The Virgin Suicides
The Virgin Suicides
Jeffrey Eugenides
In a quiet suburb of Detroit, the five Lisbon sisters – beautiful, eccentric, and obsessively watched by the neighborhood boys – commit suicide one by one over the course of a single year.As the boys observe them from afar, transfixed, they piece together the mystery of the family’s fatal melancholy, in this hypnotic and unforgettable novel of adolescent love, disquiet, and death.Jeffrey Eugenides evokes the emotions of youth with haunting sensitivity and dark humour and creates a coming-of-age story unlike any of our time. ‘The Virgin Suicides’ was adapted into a critically acclaimed film by Sofia Coppola.
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First published in Great Britain 2002 by Bloomsbury Publishing plc
Copyright © 1993 by Jeffrey Eugenides
The right of Jeffrey Eugenides to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Excerpt from ‘Make It With You’ by David Gates copyright © 1970, Colgems-EMI music Inc. All rights reserved. International Copyright Secured. Used by permission.
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Ebook Edition © APRIL 2013 ISBN: 9780007524310
Version: 2016-04-29
For Gus and Wanda
Contents
Title (#u8c64a421-308d-56b2-b2e6-ac208b329661)
Copyright (#ud700ea19-7abe-5cfb-99d1-8e26de9af950)
One (#u3d7ba88d-e41b-5d11-abd4-00658e08241f)
Two (#u322cbbec-58e3-52aa-a6ff-db0fe95db03d)
Three (#u6254a437-fee4-59e2-9ade-76bc2b8ceb67)
Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Five (#litres_trial_promo)
A Note on the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Jeffrey Eugenides (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
One (#u4efa0307-dc2b-51bd-a36b-192563e781a6)
On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide—it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese—the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope. They got out of the EMS truck, as usual moving much too slowly in our opinion, and the fat one said under his breath, “This ain’t TV, folks, this is how fast we go.” He was carrying the heavy respirator and cardiac unit past the bushes that had grown monstrous and over the erupting lawn, tame and immaculate thirteen months earlier when the trouble began.
Cecilia, the youngest, only thirteen, had gone first, slitting her wrists like a Stoic while taking a bath, and when they found her, afloat in her pink pool, with the yellow eyes of someone possessed and her small body giving off the odor of a mature woman, the paramedics had been so frightened by her tranquillity that they had stood mesmerized. But then Mrs. Lisbon lunged in, screaming, and the reality of the room reasserted itself: blood on the bath mat; Mr. Lisbon’s razor sunk in the toilet bowl, marbling the water. The paramedics fetched Cecilia out of the warm water because it quickened the bleeding, and put a tourniquet on her arm. Her wet hair hung down her back and already her extremities were blue. She didn’t say a word, but when they parted her hands they found the laminated picture of the Virgin Mary she held against her budding chest.
That was in June, fish-fly season, when each year our town is covered by the flotsam of those ephemeral insects. Rising in clouds from the algae in the polluted lake, they blacken windows, coat cars and streetlamps, plaster the municipal docks and festoon the rigging of sailboats, always in the same brown ubiquity of flying scum. Mrs. Scheer, who lives down the street, told us she saw Cecilia the day before she attempted suicide. She was standing by the curb, in the antique wedding dress with the shorn hem she always wore, looking at a Thunderbird encased in fish flies. “You better get a broom, honey,” Mrs. Scheer advised. But Cecilia fixed her with her spiritualist’s gaze. “They’re dead,” she said. “They only live twenty-four hours. They hatch, they reproduce, and then they croak. They don’t even get to eat.” And with that she stuck her hand into the foamy layer of bugs and cleared her initials: C.L.
We’ve tried to arrange the photographs chronologically, though the passage of so many years has made it difficult. A few are fuzzy but revealing nonetheless. Exhibit #1 shows the Lisbon house shortly before Cecilia’s suicide attempt. It was taken by a real estate agent, Ms. Carmina D’Angelo, whom Mr. Lisbon had hired to sell the house his large family had long outgrown. As the snapshot shows, the slate roof had not yet begun to shed its shingles, the porch was still visible above the bushes, and the windows were not yet held together with strips of masking tape. A comfortable suburban home. The upper-right second-story window contains a blur that Mrs. Lisbon identified as Mary Lisbon. “She used to tease her hair because she thought it was limp,” she said years later, recalling how her daughter had looked for her brief time on earth. In the photograph Mary is caught in the act of blow-drying her hair. Her head appears to be on fire but that is only a trick of the light. It was June 13, eighty-three degrees out, under sunny skies.
•
When the paramedics were satisfied they had reduced the bleeding to a trickle, they put Cecilia on a stretcher and carried her out of the house to the truck in the driveway. She looked like a tiny Cleopatra on an imperial litter. We saw the gangly paramedic with the Wyatt Earp mustache come out first—the one we’d call “Sheriff” when we got to know him better through these domestic tragedies—and then the fat one appeared, carrying the back end of the stretcher and stepping daintily across the lawn, peering at his police-issue shoes as though looking out for dog shit, though later, when we were better acquainted with the machinery, we knew he was checking the blood pressure gauge. Sweating and fumbling, they moved toward the shuddering, blinking truck. The fat one tripped on a lone croquet wicket. In revenge he kicked it; the wicket sprang loose, plucking up a spray of dirt, and fell with a ping on the driveway. Meanwhile, Mrs. Lisbon burst onto the porch, trailing Cecilia’s flannel nightgown, and let out a long wail that stopped time. Under the molting trees and above the blazing, overexposed grass those four figures paused in tableau: the two slaves offering the victim to the altar (lifting the stretcher into the truck), the priestess brandishing the torch (waving the flannel nightgown), and the drugged virgin rising up on her elbows, with an otherworldly smile on her pale lips.
Mrs. Lisbon rode in the back of the EMS truck, but Mr. Lisbon followed in the station wagon, observing the speed limit. Two of the Lisbon daughters were away from home, Therese in Pittsburgh at a science convention, and Bonnie at music camp, trying to learn the flute after giving up the piano (her hands were too small), the violin (her chin hurt), the guitar (her fingertips bled), and the trumpet (her upper lip swelled). Mary and Lux, hearing the siren, had run home from their voice lesson across the street with Mr. Jessup. Barging into that crowded bathroom, they registered the same shock as their parents at the sight of Cecilia with her spattered forearms and pagan nudity. Outside, they hugged on a patch of uncut grass that Butch, the brawny boy who mowed it on Saturdays, had missed. Across the street, a truckful of men from the Parks Department attended to some of our dying elms. The EMS siren shrieked, going away, and the botanist and his crew withdrew their insecticide pumps to watch the truck. When it was gone, they began spraying again. The stately elm tree, also visible in the foreground of Exhibit #1, has since succumbed to the fungus spread by Dutch elm beetles, and has been cut down.
The paramedics took Cecilia to Bon Secours Hospital on Kercheval and Maumee. In the emergency room Cecilia watched the attempt to save her life with an eerie detachment. Her yellow eyes didn’t blink, nor did she flinch when they stuck a needle in her arm. Dr. Armonson stitched up her wrist wounds. Within five minutes of the transfusion he declared her out of danger. Chucking her under her chin, he said, “What are you doing here, honey? You’re not even old enough to know how bad life gets.”
And it was then Cecilia gave orally what was to be her only form of suicide note, and a useless one at that, because she was going to live: “Obviously, Doctor,” she said, “you’ve never been a thirteen-year-old girl.”
•
The Lisbon girls were thirteen (Cecilia), and fourteen (Lux), and fifteen (Bonnie), and sixteen (Mary), and seventeen (Therese). They were short, round-buttocked in denim, with roundish cheeks that recalled that same dorsal softness. Whenever we got a glimpse, their faces looked indecently revealed, as though we were used to seeing women in veils. No one could understand how Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon had produced such beautiful children. Mr. Lisbon taught high-school math. He was thin, boyish, stunned by his own gray hair. He had a high voice, and when Joe Larson told us how Mr. Lisbon had cried when Lux was later rushed to the hospital during her own suicide scare, we could easily imagine the sound of his girlish weeping.
Whenever we saw Mrs. Lisbon we looked in vain for some sign of the beauty that must have once been hers. But the plump arms, the brutally cut steel-wool hair, and the librarian’s glasses foiled us every time. We saw her only rarely, in the morning, fully dressed though the sun hadn’t come up, stepping out to snatch up the dewy milk cartons, or on Sundays when the family drove in their paneled station wagon to St. Paul’s Catholic Church on the Lake. On those mornings Mrs. Lisbon assumed a queenly iciness. Clutching her good purse, she checked each daughter for signs of makeup before allowing her to get in the car, and it was not unusual for her to send Lux back inside to put on a less revealing top. None of us went to church, so we had a lot of time to watch them, the two parents leached of color, like photographic negatives, and then the five glittering daughters in their homemade dresses, all lace and ruffle, bursting with their fructifying flesh.
Only one boy had ever been allowed in the house. Peter Sissen had helped Mr. Lisbon install a working model of the solar system in his classroom at school, and in return Mr. Lisbon had invited him for dinner. He told us the girls had kicked him continually under the table, from every direction, so that he couldn’t tell who was doing it. They gazed at him with their blue febrile eyes and smiled, showing their crowded teeth, the only feature of the Lisbon girls we could ever find fault with. Bonnie was the only one who didn’t give Peter Sissen a secret look or kick. She only said grace and ate her food silently, lost in the piety of a fifteen-year-old. After the meal Peter Sissen asked to go to the bathroom, and because Therese and Mary were both in the downstairs one, giggling and whispering, he had to use the girls’, upstairs. He came back to us with stories of bedrooms filled with crumpled panties, of stuffed animals hugged to death by the passion of the girls, of a crucifix draped with a brassiere, of gauzy chambers of canopied beds, and of the effluvia of so many young girls becoming women together in the same cramped space. In the bathroom, running the faucet to cloak the sounds of his search, Peter Sissen found Mary Lisbon’s secret cache of cosmetics tied up in a sock under the sink: tubes of red lipstick and the second skin of blush and base, and the depilatory wax that informed us she had a mustache we had never seen. In fact, we didn’t know whose makeup Peter Sissen had found until we saw Mary Lisbon two weeks later on the pier with a crimson mouth that matched the shade of his descriptions.
