. We try to stop the bleeding by tying an old T-shirt around her foot.

“Blood is something else,” she says, noticing how clean the kitchen floor has become after she wiped it with the sponge. The rest of the day she spends trying to peel back the T-shirt and see how her cut is doing.

“Leave it alone,” we say.

“This is nothing,” she says, “this will heal.” For dinner we have no chicken, just rice. “Imagine each forkful a different dish,” she says, so we take turns calling out the fare.

“Roast beef au jus,” Jody says and we take a bite and comment how wonderfully rare.

“Peking Duck,” Louisa says and we all say, “Mmm, how good.”

“Rice,” I say when it comes my turn and my mother and sisters all look at me and groan. “All right, all right,” I say, “Camel meat tartare,” I say and my sisters say yuck, they’d rather I keep it rice, but my mother says, “You know, that may not be bad, on a hot sandy day in a tent with the flaps flapping in a wind after a hard day’s ride to nowhere and back, camel steak tartare may just hit the spot,” she says and eats a mouthful of her rice.

A red line forms up her leg from her cut. “It’s just blood poisoning,” she says the next day. “It could be hours before it travels to my brain.” We take her to the hospital but we don’t have money for a taxi so we put her on Louisa’s bicycle. My sisters walk beside her steering the handlebars and I walk behind, letting her know when her long shirttail is about to get caught up in the spokes. “I could die like Isadora Duncan did,” she says as we go down 11th Street. After an emergency visit she comes out with a shot in the rear and a bottleful of antibiotics. “Or I could just die swallowing all of these at once,” she says and shakes the bottle like maracas.

Back in the house she throws an empty egg carton out the window that faces the lot, saying she hates to see the garbage pile up inside so fast. Then she takes her cigarette, which is burning on top of the refrigerator, burning black into the white, and she inhales and puts it back up on the refrigerator and opens the refrigerator door and claps her hands in front of it and says, “All right, what shall we have for dinner tonight?” She says, “Don’t I get three wishes? Oh, wise and venerable Frigidaire, produce for my family a rack of lamb. No, eh? Is that the way it’s going to be then?” There is mayonnaise and a half lemon in the refrigerator. The lemon is old and starting to mold and shrivel.

For dinner we have lemon mayonnaise sauce over rice. While we eat my mother says not to worry, tomorrow she gets paid and we’ll have steak and potatoes, and then she says merde and goddammit to hell and then she takes her plate and throws it across the house so that it flies over the bed and smashes against the wall and the rice falls onto our bed. “Fuck your fucking father,” she then says and she cries and covers her face with her hands and we continue eating our rice, very slowly, very quietly. We are hungry.

All night I cannot sleep for the smell of lemon mayonnaise sauce on my bed sheets making me sick. I sit in the chair instead and try to curl up. Above me, in the cracks in the wood of the wall, I can hear our cockroaches moving, a soft ticking sound when they jump to the floor and scurry around. I fall asleep. In the middle of the night I wake up because my brother is carrying me back to my bed. He’s still wearing his blue silk robe and it feels so silky against me I think I could slip out of his arms and I want to hold onto him but I don’t reach out because I don’t want him to know I’m awake. He lays me down next to my mother and pulls the sheet up to my neck and tucks the sides under the mattress. I wait for him to leave and shut the door to his room. The smell of the lemon mayonnaise is still making me sick and I struggle out of the tucked-in sheet and go back to my chair up against the wall with the cockroaches in between the wood and I sleep and I dream.

*   *   *

He’s under the catalpa in a wind that blows the pods off. They hit him on the head and fall to the porch deck. He rubs his bald head and heads for the pool, for the long-handled sieve he sweeps through the water while his slut swims backstroke. Her hands alternately out of the water, the pinkies separated and crooked like a tea sipper holding the handle of a fine china cup. My father circles the pool, skimming off leaves and blades of grass. My sisters and I were told not to swim while she swims, so instead we go to the kitchen, eat cheese and crackers we were told not to eat before dinner, drink orange juice we were told not to drink after breakfast, eat sliced ham we were told is only for lunch.

We run through the house screaming. Our brother has come to visit our father too, and he is It. He is chasing us, the belt of his blue silk robe loosening and loosening as he comes closer and closer to our backs we arch to keep him from tagging us. We are red-faced and hot and running up and down stairs and our brother is growling, he is some kind of bear or bull, and then the robe comes loose and he is almost naked in the hall, his shoulders bared, the robe hardly on him. Our father’s slut walks in from the pool just in time to see our brother with his robe flying open, exposing himself. She runs away, and we hear a splash. When we look out the window, we see she has pushed our father in the pool. He is still holding the long-handled sieve and his shirt is filling with water, ballooning up.

