Tallulah Bankhead’s lost at sea. She’s wearing fine jewels. Her wet hair still holds a curling iron’s wave. Our mother says, “That’s me, that’s how I feel,” and she points to the TV, to Tallulah Bankhead who’s now bending over boatside trailing her ringed fingers through misty waters of the set.

“We’re supposed to want her dead,” Louisa says.

“Poor Tallulah, misunderstood,” our mother says.

Jody sits in the chair with her down coat still on, having come from a walk with the dog. She’s been sick all spring and won’t take the coat off. Its orange nylon is stained all down the front, its holes patched with peeling silver squares of duct tape. She snorts, moving mucous along her passages, all throughout the movie. We give her dirty looks and then we throw things. Every time she snorts she gets a paperback or a pillow or a cat thrown at her.

“I’m sick!” she says.

“Well, get over it,” Louisa says.

She sleeps with the coat on, over her nightgown under her covers. We hear her snort and cough all night.

“She was born too young, her lungs barely formed, that’s why,” our mother says and then she says, “Was that Jody?” when she hears a noise.

“Yes,” I say. “Go back to sleep.”

“She’s like Beth in Little Women,” Louisa says from her bed. “She’ll die this spring.”

“Don’t say that,” our mother says.

“Am I Jo?” I say.

“No, you’re Tiny Tim,” Louisa says. My mother and Louisa laugh from their beds. I hit my mother in the back. She is smoking in bed and the cigarette falls from her fingers and onto the sheet.

“Oh, merde,” she says and bangs at the mattress, putting out the burning ash.

Then my mother starts to cough her smoker’s cough and Jody starts to cough her sick cough and Louisa and I join in with fake coughs.

The loft next door where Jochen lived is about to be shown. The landlord’s left the door open for cleaners. On the table that is really an old door over sawhorses are paint cans and brushes and dribbled dry paint and a dropcloth and a bell and a book and a candle. The candle was melted at the bottom. It stands at a slant in a pool of its wax. The bell has paint on it, the clapper is gone. The book is the Bible, a copy in German. Some pages torn out and used to wipe paint from his brushes are crumpled in balls on the floor.

They’ve left the rope, but not the loop. I hold onto the cut rope, pull myself up, a one-armed chin-up. The pipe it’s tied to spills dust in the air.

His paintings are all over the house. I can’t see anything in them. It’s hard to tell if they’re finished or not. He has even painted over windows and on the stove. Like spillover from boiling pots, splashes of paint stain the oven door and hide the numbers on the range’s dials.

There are pictures of his children, German children on the freezer box. Blond and blue-eyed. The photos hang by magnets. Jochen painted the frames with pictures of elephants dancing in tutus and giraffes wearing bowties.

Do the German children know their father is dead? Do the German children sit quietly in a park with pigeons by a fountain in a German town, their heads lowered, their mother telling them the transatlantic news?

I take the pictures of his children and put them in a cigar box. I take them to John. I tell John, “Here, tape them to your hot dog cart,” and he does, saying there are children from where he comes from who look the same, their hair the color of the sun, their eyes blue like sky.

Before we go to school we watch our mother put her makeup on. First the powder on the face, then the eyeliner below the eye and above on the lid an exaggerated stroke like the sweeping end of a Chinese character drawn with black ink and brush. Then a layer of blue and violet and pink eyeshadow. The eyebrows wetted with a licked finger and then darkened with pencil. The bar of blush on the cheeks and then the lining of the lips. She shakes her hand back and forth, a ritual, freeing the brush of her plastic lipliner stick. Don’t we close our eyes, us girls, lean back our heads and listen to the shaking, breathe deeply, smell her L’Oréal, her Givenchy. She takes the Maybelline, licks the point and then dots her cheek with a beauty mark. She teases up her hair, then fastens it back down with bobby pins she’s been holding in her teeth.

When she’s finished we grab our books and stand in the hall, buzzing the elevator, waiting for Jesús to bring us down to the street. On the other side of the wall we can hear our brother snoring in his bed. He sleeps on his box spring now and when he turns we can hear the springs twang like an instrument he is just learning to play with the sharp pointed bones in his hips.

Rena goes to Puerto Rico. She writes that she has met her real father for the first time.

She sends oranges. She has a boyfriend named Ramón. He has given her bracelets of shark’s teeth and a necklace to match. She saw angelfish and starfish. Ramón’s got a brother, Realidad.

“That’s Reality,” she writes. If I came to visit her, Realidad and I could be boyfriend and girlfriend. “Will you come to visit me?” she asks. “PR is hot, baby. We sleep under nets. You will never guess how old Ramón is. Ramón is nineteen,” she writes. “Realidad is not so old.” Her father locks himself up and paints during the day and eats dinner with her at night. They go to bars and she dances with his friends. They are dark and have hair on their backs. She will miss the coconuts when she returns, she knows.

“Eat the oranges by slicing a hole in the top and then sucking out the juice,” she writes.

I cannot go to PR.

“Here,” our mother says, “take this instead,” and she digs up a frilly blue negligee from a barrel where we store our clothes. I put it on over my clothes. “I wore that in the hospital with your sister,” our mother says. “I craved corn flakes, not pickles,” she says.

I show John the frilly negligee. I still wear it over my clothes. He asks me to twirl, and I do, holding out the filmy skirt of it while he takes pictures of me.

“Beautiful,” he says. “Here,” John says, and gives me quarters, “buy yourself an ice cream.”

“I’ll take another hot dog,” I say. I stay with John until the end of the day when he folds down his umbrella and says he’s going home.