He inventoried deodorants and perfumes and scouring pads for rubbing away dead skin, and we were surprised to learn that there were no douches anywhere because we had thought girls douched every night like brushing their teeth. But our disappointment was forgotten in the next second when Sissen told us of a discovery that went beyond our wildest imaginings. In the trash can was one Tampax, spotted, still fresh from the insides of one of the Lisbon girls. Sissen said that he wanted to bring it to us, that it wasn’t gross but a beautiful thing, you had to see it, like a modern painting or something, and then he told us he had counted twelve boxes of Tampax in the cupboard. It was only then that Lux knocked on the door, asking if he had died in there, and he sprang to open it. Her hair, held up by a barrette at dinner, fell over her shoulders now. She didn’t move into the bathroom but stared into his eyes. Then, laughing her hyena’s laugh, she pushed past him, saying, “You done hogging the bathroom? I need something.” She walked to the cupboard, then stopped and folded her hands behind her. “It’s private. Do you mind?” she said, and Peter Sissen sped down the stairs, blushing, and after thanking Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon, hurried off to tell us that Lux Lisbon was bleeding between the legs that very instant, while the fish flies made the sky filthy and the streetlamps came on.
•
When Paul Baldino heard Peter Sissen’s story, he swore that he would get inside the Lisbons’ house and see things even more unthinkable than Sissen had. “I’m going to watch those girls taking their showers,” he vowed. Already, at the age of fourteen, Paul Baldino had the gangster gut and hit-man face of his father, Sammy “the Shark” Baldino, and of all the men who entered and exited the big Baldino house with the two lions carved in stone beside the front steps. He moved with the sluggish swagger of urban predators who smelled of cologne and had manicured nails. We were frightened of him, and of his imposing doughy cousins, Rico Manollo and Vince Fusilli, and not only because his house appeared in the paper every so often, or because of the bulletproof black limousines that glided up the circular drive ringed with laurel trees imported from Italy, but because of the dark circles under his eyes and his mammoth hips and his brightly polished black shoes which he wore even playing baseball. He had also snuck into other forbidden places in the past, and though the information he brought back wasn’t always reliable, we were still impressed with the bravery of his reconnaissance. In sixth grade, when the girls went into the auditorium to see a special film, it was Paul Baldino who had infiltrated the room, hiding in the old voting booth, to tell us what it was about. Out on the playground we kicked gravel and waited for him, and when he finally appeared, chewing a toothpick and playing with the gold ring on his finger, we were breathless with anticipation.
“I saw the movie,” he said. “I know what it’s about. Listen to this. When girls get to be about twelve or so”—he leaned toward us—“their tits bleed.”
Despite the fact that we now knew better, Paul Baldino still commanded our fear and respect. His rhino’s hips had gotten even larger and the circles under his eyes had deepened to a cigar-ash-and-mud color that made him look acquainted with death. This was about the time the rumors began about the escape tunnel. A few years earlier, behind the spiked Baldino fence patrolled by two identical white German shepherds, a group of workmen had appeared one morning. They hung tarpaulins over ladders to obscure what they did, and after three days, when they whisked the tarps away, there, in the middle of the lawn, stood an artificial tree trunk. It was made of cement, painted to look like bark, complete with fake knothole and two lopped limbs pointing at the sky with the fervor of amputee stubs. In the middle of the tree, a chain-sawed wedge contained a metal grill.
Paul Baldino said it was a barbecue, and we believed him. But, as time passed, we noticed that no one ever used it. The papers said the barbecue had cost $50,000 to install, but not one hamburger or hot dog was ever grilled upon it. Soon the rumor began to circulate that the tree trunk was an escape tunnel, that it led to a hideaway along the river where Sammy the Shark kept a speedboat, and that the workers had hung tarps to conceal the digging. Then, a few months after the rumors began, Paul Baldino began emerging in people’s basements, through the storm sewers. He came up in Chase Buell’s house, covered with a gray dust that smelled like friendly shit; he squeezed up into Danny Zinn’s cellar, this time with a flashlight, baseball bat, and a bag containing two dead rats; and finally he ended up on the other side of Tom Faheem’s boiler, which he clanged three times.
He always explained to us that he had been exploring the storm sewer underneath his own house and had gotten lost, but we began to suspect he was playing in his father’s escape tunnel. When he boasted that he would see the Lisbon girls taking their showers, we all believed he was going to enter the Lisbon house the same way he had entered the others. We never learned exactly what happened, though the police interrogated Paul Baldino for over an hour. He told them only what he told us. He said he had crawled into the sewer duct underneath his own basement and had started walking, a few feet at a time. He described the surprising size of the pipes, the coffee cups and cigarette butts left by workmen, and the charcoal drawings of naked women that resembled cave paintings. He told how he had chosen tunnels at random, and how as he passed under people’s houses he could smell what they were cooking. Finally he had come up through the sewer grate in the Lisbons’ basement. After brushing himself off, he went looking for someone on the first floor, but no one was home. He called out again and again, moving through the rooms. He climbed the stairs to the second floor. Down the hall, he heard water running. He approached the bathroom door. He insisted that he had knocked. And then Paul Baldino told how he had stepped into the bathroom and found Cecilia, naked, her wrists oozing blood, and how after overcoming his shock he had run downstairs to call the police first thing, because that was what his father had always taught him to do.
•
The paramedics found the laminated picture first, of course, and in the crisis the fat one put it in his pocket. Only at the hospital did he think to give it to Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon. Cecilia was out of danger by that point, and her parents were sitting in the waiting room, relieved but confused. Mr. Lisbon thanked the paramedic for saving his daughter’s life. Then he turned the picture over and saw the message printed on the back:
The Virgin Mary has been appearing in our city, bringing her message of peace to a crumbling world. As in Lourdes and Fatima, Our Lady has granted her presence to people just like you. For information call 555-MARY
Mr. Lisbon read the words three times. Then he said in a defeated voice, “We baptized her, we confirmed her, and now she believes this crap.”
It was his only blasphemy during the entire ordeal. Mrs. Lisbon reacted by crumpling the picture in her fist (it survived; we have a photocopy here).
Our local newspaper neglected to run an article on the suicide attempt, because the editor, Mr. Baubee, felt such depressing information wouldn’t fit between the front-page article on the Junior League Flower Show and the back-page photographs of grinning brides. The only newsworthy article in that day’s edition concerned the cemetery workers’ strike (bodies piling up, no agreement in sight), but that was on page 4 beneath the Little League scores.
After they returned home, Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon shut themselves and the girls in the house, and didn’t say a word about what had happened. Only when pressed by Mrs. Scheer did Mrs. Lisbon refer to “Cecilia’s accident,” acting as though she had cut herself in a fall. With precision and objectivity, however, already bored by blood, Paul Baldino described to us what he had seen, and left no doubt that Cecilia had done violence to herself.
Mrs. Buck found it odd that the razor ended up in the toilet. “If you were cutting your wrists in the tub,” she said, “wouldn’t you just lay the razor on the side?” This led to the question as to whether Cecilia had cut her wrists while already in the bath water, or while standing on the bath mat, which was bloodstained. Paul Baldino had no doubts: “She did it on the john,” he said. “Then she got into the tub. She sprayed the place, man.”
Cecilia was kept under observation for a week. The hospital records show that the artery in her right wrist was completely severed, because she was left-handed, but the gash in her left wrist didn’t go as deep, leaving the underside of the artery intact. She received twenty-four stitches in each wrist.
She came back still wearing the wedding dress. Mrs. Patz, whose sister was a nurse at Bon Secours, said that Cecilia had refused to put on a hospital gown, demanding that her wedding dress be brought to her, and Dr. Hornicker, the staff psychiatrist, thought it best to humor her. She returned home during a thunderstorm. We were in Joe Larson’s house, right across the street, when the first clap of thunder hit. Downstairs Joe’s mother shouted to close all the windows, and we ran to ours. Outside a deep vacuum stilled the air. A gust of wind stirred a paper bag, which lifted, rolling, into the lower branches of the trees. Then the vacuum broke with the downpour, the sky grew black, and the Lisbons’ station wagon tried to sneak by in the darkness.
We called Joe’s mother to come see. In a few seconds we heard her quick feet on the carpeted stairs and she joined us by the window. It was Tuesday and she smelled of furniture polish. Together we watched Mrs. Lisbon push open her car door with one foot, then climb out, holding her purse over her head to keep dry. Crouching and frowning, she opened the rear door. Rain fell. Mrs. Lisbon’s hair fell into her face. At last Cecilia’s small head came into view, hazy in the rain, swimming up with odd thrusting movements because of the double slings that impeded her arms. It took her a while to get up enough steam to roll to her feet. When she finally tumbled out she lifted both slings like canvas wings and Mrs. Lisbon took hold of her left elbow and led her into the house. By that time the rain had found total release and we couldn’t see across the street.
In the following days we saw Cecilia a lot. She would sit on her front steps, picking red berries off the bushes and eating them, or staining her palms with the juice. She always wore the wedding dress and her bare feet were dirty. In the afternoons, when sun lit the front yard, she would watch ants swarming in sidewalk cracks or lie on her back in fertilized grass staring up at clouds. One of her sisters always accompanied her. Therese brought science books onto the front steps, studying photographs of deep space and looking up whenever Cecilia strayed to the edge of the yard. Lux spread out beach towels and lay suntanning while Cecilia scratched Arabic designs on her own leg with a stick. At other times Cecilia would accost her guard, hugging her neck and whispering in her ear.
Everyone had a theory as to why she had tried to kill herself. Mrs. Buell said the parents were to blame. “That girl didn’t want to die,” she told us. “She just wanted out of that house.” Mrs. Scheer added, “She wanted out of that decorating scheme.” On the day Cecilia returned from the hospital, those two women brought over a Bundt cake in sympathy, but Mrs. Lisbon refused to acknowledge any calamity. We found Mrs. Buell much aged and hugely fat, still sleeping in a separate bedroom from her husband, the Christian Scientist. Propped up in bed, she still wore pearled cat’s-eye sunglasses during the daytime, and still rattled ice cubes in the tall glass she claimed contained only water; but there was a new odor of afternoon indolence to her, a soap-opera smell. “As soon as Lily and I took over that Bundt cake, that woman told the girls to go upstairs. We said, ‘It’s still warm, let’s all have a piece,’ but she took the cake and put it in the refrigerator. Right in front of us.” Mrs. Scheer remembered it differently. “I hate to say it, but Joan’s been potted for years. The truth is, Mrs. Lisbon thanked us quite graciously. Nothing seemed wrong at all. I started to wonder if maybe it was true that the girl had only fallen and cut herself. Mrs. Lisbon invited us out to the sun room and we each had a piece of cake. Joan disappeared at one point. Maybe she went back home to have another belt. It wouldn’t surprise me.”
