On and off the screen, sisters Patricia ("True Romance," "Ed Wood") and Rosanna ("Pulp Fiction") keep the groovy vibe going.

by Catherine Seipp

Rosanna Arquette is reflecting on her acting career, future plans as a producer, and present pregnancy when a piece of chocolate cake arrives at our table. She declines to try it. "I'm not really a sugar person," she says with holistic conviction, adding that expectant mothers are not permitted to eat chocolate. "Anyway," she continues, "acting was the main thing in my life—okay, one taste—and I've done it since I was a kid" (she reaches for a second bite)—"man, that is good!—but I'm getting a real charge out of producing and putting together the soundtrack of the movie...." Her voice trails off. "This is a rush for me," she says, "It's getting me dizzy."Tripping out on two bites of chocolate cake should not be unexpected from an actress who's been described as quirky and kooky ever since playing a series of flighty young things (Baby, It's You; Desperately Seeking Susan; New York Stories) in the '80s. But lately the eccentric ingenue of the moment has been younger sister Patricia, who gave an astonishing performance in last year's True Romance. In her next film, Patricia plays the sweet, accepting wife of a cross-dressing schlock director in Tim Burton's Ed Wood. Typical of Rosanna's bred-in-the-bone bohemianism, though, she doesn't seem to care that the spotlight has shifted.Rosanna is frank about her lesser box-office power and eager to get hooked in again. "I want to breast-feed on film," she swoons. She's producing a movie about a woman who loses herself in a bad relationship (an autobiographical idea, she admits). Meg Ryan, one of her real-life best friends, will star, while Rosanna says she is content to play her onscreen best friend. She also has a small but memorable role as drug dealer Eric Stoltz's body-pierced wife in Pulp Fiction, Quentin Tarantino's brilliant, corrosive cavalcade of character acting. But impending motherhood is clearly her main focus. "This is the biggest role of my life," she says. "I'm scared! I didn't think I would be."Unlike her single-mother sister, Rosanna is married—for the third time, in fact, and after a string of involvements with musician Mr. Wrongs (the old Toto hit "Rosanna" was written while she was dating one of the band's members). A few months after returning from an expatriate life in Europe, she met her groom-to-be, Jon Sidel, the purveyor of ultrahip Los Angeles restaurants—including the one we're in now, Swingers, an in-crowd diner where a parade of musician and actor acquaintances stop by Rosanna's table every few minutes. "Tell Tom I said hi," she says cheerfully to a friend on his way to a Tom Hayden fundraiser. "I like Tom."This generation of Arquettes has a pedigree whose liberal artsiness is by now well established. Patricia, 26, is the next to youngest and Rosanna, 34, the eldest in a close-knit family of five siblings that also includes up-and-coming brother Alexis, a movie actor (Threesome) and aspiring gay icon in the L.A. club scene. The most famous member of the clan used to be grandfather Cliff Arquette, television's Charley Weaver. Dad (Lewis) is an improv actor and director; Mom (Marti) a poet and peace activist who painted "Stop the War" on her children's bodies. Patricia remembers being raised on a commune, fighting with her mother when she got "the puberty blues," and moving out at 15 to live with Rosanna. Rosanna remembers being the only white child in the Little Brownies nursery school in Harlem.A month after Rosanna had her chocolate cake experience, her younger sister walks into Swingers half an hour late, looking a little dreamy after having just returned from half a year on location in Malaysia, where she was shooting John Boorman's Beyond Rangoon. "Hi, I'm so sorry," she says breathlessly, ordering tofu scramble. "I had to take my dog and cat to the pet shop for a flea bath, and they hate each other." She looks almost nothing like her sister, except around the eyes, which are as green and glittering as the sea.Though she got a reported $1 million for Beyond Rangoon, Patricia still lives with her five-year-old son in a funky—okay, cruddy—area of Silverlake. The gunfire at night is a definite minus. "But every day there I see something beautiful," she says. "Like today, I saw these two Latin women, and one was unloading these melons from an old Datsun and just hurling them over the top to another woman, who was putting them into the back of a pickup truck."Also, the neighborhood offers a convenient, agreeable nursery school. "I like hippie schools," says Patricia, indicating that a new crop of true-to-their-roots Arquettes is on the way.