She does not eat dinner with us. Our father goes to the bottom of the stairs to her room, telling her to come down, telling her he has made steak and ratatouille. We eat without her. We steal food from each other’s plates. I steal steak from Louisa and Jody steals from me and our brother steals from all of ours and our father yells for us to stop. He loads a plate with steak and ratatouille and goes up the stairs to his slut’s room. We hear the plate crash and break and our father comes down with the pieces and some ratatouille on his head. He puts the broken plate on the table and takes bread and soaks up what ratatouille is still left on one of the broken pieces. My sisters and I walk over to him, pull slimy bits of onion and eggplant off the middle of his head.

Then it’s our brother who goes up to see her. He takes with him nothing but a glass of wine. My sisters and I follow him. He shoos us back, but we follow anyway. He knocks on the door and tells her who it is. The door opens just a little bit, not wide enough for anything to fit through except maybe a band of light, so my brother pushes it open more and goes in and closes the door behind him. We tiptoe up to the door, we listen from the outside. At first there is nothing, only what sounds like the soft whispering sound of our brother’s robe swishing as he moves like he’s showing her some private dance. Then we hear someone swallow. It can’t be her, it’s so loud. It’s our brother. He hasn’t brought her the wine. He’s drinking it himself. Then there’s a smash. The glass hits the door right by where our ears are pressed against it, trying to listen. Then we hear her laugh, it’s a laugh that starts off low and then gets high. She’s still laughing when our brother leaves the room and he’s laughing himself, and just missing with his bare feet the glass that lies in shards beside the door.

In the morning my brother takes the car and drives us to the beach. It’s starting to rain and no one is there. The sand gets pocked by the drops.

“Let’s go in,” he says and takes off his robe and dives into the water. I stand by his crumpled robe, the dragon face up, attacking the rain with his breaths of silk fire. My brother waves me in, saying it’s not cold.

He’s right, it’s not cold when I dive in and then come up and stand waist deep in water while he tells me about the transfer effect—the way water is warmer than air when it’s cold because the water steals the air’s warmth. The same way, he says, that when you get into a bed with someone already in it, someone who’s already been under the covers a long time, then you steal their warmth.

Maybe the transfer effect works with things other than temperature, I think. Maybe me hanging out with John all the time will make me somehow lose my teeth. I will feel Rena’s mother’s drugs, her woozy, swirly world. I will dream my mother’s dreams, take on her French, speak words I do not even know as I sleep next to her, an unwitting thief in the night.

“Help! Help!” my brother says.

He is drowning for us. He is jerking around, splashing, waving in the water. The clouds roll dark behind him. The rain falls hard. He is letting ocean in his mouth, he is spitting it out, he is hanging from our necks, clawing at our skin, a comedian come up from the depths.

We are screaming “Let go of us!” The lightning, can’t he see, the need for shore. And if only the dog were here, to grab his skin between her white front teeth to bite down hard and tow him back, tow us all out, get us all in the car, windows up, wipers on. We are being scratched by our brother’s nails, he is climbing up us, a victim gone wild. Lifeguards must first learn how to kick the victims off them, how to unstrangle themselves from the clutching arms. Before learning how to save the drowning man they must learn to save themselves.

We know this, my sisters and I. We kick him good. Great kangaroo double kicks with both legs underwater up against his hairless chest as we try to slip through his arms. He’s got us all three. He gurgles and slowly submerges while we see our chance and break for shore. We run for the car but he’s got the key on a string on his wrist. We look back to him, what was him in the water, now just surf. His blue silk robe a dark thing that could be anything, a small tidal pool, a fisherman’s cut discarded net.

Suddenly he is behind us, alive, roaring, naked, holding up his monster arms, and we are screaming and the thunder cracks and we grab the key and we are in the car with the rain on the roof and we do not know if the car is on. Who can hear it through the belting rain?

“Is it on? Is it on?” we say and he is out the door again, running for the silk robe under a pea green sky. Yes, it’s on, and he’s back in the car with his robe and we are on the road, the sound of the windshield wipers soothing, a towel being passed around rubbed on all the wet girls’ hair, denied to our brother for the drowning scare he gave us.