We found Mr. Buell just down the hall from his wife, in a bedroom with a sporting theme. On the shelf stood a photograph of his first wife, whom he had loved ever since divorcing her, and when he rose from his desk to greet us, he was still stooped from the shoulder injury faith had never quite healed. “It was like anything else in this sad society,” he told us. “They didn’t have a relationship with God.” When we reminded him about the laminated picture of the Virgin Mary, he said, “Jesus is the one she should have had a picture of.” Through the wrinkles and unruly white eyebrows we could discern the handsome face of the man who had taught us to pass a football so many years ago. Mr. Buell had been a pilot in the Second World War. Shot down over Burma, he led his men on a hundred-mile hike through the jungle to safety. He never accepted any kind of medicine after that, not even aspirin. One winter he broke his shoulder skiing, and could only be convinced to get an X ray, nothing more. From that time on he winced when we tried to tackle him, and raked leaves one-handed, and no longer flipped daredevil pancakes on Sunday mornings. Otherwise he persevered, and always gently corrected us when we took the Lord’s name in vain. In his bedroom, the shoulder had fused into a graceful humpback. “It’s sad to think about those girls,” he said. “What a waste of life.”
The most popular theory at the time held Dominic Palazzolo to blame. Dominic was the immigrant kid staying with relatives until his family got settled in New Mexico. He was the first boy in our neighborhood to wear sunglasses, and within a week of arriving, he had fallen in love. The object of his desire wasn’t Cecilia but Diana Porter, a girl with chestnut hair and a horsey though pretty face who lived in an ivy-covered house on the lake. Unfortunately, she didn’t notice Dominic peering through the fence as she played fierce tennis on the clay court, nor as she lay, sweating nectar, on the poolside recliner. On our corner, in our group, Dominic Palazzolo didn’t join in conversations about baseball or busing, because he could speak only a few words of English, but every now and then he would tilt his head back so that his sunglasses reflected sky, and would say, “I love her.” Every time he said it he seemed delivered of a profundity that amazed him, as though he had coughed up a pearl. At the beginning of June, when Diana Porter left on vacation to Switzerland, Dominic was stricken. “Fuck the Holy Mother,” he said, despondent. “Fuck God.” And to show his desperation and the validity of his love, he climbed onto the roof of his relatives’ house and jumped off.
We watched him. We watched Cecilia Lisbon watching from her front yard. Dominic Palazzolo, with his tight pants, his Dingo boots, his pompadour, went into the house, we saw him passing the plate-glass picture windows downstairs; and then he appeared at an upstairs window, with a silk handkerchief around his neck. Climbing onto the ledge, he swung himself up to the flat roof. Aloft, he looked frail, diseased, and temperamental, as we expected a European to look. He toed the roof’s edge like a high diver, and whispered, “I love her,” to himself as he dropped past the windows and into the yard’s calculated shrubbery.
He didn’t hurt himself. He stood up after the fall, having proved his love, and down the block, some maintained, Cecilia Lisbon developed her own. Amy Schraff, who knew Cecilia in school, said that Dominic had been all she could talk about for the final week before commencement. Instead of studying for exams, she spent study halls looking up ITALY in the encyclopedia. She started saying “Ciao,” and began slipping into St. Paul’s Catholic Church on the Lake to sprinkle her forehead with holy water. In the cafeteria, even on hot days when the place was thick with the fumes of institutional food, Cecilia always chose the spaghetti and meatballs, as though by eating the same food as Dominic Palazzolo she could be closer to him. At the height of her crush she purchased the crucifix Peter Sissen had seen decorated with the brassiere.
The supporters of this theory always pointed to one central fact: the week before Cecilia’s suicide attempt, Dominic Palazzolo’s family had called him to New Mexico. He went telling God to fuck Himself all over again because New Mexico was even farther from Switzerland, where, right that minute, Diana Porter strolled under summer trees, moving unstoppably away from the world he was going to inherit as the owner of a carpet cleaning service. Cecilia had unleashed her blood in the bath, Amy Schraff said, because the ancient Romans had done that when life became unbearable, and she thought when Dominic heard about it, on the highway, amid the cactus, he would realize that it was she who loved him.
The psychiatrist’s report takes up most of the hospital record. After talking with Cecilia, Dr. Hornicker made the diagnosis that her suicide was an act of aggression inspired by the repression of adolescent libidinal urges. To each of three wildly different ink blots, she had responded, “A banana.” She also saw “prison bars,” “a swamp,” “an Afro,” and “the earth after an atomic bomb.” When asked why she had tried to kill herself, she said only, “It was a mistake,” and clammed up when Dr. Hornicker persisted. “Despite the severity of her wounds,” he wrote, “I do not think the patient truly meant to end her life. Her act was a cry for help.” He met with Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon and recommended that they relax their rules. He thought Cecilia would benefit by “having a social outlet, outside the codification of school, where she can interact with males her own age. At thirteen, Cecilia should be allowed to wear the sort of makeup popular among girls her age, in order to bond with them. The aping of shared customs is an indispensable step in the process of individuation.”
From that time on, the Lisbon house began to change. Almost every day, and even when she wasn’t keeping an eye on Cecilia, Lux would suntan on her towel, wearing the swimsuit that caused the knife sharpener to give her a fifteen-minute demonstration for nothing. The front door was always left open, because one of the girls was always running in or out. Once, outside Jeff Maldrum’s house, playing catch, we saw a group of girls dancing to rock and roll in his living room. They were very serious about learning the right ways to move, and we were amazed to learn that girls danced together for fun, while Jeff Maldrum only rapped the glass and made kissing noises until they pulled down the shade. Before they disappeared we saw Mary Lisbon in the back near the bookcase, wearing bell-bottomed blue jeans with a heart embroidered on the seat.
There were other miraculous changes. Butch, who cut the Lisbon grass, was now allowed inside for a glass of water, no longer having to drink from the outside faucet. Sweaty, shirtless, and tattooed, he walked right into the kitchen where the Lisbon girls lived and breathed, but we never asked him what he saw because we were scared of his muscles and his poverty.
We assumed Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon were in agreement about the new leniency, but when we met with Mr. Lisbon years later, he told us his wife had never agreed with the psychiatrist. “She just gave in for a while,” he said. Divorced by that time, he lived alone in an efficiency apartment, the floor of which was covered with shavings from his wood carvings. Whittled birds and frogs crowded the shelves. According to Mr. Lisbon, he had long harbored doubts about his wife’s strictness, knowing in his heart that girls forbidden to dance would only attract husbands with bad complexions and sunken chests. Also, the odor of all those cooped-up girls had begun to annoy him. He felt at times as though he were living in the bird house at the zoo. Everywhere he looked he found hairpins and fuzzy combs, and because so many females roamed the house they forgot he was a male and discussed their menstruation openly in front of him. Cecilia had just gotten her period, on the same day of the month as the other girls, who were all synchronized in their lunar rhythms. Those five days of each month were the worst for Mr. Lisbon, who had to dispense aspirin as though feeding the ducks and comfort crying jags that arose because a dog was killed on TV. He said the girls also displayed a dramatic womanliness during their “monthly time.” They were more languorous, descended the stairs in an actressy way, and kept saying with a wink, “Cousin Herbie’s come for a visit.” On some nights they sent him out to buy more Tampax, not just one box but four or five, and the young store clerks with their thin mustaches would smirk. He loved his daughters, they were precious to him, but he longed for the presence of a few boys.
That was why, two weeks after Cecilia returned home, Mr. Lisbon persuaded his wife to allow the girls to throw the first and only party of their short lives. We all received invitations, made by hand from construction paper, with balloons containing our names in Magic Marker. Our amazement at being formally invited to a house we had only visited in our bathroom fantasies was so great that we had to compare one another’s invitations before we believed it. It was thrilling to know that the Lisbon girls knew our names, that their delicate vocal cords had pronounced their syllables, and that they meant something in their lives. They had had to labor over proper spellings and to check our addresses in the phone book or by the metal numbers nailed to the trees.
As the night of the party approached, we watched the house for signs of decorating or other preparations, but saw none. The yellow bricks retained their look of a church-run orphanage and the silence of the lawn was absolute. The curtains didn’t rustle, nor did a van deliver six-foot submarine sandwiches or drums of potato chips.
Then the night arrived. In blue blazers, with khaki trousers and clip-on neckties, we walked along the sidewalk in front of the Lisbon house as we had so many times before, but this time we turned up the walk, and climbed the front steps between the pots of red geraniums, and rang the doorbell. Peter Sissen acted as our leader, and even looked slightly bored, saying again and again, “Wait’ll you see this.” The door opened. Above us, the face of Mrs. Lisbon took form in the dimness. She told us to come in, we bumped against each other getting through the doorway, and as soon as we set foot on the hooked rug in the foyer we saw that Peter Sissen’s descriptions of the house had been all wrong. Instead of a heady atmosphere of feminine chaos, we found the house to be a tidy, dry-looking place that smelled faintly of stale popcorn. A piece of needlepoint saying “Bless This Home” was framed over the arch, and to the right, on a shelf above the radiator, five pairs of bronzed baby shoes preserved for all time the unstimulating stage of the Lisbon girls’ infancy. The dining room was full of stark colonial furniture. One wall had a painting of Pilgrims plucking a turkey. The living room revealed orange carpeting and a brown vinyl sofa. Mr. Lisbon’s La-Z-Boy flanked a small table on which sat the partially completed model of a sailing ship, without rigging and with the busty mermaid on the prow painted over.
We were directed downstairs to the rec room. The steps were metal-tipped and steep, and as we descended, the light at the bottom grew brighter and brighter, as though we were approaching the molten core of the earth. By the time we reached the last step it was blinding. Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead; table lamps burned on every surface. The green and red linoleum checkerboard flamed beneath our buckled shoes. On a card table, the punch bowl erupted lava. The paneled walls gleamed, and for the first few seconds the Lisbon girls were only a patch of glare like a congregation of angels. Then, however, our eyes got used to the light and informed us of something we had never realized: the Lisbon girls were all different people. Instead of five replicas with the same blond hair and puffy cheeks we saw that they were distinct beings, their personalities beginning to transform their faces and reroute their expressions. We saw at once that Bonnie, who introduced herself now as Bonaventure, had the sallow complexion and sharp nose of a nun. Her eyes watered and she was a foot taller than any of her sisters, mostly because of the length of her neck which would one day hang from the end of a rope. Therese Lisbon had a heavier face, the cheeks and eyes of a cow, and she came forward to greet us on two left feet. Mary Lisbon’s hair was darker; she had a widow’s peak and fuzz above her upper lip that suggested her mother had found her depilatory wax. Lux Lisbon was the only one who accorded with our image of the Lisbon girls. She radiated health and mischief. Her dress fit tightly, and when she came forward to shake our hands, she secretly moved one finger to tickle our palms, giving off at the same time a strange gruff laugh. Cecilia was wearing, as usual, the wedding dress with the shorn hem. The dress was vintage 1920s. It had sequins on the bust she didn’t fill out, and someone, either Cecilia herself or the owner of the used clothing store, had cut off the bottom of the dress with a jagged stroke so that it ended above Cecilia’s chafed knees. She sat on a barstool, staring into her punch glass, and the shapeless bag of a dress fell over her. She had colored her lips with red crayon, which gave her face a deranged harlot look, but she acted as though no one were there.
We knew to stay away from her. The bandages had been removed, but she was wearing a collection of bracelets to hide the scars. None of the other girls had any bracelets on, and we assumed they’d given Cecilia all they had. Scotch tape held the undersides of the bracelets to Cecilia’s skin, so they wouldn’t slide. The wedding dress bore spots of hospital food, stewed carrots and beets. We got our punch and stood on one side of the room while the Lisbon girls stood on the other.
We had never been to a chaperoned party. We were used to the parties our older brothers threw with our parents out of town, to dark rooms vibrating with heaps of bodies, musical vomiting, beer kegs beached on ice in the bathtub, riots in the hallways, and the destruction of living room sculpture. This was all different. Mrs. Lisbon ladled out more glasses of punch while we watched Therese and Mary play dominoes, and across the room Mr. Lisbon opened his tool kit. He showed us his ratchets, spinning them in his hand so that they whirred, and a long sharp tube he called his router, and another covered with putty he called his scraper, and one more with a pronged end he said was his gouger. His voice was hushed as he spoke about these implements, but he never looked at us, only at the tools themselves, running his fingers over their lengths or testing their sharpness with the tender bulb of his thumb. A single vertical crease deepened in his forehead, and in the middle of his dry face his lips grew moist.
Through all this Cecilia remained on her stool.
We were happy when Joe the Retard showed up. He arrived on his mother’s arm, wearing his baggy Bermuda shorts and his blue baseball cap, and as usual he was grinning with the face he shared with every other mongoloid. He had his invitation tied with a red ribbon around his wrist, which meant that the Lisbon girls had spelled out his name as well as our own, and he came murmuring with his oversize jaw and loose lips, his tiny Japanese eyes, his smooth cheeks shaved by his brothers. Nobody knew exactly how old Joe the Retard was, but for as long as we could remember he had had whiskers. His brothers used to take him onto the porch with a bucket to shave him, yelling for him to keep still, saying if they slit his throat it wouldn’t be their fault, while Joe turned white and became as motionless as a lizard. We also knew that retards didn’t live long and aged faster than other people, which explained the gray hairs peeking out from under Joe’s baseball cap. As children we had expected that Joe the Retard would be dead by the time we became adolescents, but now we were adolescents and Joe was still a child.
Now that he had arrived we were able to show the Lisbon girls all the things we knew about him, how his ears wiggled if you scratched his chin, how he could only say “Heads” when you flipped a coin, never “Tails,” because that was too complicated, even if we said, “Joe, try tails,” he would say, “Heads!” thinking he won every time because we let him. We had him sing the song he always sang, the one Mr. Eugene taught him. He sang, “Oh, the monkeys have no tails in Sambo Wango, oh, the monkeys have no tails in Sambo Wango, oh, the monkeys have no tails, they were bitten off by whales,” and we clapped, and the Lisbon girls clapped, Lux clapped, and leaned against Joe the Retard, who was too dense to appreciate it.
The party was just beginning to get fun when Cecilia slipped off her stool and made her way to her mother. Playing with the bracelets on her left wrist, she asked if she could be excused. It was the only time we ever heard her speak, and we were surprised by the maturity of her voice. More than anything she sounded old and tired. She kept pulling on the bracelets, until Mrs. Lisbon said, “If that’s what you want, Cecilia. But we’ve gone to all this trouble to have a party for you.”
Cecilia tugged the bracelets until the tape came unstuck. Then she froze. Mrs. Lisbon said, “All right. Go up, then. We’ll have fun without you.” As soon as she had permission, Cecilia made for the stairs. She kept her face to the floor, moving in her personal oblivion, her sunflower eyes fixed on the predicament of her life we would never understand. She climbed the steps to the kitchen, closed the door behind her, and proceeded through the upstairs hallway. We could hear her feet right above us. Halfway up the staircase to the second floor her steps made no more noise, but it was only thirty seconds later that we heard the wet sound of her body falling onto the fence that ran alongside the house. First came the sound of wind, a rushing we decided later must have been caused by her wedding dress filling with air. This was brief. A human body falls fast. The main thing was just that: the fact of a person taking on completely physical properties, falling at the speed of a rock. It didn’t matter whether her brain continued to flash on the way down, or if she regretted what she’d done, or if she had time to focus on the fence spikes shooting toward her. Her mind no longer existed in any way that mattered. The wind sound huffed, once, and then the moist thud jolted us, the sound of a watermelon breaking open, and for that moment everyone remained still and composed, as though listening to an orchestra, heads tilted to allow the ears to work and no belief coming in yet. Then Mrs. Lisbon, as though alone, said, “Oh, my God.”
Mr. Lisbon ran upstairs. Mrs. Lisbon ran to the top and stood holding the banister. In the stairwell we could see her silhouette, the thick legs, the great sloping back, the big head stilled with panic, the eyeglasses jutting into space and filled with light. She took up most of the stairs and we were hesitant to go around her until the Lisbon girls did. Then we squeezed by. We reached the kitchen. Through a side window we could see Mr. Lisbon standing in the shrubbery. When we came out the front door we saw that he was holding Cecilia, one hand under her neck and the other under her knees. He was trying to lift her off the spike that had punctured her left breast, traveled through her inexplicable heart, separated two vertebrae without shattering either, and come out her back, ripping the dress and finding the air again. The spike had gone through so fast there was no blood on it. It was perfectly clean and Cecilia merely seemed balanced on the pole like a gymnast. The fluttering wedding dress added to this circusy effect. Mr. Lisbon kept trying to lift her off, gently, but even in our ignorance we knew it was hopeless and that despite Cecilia’s open eyes and the way her mouth kept contracting like that of a fish on a stringer it was just nerves and she had succeeded, on the second try, in hurling herself out of the world.
Two (#u4efa0307-dc2b-51bd-a36b-192563e781a6)
We didn’t understand why Cecilia had killed herself the first time and we understood even less when she did it twice. Her diary, which the police inspected as part of the customary investigation, didn’t confirm the supposition of unrequited love. Dominic Palazzolo was mentioned only once in that tiny rice-paper journal illuminated with colored Magic Markers to look like a Book of Hours or a medieval Bible. Miniature designs crowded the pages. Bubblegum angels swooped from top margins, or scraped their wings between teeming paragraphs. Maidens with golden hair dripped sea-blue tears into the book’s spine. Grape-colored whales spouted blood around a newspaper item (pasted in) listing arrivals to the endangered species list. Six hatchlings cried from shattered shells near an entry made on Easter. Cecilia had filled the pages with a profusion of colors and curlicues, Candyland ladders and striped shamrocks, but the entry about Dominic read, “Palazzolo jumped off the roof today over that rich bitch, Porter. How stupid can you be?”
The paramedics came back again, the same two, though it took us a while to recognize them. Out of fear and politeness we had moved across the street to sit on the hood of Mr. Larson’s Oldsmobile. As we made our exit, none of us had said a word except for Valentine Stamarowski, who called across the lawn, “Thank you for the party, Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon.” Mr. Lisbon was still sunk in bushes up to his waist, his back jerking as though he were trying to pull Cecilia up and off, or as though he were sobbing. On the porch Mrs. Lisbon made the other girls face the house. The sprinkler system, timed to go on at 8:15 p.m., spurted into life just as the EMS truck appeared at the end of the block, moving at about fifteen miles an hour, without flashing lights or siren, as though the paramedics already knew it was hopeless. The skinny one with the mustache climbed out first, then the fat one. They got the stretcher immediately, instead of first checking on the victim, a lapse which we later learned from medical professionals violated procedure. We didn’t know who had called the paramedics or how they knew they were no more than undertakers that day. Tom Faheem said Therese had gone inside and called, but the rest of us remember the remaining four Lisbon girls immobile on the porch until after the EMS truck arrived. No one else on our street was aware of what had happened. The identical lawns down the block were empty. Someone was barbecuing somewhere. Behind Joe Larson’s house we could hear a birdie being batted back and forth, endlessly, by the two greatest badminton players in the world.
The paramedics moved Mr. Lisbon aside so they could examine Cecilia. They found no pulse, but went ahead trying to save her anyway. The fat one hacksawed the fence stake while the skinny one got ready to catch her, because it was more dangerous to pull Cecilia off the barbed end than to leave it piercing her. When the stake snapped loose, the skinny one fell back under Cecilia’s released weight. Then he regained his footing, pivoted, and slipped her onto the stretcher. As they carried her away, the sawed-off stake lifted the sheet like a tent post.
By this time it was nearly nine o’clock. From the roof of Chase Buell’s house where we congregated after getting out of our dress-up clothes to watch what would happen next, we could see, over the heaps of trees throwing themselves into the air, the abrupt demarcation where the trees ended and the city began. The sun was falling in the haze of distant factories, and in the adjoining slums the scatter of glass picked up the raw glow of the smoggy sunset. Sounds we usually couldn’t hear reached us now that we were up high, and crouching on the tarred shingles, resting chins in hands, we made out, faintly, an indecipherable backward-playing tape of city life, cries and shouts, the barking of a chained dog, car horns, the voices of girls calling out numbers in an obscure tenacious game—sounds of the impoverished city we never visited, all mixed and muted, without sense, carried on a wind from that place. Then: darkness. Car lights moving in the distance. Up close, yellow house lights coming on, revealing families around televisions. One by one, we all went home.
•
There had never been a funeral in our town before, at least not during our lifetimes. The majority of dying had happened during the Second World War when we didn’t exist and our fathers were impossibly skinny young men in black-and-white photographs—dads on jungle airstrips, dads with pimples and tattoos, dads with pinups, dads who wrote love letters to the girls who would become our mothers, dads inspired by K rations, loneliness and glandular riot in malarial air into poetic reveries that ceased entirely once they got back home. Now our dads were middle-aged, with paunches, and shins rubbed hairless from years of wearing pants, but they were still a long way from death. Their own parents, who spoke foreign languages and lived in converted attics like buzzards, had the finest medical care available and were threatening to live on until the next century. Nobody’s grandfather had died, nobody’s grandmother, nobody’s parents, only a few dogs: Tom Burke’s beagle, Muffin, who choked on Bazooka Joe bubble gum, and then that summer, a creature who in dog years was still a puppy—Cecilia Lisbon.
The cemetery workers’ strike hit its sixth week the day she died. Nobody had given much thought to the strike, nor to the cemetery workers’ grievances, because most of us had never been to a cemetery. Occasionally we heard gunshots coming from the ghetto, but our fathers insisted it was only cars backfiring. Therefore, when the newspapers reported that burials in the city had completely stopped, we didn’t think it affected us. Likewise, Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon, only in their forties, with a crop of young daughters, had given little thought to the strike, until those same daughters began killing themselves.
Funerals continued, but without the consummation of burial. Caskets were carted out beside undug plots; priests performed eulogies; tears were shed; after which the caskets were taken back to the deep freeze of the mortuary to await a settlement. Cremation enjoyed a rise in popularity. Mrs. Lisbon, however, objected to this idea, fearing it was heathen, and even pointed to a biblical passage that suggested the dead will rise bodily at the Second Coming, no ashes allowed.
Only one cemetery existed in our suburb, a drowsy field owned by various denominations over the years, from Lutheran through Episcopalian to Catholic. It contained three French Canadian fur trappers, a line of bakers named Kropp, and J. B. Milbank, who invented a local soft drink resembling root beer. With its leaning headstones, its red gravel drive in the shape of a horseshoe, and its many trees nourished by well-fed carcasses, the cemetery had filled up long ago in the time of the last deaths. Because of this, the funeral director, Mr. Alton, was forced to take Mr. Lisbon on a tour of possible alternatives.
He remembered the trip well. The days of the cemetery strike weren’t easily forgotten, but Mr. Alton also confessed, “It was my first suicide. A young kid, too. You couldn’t use the same sort of condolences. I was kind of sweating it out, to tell you the truth.” On the West Side they visited a quiet cemetery in the Palestinian section, but Mr. Lisbon didn’t like the foreign sound of the muezzin calling the people to prayer, and had heard that the neighbors still ritually slaughtered goats in their bathtubs. “Not here,” he said, “not here.” Next they toured a small Catholic cemetery that looked perfect, until, coming to the back, Mr. Lisbon saw two miles of leveled land that reminded him of photographs of Hiroshima. “It was Poletown,” Mr. Alton told us. “GM bought out like twenty-five thousand Polacks to build this huge automotive plant. They knocked down twenty-four city blocks, then ran out of money. So the place was all rubble and weeds. It was desolate, sure, but only if you were looking out the back fence.” Finally they arrived at a public nondenominational cemetery located between two freeways, and it was here that Cecilia Lisbon was given all the final funerary rites of the Catholic Church except interment. Officially, Cecilia’s death was listed in church records as an “accident,” as were the other girls’ a year later. When we asked Father Moody about this, he said, “We didn’t want to quibble. How do you know she didn’t slip?” When we brought up the sleeping pills, and the noose, and the rest of it, he said, “Suicide, as a mortal sin, is a matter of intent. It’s very difficult to know what was in those girls’ hearts. What they were really trying to do.”
Most of our parents attended the funeral, leaving us home to protect us from the contamination of tragedy. They all agreed the cemetery was the flattest they had ever seen. There were no headstones or monuments, only granite tablets sunk into the earth, and, on V.F.W. graves, plastic American flags abused by rain, or wire garlands holding dead flowers. The hearse had trouble getting through the gate because of the picketing, but when the strikers learned the deceased’s age, they parted, and even lowered their angry placards. Inside, neglect resulting from the strike was obvious. Dirt was piled around some graves. A digging machine stood frozen with its jaws piercing the sod, as though the union’s call had come in the middle of burying someone. Family members acting as caretakers had made touching attempts to spruce up loved ones’ final resting places. Excessive fertilizer had scorched one plot a blazing yellow. Excessive watering had turned another into a marsh. Because water had to be carried in by hand (the sprinkler system had been sabotaged), a trail of deep footprints from grave to grave made it appear the dead were walking around at night.
The grass hadn’t been cut in nearly seven weeks. Mourners stood ankle-deep as the pallbearers carried out the coffin. Because of the low teenage mortality rate, mortuary suppliers built few caskets to their middling size. They manufactured a small quantity of infant caskets, little bigger than bread boxes. The next size up was full-size, more than Cecilia required. When they had opened her casket at the Funeral Home, all anyone had seen was the satin pillow and the ruffled cushioning of the casket’s lid. Mrs. Turner said, “For a minute I thought the thing was empty.” But then, making only a shallow imprint because of her eighty-six pounds, pale skin and hair blending with white satin, Cecilia emerged from the background like a figure in an optical illusion. She was dressed not in the wedding gown, which Mrs. Lisbon had thrown away, but in a beige dress with a lace collar, a Christmas gift from her grandmother which she had refused to wear in life. The open section of lid revealed not only her face and shoulders, but her hands with their bitten nails, her rough elbows, the twin prongs of her hips, and even her knees.
Only the family filed past the coffin. First the girls walked past, each dazed and expressionless, and, later, people said we should have known by their faces. “It was like they were giving her a wink,” Mrs. Carruthers said. “They should have been bawling, but what did they do? Up to the coffin, peek in, and away. Why didn’t we see it?” Curt Van Osdol, the only kid at the Funeral Home, said he would have copped a last feel, right there in front of the priest and everybody, if only we had been there to appreciate it. After the girls passed by, Mrs. Lisbon, on her husband’s arm, took ten stricken steps to dangle her weak head over Cecilia’s face, rouged for the first and last time ever. “Look at her nails,” Mr. Burton thought he heard her say. “Couldn’t they do something about her nails?”
And then Mr. Lisbon replied: “They’ll grow out. Fingernails keep growing. She can’t bite them now, dear.”
•
Our own knowledge of Cecilia kept growing after her death, too, with the same unnatural persistence. Though she had spoken only rarely and had had no real friends, everybody possessed his own vivid memories of Cecilia. Some of us had held her for five minutes as a baby while Mrs. Lisbon ran back into the house to get her purse. Some of us had played in the sandbox with her, fighting over a shovel, or had exposed ourselves to her behind the mulberry tree that grew like deformed flesh through the chain link fence. We had stood in line with her for smallpox vaccinations, had held polio sugar cubes under our tongues with her, had taught her to jump rope, to light snakes, had stopped her from picking her scabs on numerous occasions, and had cautioned her against touching her mouth to the drinking fountain at Three Mile Park. A few of us had fallen in love with her, but had kept it to ourselves, knowing that she was the weird sister.
Cecilia’s bedroom—when we finally obtained a description from Lucy Brock—confirmed this assessment of her character. In addition to a zodiac mobile, Lucy found a collection of potent amethysts, as well as a pack of Tarot cards under Cecilia’s pillow that still smelled of her incense and hair. Lucy checked—because we asked her to—to see if the sheets had been cleaned, but she said they hadn’t. The room had been left intact as an exhibit. The window from which Cecilia jumped was still open. In the top bureau drawer, Lucy found seven pairs of underpants, each dyed black with Rit. She also found two pairs of immaculate high-tops in the closet. Neither of these things surprised us. We had long known about Cecilia’s black underwear because whenever she’d stood up on her bicycle pedals to gain speed we had looked up her dress. We’d also often seen her on the back steps, scrubbing her high-tops with a toothbrush and cup of Ivory Liquid.
Cecilia’s diary begins a year and a half before her suicide. Many people felt the illuminated pages constituted a hieroglyphics of unreadable despair, though the pictures looked cheerful for the most part. The diary had a lock, but David Barker, who got it from Skip Ortega, the plumber’s assistant, told us that Skip had found the diary next to the toilet in the master bathroom, its lock already jimmied as though Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon had been reading it themselves. Tim Winer, the brain, insisted on examining the diary. We carried it to the study his parents had built for him, with its green desk lamps, contour globe, and gilt-edged encyclopedias. “Emotional instability,” he said, analyzing the handwriting. “Look at the dots on these i’s. All over the place.” And then, leaning forward, showing the blue veins beneath his weakling’s skin, he added: “Basically, what we have here is a dreamer. Somebody out of touch with reality. When she jumped, she probably thought she’d fly.”
We know portions of the diary by heart now. After we got it up to Chase Buell’s attic, we read portions out loud. We passed the diary around, fingering pages and looking anxiously for our names. Gradually, however, we learned that although Cecilia had stared at everybody all the time, she hadn’t thought about any of us. Nor did she think about herself. The diary is an unusual document of adolescence in that it rarely depicts the emergence of an unformed ego. The standard insecurities, laments, crushes, and daydreams are nowhere in evidence. Instead, Cecilia writes of her sisters and herself as a single entity. It’s often difficult to identify which sister she’s talking about, and many strange sentences conjure in the reader’s mind an image of a mythical creature with ten legs and five heads, lying in bed eating junk food, or suffering visits from affectionate aunts. Most of the diary told us more about how the girls came to be than why they killed themselves. We got tired of hearing about what they ate (“Monday, February 13. Today we had frozen pizza …”), or what they wore, or which colors they favored. They all detested creamed corn. Mary had chipped her tooth on the monkey bars and had a cap. (“I told you,” Kevin Head said, reading that.) And so we learned about their lives, came to hold collective memories of times we hadn’t experienced, harbored private images of Lux leaning over the side of a ship to stroke her first whale, and saying, “I didn’t think they would stink so much,” while Therese answered, “It’s the kelp in their baleens rotting.” We became acquainted with starry skies the girls had gazed at while camping years before, and the boredom of summers traipsing from back yard to front to back again, and even a certain indefinable smell that arose from toilets on rainy nights, which the girls called “sewery.” We knew what it felt like to see a boy with his shirt off, and why it made Lux write the name Kevin in purple Magic Marker all over her three-ring binder and even on her bras and panties, and we understood her rage coming home one day to find that Mrs. Lisbon had soaked her things in Clorox, bleaching all the “Kevins” out. We knew the pain of winter wind rushing up your skirt, and the ache of keeping your knees together in class, and how drab and infuriating it was to jump rope while the boys played baseball. We could never understand why the girls cared so much about being mature, or why they felt compelled to compliment each other, but sometimes, after one of us had read a long portion of the diary out loud, we had to fight back the urge to hug one another or to tell each other how pretty we were. We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together. We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn’t fathom them at all. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.
As the diary progresses, Cecilia begins to recede from her sisters and, in fact, from personal narrative of any kind. The first person singular ceases almost entirely, the effect akin to a camera’s pulling away from the characters at the end of a movie, to show, in a series of dissolves, their house, street, city, country, and finally planet, which not only dwarfs but obliterates them. Her precocious prose turns to impersonal subjects, the commercial of the weeping Indian paddling his canoe along a polluted stream, or the body counts from the evening war. In its last third the diary shows two rotating moods. In romantic passages Cecilia despairs over the demise of our elm trees. In cynical entries she suggests the trees aren’t sick at all, and that the deforesting is a plot “to make everything flat.” Occasional references to this or that conspiracy theory crop up—the Illuminati, the Military-Industrial complex—but she only feints in that direction, as though the names are so many vague chemical pollutants. From invective she shifts without pause into her poetic reveries again. A couplet about summer from a poem she never finished, is quite nice, we think:
The trees like lungs filling with air My sister, the mean one, pulling my hair
The fragment is dated June 26, three days after she returned from the hospital, when we used to see her lying in the front-yard grass.
•
Little is known of Cecilia’s state of mind on the last day of her life. According to Mr. Lisbon, she seemed pleased about her party. When he went downstairs to check on the preparations, he found Cecilia standing on a chair, tying balloons to the ceiling with red and blue ribbons. “I told her to get down. The doctor said she shouldn’t hold her hands over her head. Because of the stitches.” She did as commanded, and spent the rest of the day lying on the rug in her bedroom, staring up at her zodiac mobile and listening to the odd Celtic records she’d gotten through a mail-order house. “It was always some soprano singing about marshes and dead roses.” The melancholic music alarmed Mr. Lisbon, comparing it as he did to the optimistic tunes of his own youth, but, passing down the hall, he realized that it was certainly no worse than Lux’s howling rock music or even the inhuman screech of Therese’s ham radio.
From two in the afternoon on, Cecilia soaked in the bathtub. It wasn’t unusual for her to take marathon baths, but after what had happened the last time, Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon took no chances. “We made her leave the door open a crack,” Mrs. Lisbon said. “She didn’t like it, of course. And now she had new ammunition. That psychiatrist had said Ceel was at the age where she needed a lot of privacy.” Throughout the afternoon, Mr. Lisbon kept coming up with excuses to pass by the bathroom. “I’d wait to hear a splash, then I’d go on past. We’d taken everything sharp out of there, of course.”
At four-thirty, Mrs. Lisbon sent Lux up to check on Cecilia. When she came back downstairs, she seemed unconcerned, and nothing about her demeanor suggested she had an inkling about what her sister would do later that day. “She’s fine,” Lux said. “She’s stinking up the place with those bath salts.”
At five-thirty, Cecilia got out of the bath and dressed for the party. Mrs. Lisbon heard her going back and forth between her sisters’ two bedrooms (Bonnie shared with Mary, Therese with Lux). The rattling of her bracelets comforted her parents because it allowed them to keep track of her movements like an animal with a bell on its collar. From time to time during the hours before we arrived, Mr. Lisbon heard the tinkling of Cecilia’s bracelets as she went up and down the stairs, trying on different shoes.
According to what they told us later on separate occasions and in separate states, Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon didn’t find Cecilia’s behavior strange during the party. “She was always quiet with company,” Mrs. Lisbon said. And perhaps because of their lack of socializing, Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon remembered the party as a successful event. Mrs. Lisbon, in fact, was surprised when Cecilia asked to be excused. “I thought she was having a nice time.” Even at this point, the other girls didn’t act as though they knew what was about to happen. Tom Faheem recalls Mary telling him about a jumper she wanted to buy at Penney’s. Therese and Tim Winer discussed their anxiety over getting into an Ivy League college.
From clues later discovered, it appears Cecilia’s ascent to her bedroom was not as quick as we remember it. She took time, for instance, between leaving us and reaching the upstairs to drink juice from a can of pears (she left the can on the counter, punctured with only one hole in disregard of Mrs. Lisbon’s prescribed method). Either before or after drinking the juice, she went to the back door. “I thought they were sending her on a trip,” Mrs. Pitzenberger said. “She was carrying a suitcase.”
No suitcase was ever found. We can only explain Mrs. Pitzenberger’s testimony as the hallucination of a bifocal wearer, or a prophecy of the later suicides where luggage played such a central motif. Whatever the truth, Mrs. Pitzenberger saw Cecilia close the back door, and it was only seconds later that she climbed the stairs, as we so distinctly heard from below. She flipped on the lights in her bedroom as she entered, though it was still light out. Across the street, Mr. Buell saw her open her bedroom window. “I waved to her, but she didn’t see me,” he told us. Just then his wife groaned from the other room. He didn’t hear about Cecilia until after the EMS truck had come and gone. “Unfortunately, we had problems of our own,” he said. He went to check on his sick spouse just as Cecilia stuck her head out the window, into the pink, humid, pillowing air.
Three (#u4efa0307-dc2b-51bd-a36b-192563e781a6)
Flower arrangements arrived at the Lisbon house later than was customary. Because of the nature of the death, most people decided not to send flowers to the Funeral Home, and in general everybody put off placing their orders, unsure whether to let the catastrophe pass in silence or to act as though the death were natural. In the end, however, everybody sent something, white roses in wreaths, clusters of orchids, weeping peonies. Peter Loomis, who delivered for FTD, said flowers crammed the Lisbons’ entire living room. Bouquets exploded from chairs and lay scattered across the floor. “They didn’t even put them in vases,” he said. Most people opted for generic cards that said “With Sympathy” or “Our Condolences,” but some of the Waspier types, accustomed to writing notes for all occasions, labored over personal responses. Mrs. Beards used a quote from Walt Whitman we took to murmuring to one another: “All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, / and to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.” Chase Buell peeked at his own mother’s card as he slipped it under the Lisbons’ door. It read: “I don’t know what you’re feeling. I won’t even pretend.”
A few people braved personal calls. Mr. Hutch and Mr. Peters walked over to the Lisbon house on separate occasions, but their reports differed little. Mr. Lisbon invited them in, but before they could broach the painful subject, he sat them down in front of the baseball game. “He kept talking about the bullpen,” Mr. Hutch said. “Hell, I pitched in college. I had to straighten him out on a few essentials. First of all, he wanted to trade Miller, though he was our only decent closer. I forgot what I’d gone over there to do.” Mr. Peters said, “The guy was only half there. He kept turning the tint control up, so that the infield was practically blue. Then he’d sit back down. Then he’d get up again. One of the girls came in—can you tell them apart?—and brought us a couple beers. Took a swig from his before handing it over.”
Neither of the men mentioned the suicide. “I wanted to, I really did,” said Mr. Hutch. “I just never got around to it.”
Father Moody showed more perseverance. Mr. Lisbon welcomed the cleric as he had the other men, ushering him to a seat before the baseball game. A few minutes later, as though on cue, Mary served beers. But Father Moody wasn’t deflected. During the second inning, he said, “How about we get the Mrs. down here? Have a little chat.”
Mr. Lisbon hunched toward the screen. “Afraid she’s not seeing anybody right now. Under the weather.”
“She’ll see her priest,” Father Moody said.
He stood up to go. Mr. Lisbon held up two fingers. His eyes were watering. “Father,” he said. “Double-play ball, Father.”
Paolo Conelli, an altar boy, overheard Father Moody tell Fred Simpson, the choirmaster, how he had left “that strange man, God forgive me for saying so, but He made him that way,” and climbed the front stairs. Already the house showed signs of uncleanliness, though they were nothing compared to what was to come later. Dust balls lined the steps. A half-eaten sandwich sat atop the landing where someone had felt too sad to finish it. Because Mrs. Lisbon had stopped doing laundry or even buying detergent, the girls had taken to washing clothes by hand in the bathtub, and when Father Moody passed their bathroom, he saw shirts and pants and underthings draped over the shower curtain. “It sounded quite pleasant, actually,” he said. “Like rain.” Steam rose from the floor, along with the smell of jasmine soap (weeks later, we asked the cosmetics lady at Jacobsen’s for some jasmine soap we could smell). Father Moody stood outside the bathroom, too bashful to enter that moist cave that existed as a common room between the girls’ two shared bedrooms. Inside, if he hadn’t been a priest and had looked, he would have seen the throne-like toilet where the Lisbon girls defecated publicly, the bathtub they used as a couch, filling it with pillows so that two sisters could luxuriate while another curled her hair. He would have seen the radiator stacked with glasses and Coke cans, the clamshell soap dish employed, in a pinch, as an ashtray. From the age of twelve Lux spent hours in the john smoking cigarettes, exhaling either out the window or into a wet towel she then hung outside. But Father Moody saw none of this. He only passed through the tropical air current and that was all. Behind him he felt the colder drafts of the house, circulating dust motes and that particular family smell every house had, you knew it when you came in—Chase Buell’s house smelled like skin, Joe Larson’s like mayonnaise, the Lisbons’ like stale popcorn, we thought, though Father Moody, going there after the deaths had begun, said, “It was a mix between a funeral parlor and broom closet. All those flowers. All that dust.” He wanted to step back into the current of jasmine, but as he stood, listening to rain beading bathroom tiles and washing away the girls’ footprints, he heard voices. He made a quick circuit of the hallway, calling out for Mrs. Lisbon, but she didn’t respond. Returning to the top of the stairs, he had started down when he saw the Lisbon girls through a partly open doorway.
“At that point, those girls had no intention of repeating Cecilia’s mistake. I know everyone thinks it was a plan, or that we handled it poorly, but they were just as shocked as I was.” Father Moody rapped softly on the door and asked for permission to enter. “They were sitting on the floor together, and I could tell they’d been crying. I think they were having some kind of slumber party. They had pillows all over. I hate to mention it, and I remember scolding myself for even thinking it at the time, but it was unmistakable: they hadn’t bathed.”
We asked Father Moody whether he had discussed Cecilia’s death or the girls’ grief, but he said he hadn’t. “I brought it up a few times, but they didn’t take up the subject. I’ve learned you can’t force it. The time has to be right and the heart willing.” When we asked him to sum up his impression of the girls’ emotional state at that point, he said, “Buffeted but not broken.”
•
In the first few days after the funeral, our interest in the Lisbon girls only increased. Added to their loveliness was a new mysterious suffering, perfectly silent, visible in the blue puffiness beneath their eyes or the way they would sometimes stop in mid-stride, look down, and shake their heads as though disagreeing with life. Grief made them wander. We heard reports of the girls walking aimlessly through Eastland, down the lighted mall with its timid fountains and hot dogs impaled beneath heat lamps. Now and then they fingered a blouse, or dress, but bought nothing. Woody Clabault saw Lux Lisbon talking to a motorcycle gang outside Hudson’s. One biker asked her to go for a ride, and after looking in the direction of her house more than ten miles away, she accepted. She hugged his waist. He kicked the machine into life. Later, Lux was seen walking home alone, carrying her shoes.
In the Kriegers’ basement, we lay on a strip of leftover carpeting and dreamed of all the ways we could soothe the Lisbon girls. Some of us wanted to lie down in the grass with them, or play the guitar and sing them songs. Paul Baldino wanted to take them to Metro Beach so they could all get a tan. Chase Buell, more and more under the sway of his father the Christian Scientist, said only that the girls needed “help not of this world.” But when we asked him what he meant, he shrugged and said, “Nothing.” Nevertheless, when the girls walked by, we often found him crouching by a tree, moving his lips with his eyes closed.
Not everyone thought about the girls, however. Even before Cecilia’s funeral, some people could talk of nothing but the dangerousness of the fence she’d jumped on. “It was an accident waiting to happen,” said Mr. Frank, who worked in insurance. “You couldn’t get a policy to cover it.”
“Our kids could jump on it, too,” Mrs. Zaretti insisted during coffee hour following Sunday Mass. Not long after, a group of fathers began digging the fence out free of charge. It turned out the fence stood on the Bateses’ property. Mr. Buck, a lawyer, negotiated with Mr.. Bates about the fence’s removal and didn’t speak to Mr. Lisbon at all. Everyone assumed, of course, that the Lisbons would be grateful.
We had rarely seen our fathers in work boots before, toiling in the earth and wielding brand-new root clippers. They struggled with the fence, bent over like Marines hoisting the flag on Iwo Jima. It was the greatest show of common effort we could remember in our neighborhood, all those lawyers, doctors, and mortgage bankers locked arm in arm in the trench, with our mothers bringing out orange Kool-Aid, and for a moment our century was noble again. Even the sparrows on the telephone lines seemed to be watching. No cars passed. The industrial fog of our city made the men resemble figures hammered into pewter, but by late afternoon they still couldn’t uproot the fence. Mr. Hutch got the idea of hacksawing the bars as the paramedics had, and for a while the men took turns sawing, but their paper-pushing arms gave out quickly. Finally they tied the fence to the back of Uncle Tucker’s four-wheel-drive Bronco. Nobody cared that Uncle Tucker didn’t have a license (driving examiners always smelled booze on him, even if he quit drinking three days before the test they still smelled it evaporating from his pores). Our fathers just cried, “Hit it!” and Uncle Tucker floored his accelerator, but the fence didn’t budge. By midafternoon they abandoned the effort and took up a collection to hire a professional hauling service. An hour later, a lone man showed up in a tow truck, attached a hook to the fence, pressed a button to make his giant winch revolve, and with a deep earth sound, the murdering fence came loose. “You can see blood,” Anthony Turkis said, and we looked to see if the blood that hadn’t been there at the time of the suicide had arrived after the fact. Some said it was on the third spike, some said the fourth, but it was as impossible as finding the bloody shovel on the back of AbbeyRoad where all the clues proclaimed that Paul was dead.
None of the Lisbons helped with the fence removal. From time to time, however, we saw their faces blinking at the windows. Just after the truck pulled the fence free, Mr. Lisbon himself came out the side door and coiled up a garden hose. He didn’t move to the trench. He raised one hand in a neighborly salute and returned inside. The man lashed the fence, in sections, to his truck and—getting paid for it—gave Mr. Bates the worst lawn job we’d ever seen. We were amazed our parents permitted this, when lawn jobs usually justified calling the cops. But now Mr. Bates didn’t scream or try to get the truck’s license plate, nor did Mrs. Bates, who had once wept when we set off firecrackers in her state-fair tulips—they said nothing, and our parents said nothing, so that we sensed how ancient they were, how accustomed to trauma, depressions, and wars. We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the world they really believed in, and that for all their caretaking and bitching about crabgrass they didn’t give a damn about lawns.
After the truck drove away, our fathers gathered around the hole once more, staring down at wriggling earthworms, kitchen spoons, the one rock Paul Little swore was an Indian arrowhead. They leaned on shovels, mopping brows, even though they hadn’t done anything. Everyone felt a lot better, as though the lake had been cleaned up, or the air, or the other side’s bombs destroyed. There wasn’t much you could do to save us, but at least the fence was gone. Despite the devastation of his lawn, Mr. Bates did some edging, and the old German couple appeared in their grape arbor to drink dessert wine. As usual they wore their Alpine hats, Mr. Hessen’s with a tiny green feather, while their schnauzer sniffed at the end of his leash. Grapes burst above their heads. Mrs. Hessen’s humped back dove and surfaced amid her swelling rosebushes as she sprayed.
At some point, we looked up into the sky to see that all the fish flies had died. The air was no longer brown but blue. Using kitchen brooms, we swept bugs from poles and windows and electrical lines. We stuffed them into bags, thousands upon thousands of insect bodies with wings of raw silk, and Tim Winer, the brain, pointed out how the fish flies’ tails resembled those of lobsters. “They’re smaller,” he said, “but possess the same basic design. Lobsters are classified in the phylum Arthropoda, same as insects. They’re bugs. And bugs are only lobsters that have learned to fly.”
No one ever understood what got into us that year, or why we hated so intensely the crust of dead bugs over our lives. Suddenly, however, we couldn’t bear the fish flies carpeting our swimming pools, filling our mailboxes, blotting out stars on our flags. The collective action of digging the trench led to cooperative sweeping, bag-carting, patio-hosing. A score of brooms kept time in all directions as the pale ghosts of fish flies dropped from walls like ash. We examined their tiny wizards’ faces, rubbing them between our fingers until they gave off the scent of carp. We tried to light them but they wouldn’t burn (which made the fish flies seem deader than anything). We hit bushes, beat rugs, turned on windshield wipers full blast. Fish flies clogged sewer grates so that we had to stuff them down with sticks. Crouching over sewers, we could hear the river under the city flowing away. We dropped rocks and listened for the splash.
We didn’t stop with our own houses. Once our walls were clean, Mr. Buell told Chase to start cleaning bugs off the Lisbon house. Because of his religious beliefs, Mr. Buell often went the extra mile, raking ten feet into the Hessens’ yard, or shoveling their walk and even throwing down rock salt. It wasn’t odd for him to tell Chase to start sweeping the Lisbons’ house, even though they lived across the street and not next door. Because Mr. Lisbon only had daughters, boys and men had gone over in the past to help him drag away lightning-struck limbs, and as Chase approached, holding his broom over his head like a regimental banner, nobody said a word. Then, however, Mr. Krieger told Kyle to go over and sweep some, and Mr. Hutch sent Ralph, and soon we were all over at the Lisbon house, brushing walls and scraping away bug husks. They had even more than we did, the walls an inch thick, and Paul Baldino asked us the riddle, “What smells like fish, is fun to eat, but isn’t fish?”
Once we got to the Lisbons’ windows, our new inexplicable feelings for the girls came to the fore. As we slapped off bugs, we saw Mary Lisbon in the kitchen, holding a box of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese. She appeared to be contemplating whether or not to open it. She read the directions, turned the box over to look at the vivid picture of the noodles, and then put the box back on the counter. Anthony Turkis, pressing his face to the window, said, “She should eat something.” She picked up the box again. Hopefully, we watched. But then she turned and disappeared.
Outside it grew dark. Lights came on down the block, but not in the Lisbon house. We couldn’t see in any better, and in fact the glass panes began to reflect our own gaping faces. It was only nine o’clock, but everything confirmed what people had been saying: that since Cecilia’s suicide the Lisbons could hardly wait for night to forget themselves in sleep. Up in a bedroom window, Bonnie’s three votive candles glimmered in a reddish haze, but otherwise the house absorbed the shadows of night. Insects started up in their hiding places all around, vibrating the minute we turned our backs. Everyone called them crickets, but we never found any in the sprayed bushes or aerated lawns, and had no idea what they looked like. They were merely sound. Our parents had been more intimate with crickets. For them the buzzing apparently didn’t sound mechanical. It came from every direction, always from a height just above our heads, or just below, and always with the suggestion that the insect world felt more than we did. As we stood charmed into stillness, listening to the crickets, Mr. Lisbon came out the side door and thanked us. His hair looked even grayer than usual, but grief hadn’t altered the highness of his voice. He had on overalls, one knee covered by sawdust. “Feel free to use the hose,” he said, and then he looked at the Good Humor truck passing by, the jingle of the bell seemed to trigger a memory, he smiled, or winced—we couldn’t tell which—and returned inside.
We went with him only later, invisibly, with the ghosts of our questions. Apparently, as he stepped back inside, he saw Therese come out of the dining room. She was stuffing her mouth with candy—M&M’s, by the colors—but stopped immediately on seeing him. She swallowed an unchewed chunk. Her high forehead glowed in the light from the street and her cupid’s lips were redder, smaller, and more shapely than he remembered, especially in contrast to her cheeks and chin, which had gained weight. Her eyelashes were crusted, as though recently glued shut. At that moment Mr. Lisbon had the feeling that he didn’t know who she was, that children were only strangers you agreed to live with, and he reached out in order to meet her for the first time. He rested his hands on her shoulders, then dropped them to his sides. Therese brushed the hair out of her face, smiled, and began walking slowly up the stairs.
Mr. Lisbon went on his usual nighttime rounds, checking to see that the front door was locked (it wasn’t), that the garage light was off (it was), and that none of the burners on the stove had been left on (none had). He turned off the light in the first-floor bathroom, where he found Kyle Krieger’s retainer in the sink, left from when he’d taken it out during the party to eat cake. Mr. Lisbon ran the retainer under water, examining the pink shell form-fitted to the roof of Kyle’s mouth, the crenellations in the plastic that encircled the turret of his teeth, the looping front wire bent at key spots (you could see plier marks) to provide modulated pressure. Mr. Lisbon knew his parental and neighborly duty entailed putting the retainer in a Ziploc bag, calling the Kriegers, and telling them their expensive orthodontal device was in safe keeping. Acts like these—simple, humane, conscientious, forgiving—held life together. Only a few days earlier he would have been able to perform them. But now he took the retainer and dropped it in the toilet. He pressed the handle. The retainer, jostled in the surge, disappeared down the porcelain throat, and, when waters abated, floated triumphantly, mockingly, out. Mr. Lisbon waited for the tank to refill and flushed again, but the same thing happened. The replica of the boy’s mouth clung to the white slope.
At that point something flashed in the corner of his eye. “I thought I saw somebody, but when I looked, there was nothing there.” Nor did he see anything as he came around the back hall into the foyer and up the front stairs. On the second floor he listened at the girls’ doors, but heard only Mary coughing in her sleep, Lux playing a radio softly, singing along. He stepped into the girls’ bathroom. A beam of light from the risen moon penetrated the window, lighting up a portion of mirror. Amid smudged fingerprints, a small circle had been wiped clean where his daughters contemplated their images, and above the mirror itself Bonnie had taped a white construction-paper dove. Mr. Lisbon parted his lips in a grimace and saw in the clean circle the one dead canine tooth beginning to turn green on the left side of his mouth. The doors to the girls’ shared bedrooms were not completely closed. Breathings and murmurings issued from them. He listened to the sounds as though they could tell him what the girls were feeling and how to comfort them. Lux switched her radio off, and everything was silent. “I couldn’t go in,” Mr. Lisbon confessed to us years later. “I didn’t know what to say.” Only as he left the bathroom, heading for the oblivion of sleep himself, did Mr. Lisbon see Cecilia’s ghost. She was standing in her old bedroom, dressed in the wedding dress again, having somehow shed the beige dress with the lace collar she’d worn in her coffin. “The window was still open,” Mr. Lisbon said. “I don’t think we’d ever remembered to shut it. It was all clear to me. I knew I had to close that window or else she’d go on jumping out of it forever.”
According to his story, he didn’t cry out. He didn’t want to make contact with the shade of his daughter, to learn why she had done herself in, to ask forgiveness, or to rebuke her. He merely rushed forward, brushing past, to close the window. As he did, however, the ghost turned, and he saw that it was only Bonnie, wrapped in a bedsheet. “Don’t worry,” she said, quietly. “They took the fence out.”
•
In a handwritten note displaying the penmanship perfected during his graduate school days in Zurich, Dr. Hornicker called Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon in for a second consultation, but they didn’t go. Instead, from what we observed during the remainder of the summer, Mrs. Lisbon once more took charge of the house while Mr. Lisbon receded into a mist. When we saw him after that, he had the sheepish look of a poor relation. By late August, in the weeks of preparation before school, he began leaving by the back door as though sneaking out. His car would whine inside the garage and, when the automatic door rose, would emerge tentatively, lopsided like an animal missing a leg. Through the windshield we could see Mr. Lisbon at the wheel, his hair still wet and his face sometimes dabbed with shaving cream, but he made no expression when the tail pipe hit the end of the driveway, sending up sparks, as it did every time. At six o’clock he returned home. As he came up the drive, the garage door shuddered to engulf him, and then we wouldn’t see him until the next morning, when the clanging tail pipe announced his departure.
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Jeffrey Eugenides
In a quiet suburb of Detroit, the five Lisbon sisters – beautiful, eccentric, and obsessively watched by the neighborhood boys – commit suicide one by one over the course of a single year.As the boys observe them from afar, transfixed, they piece together the mystery of the family’s fatal melancholy, in this hypnotic and unforgettable novel of adolescent love, disquiet, and death.Jeffrey Eugenides evokes the emotions of youth with haunting sensitivity and dark humour and creates a coming-of-age story unlike any of our time. ‘The Virgin Suicides’ was adapted into a critically acclaimed film by Sofia Coppola.
This electronic edition published by
Fourth Estate 2013
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.4thestate.co.uk (http://www.4thestate.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain 2002 by Bloomsbury Publishing plc
Copyright © 1993 by Jeffrey Eugenides
The right of Jeffrey Eugenides to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Excerpt from ‘Make It With You’ by David Gates copyright © 1970, Colgems-EMI music Inc. All rights reserved. International Copyright Secured. Used by permission.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Ebook Edition © APRIL 2013 ISBN: 9780007524310
Version: 2016-04-29
For Gus and Wanda
Contents
Title (#u8c64a421-308d-56b2-b2e6-ac208b329661)
Copyright (#ud700ea19-7abe-5cfb-99d1-8e26de9af950)
One (#u3d7ba88d-e41b-5d11-abd4-00658e08241f)
Two (#u322cbbec-58e3-52aa-a6ff-db0fe95db03d)
Three (#u6254a437-fee4-59e2-9ade-76bc2b8ceb67)
Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Five (#litres_trial_promo)
A Note on the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Jeffrey Eugenides (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
One (#u4efa0307-dc2b-51bd-a36b-192563e781a6)
On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide—it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese—the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope. They got out of the EMS truck, as usual moving much too slowly in our opinion, and the fat one said under his breath, “This ain’t TV, folks, this is how fast we go.” He was carrying the heavy respirator and cardiac unit past the bushes that had grown monstrous and over the erupting lawn, tame and immaculate thirteen months earlier when the trouble began.
Cecilia, the youngest, only thirteen, had gone first, slitting her wrists like a Stoic while taking a bath, and when they found her, afloat in her pink pool, with the yellow eyes of someone possessed and her small body giving off the odor of a mature woman, the paramedics had been so frightened by her tranquillity that they had stood mesmerized. But then Mrs. Lisbon lunged in, screaming, and the reality of the room reasserted itself: blood on the bath mat; Mr. Lisbon’s razor sunk in the toilet bowl, marbling the water. The paramedics fetched Cecilia out of the warm water because it quickened the bleeding, and put a tourniquet on her arm. Her wet hair hung down her back and already her extremities were blue. She didn’t say a word, but when they parted her hands they found the laminated picture of the Virgin Mary she held against her budding chest.
That was in June, fish-fly season, when each year our town is covered by the flotsam of those ephemeral insects. Rising in clouds from the algae in the polluted lake, they blacken windows, coat cars and streetlamps, plaster the municipal docks and festoon the rigging of sailboats, always in the same brown ubiquity of flying scum. Mrs. Scheer, who lives down the street, told us she saw Cecilia the day before she attempted suicide. She was standing by the curb, in the antique wedding dress with the shorn hem she always wore, looking at a Thunderbird encased in fish flies. “You better get a broom, honey,” Mrs. Scheer advised. But Cecilia fixed her with her spiritualist’s gaze. “They’re dead,” she said. “They only live twenty-four hours. They hatch, they reproduce, and then they croak. They don’t even get to eat.” And with that she stuck her hand into the foamy layer of bugs and cleared her initials: C.L.
We’ve tried to arrange the photographs chronologically, though the passage of so many years has made it difficult. A few are fuzzy but revealing nonetheless. Exhibit #1 shows the Lisbon house shortly before Cecilia’s suicide attempt. It was taken by a real estate agent, Ms. Carmina D’Angelo, whom Mr. Lisbon had hired to sell the house his large family had long outgrown. As the snapshot shows, the slate roof had not yet begun to shed its shingles, the porch was still visible above the bushes, and the windows were not yet held together with strips of masking tape. A comfortable suburban home. The upper-right second-story window contains a blur that Mrs. Lisbon identified as Mary Lisbon. “She used to tease her hair because she thought it was limp,” she said years later, recalling how her daughter had looked for her brief time on earth. In the photograph Mary is caught in the act of blow-drying her hair. Her head appears to be on fire but that is only a trick of the light. It was June 13, eighty-three degrees out, under sunny skies.
•
When the paramedics were satisfied they had reduced the bleeding to a trickle, they put Cecilia on a stretcher and carried her out of the house to the truck in the driveway. She looked like a tiny Cleopatra on an imperial litter. We saw the gangly paramedic with the Wyatt Earp mustache come out first—the one we’d call “Sheriff” when we got to know him better through these domestic tragedies—and then the fat one appeared, carrying the back end of the stretcher and stepping daintily across the lawn, peering at his police-issue shoes as though looking out for dog shit, though later, when we were better acquainted with the machinery, we knew he was checking the blood pressure gauge. Sweating and fumbling, they moved toward the shuddering, blinking truck. The fat one tripped on a lone croquet wicket. In revenge he kicked it; the wicket sprang loose, plucking up a spray of dirt, and fell with a ping on the driveway. Meanwhile, Mrs. Lisbon burst onto the porch, trailing Cecilia’s flannel nightgown, and let out a long wail that stopped time. Under the molting trees and above the blazing, overexposed grass those four figures paused in tableau: the two slaves offering the victim to the altar (lifting the stretcher into the truck), the priestess brandishing the torch (waving the flannel nightgown), and the drugged virgin rising up on her elbows, with an otherworldly smile on her pale lips.
Mrs. Lisbon rode in the back of the EMS truck, but Mr. Lisbon followed in the station wagon, observing the speed limit. Two of the Lisbon daughters were away from home, Therese in Pittsburgh at a science convention, and Bonnie at music camp, trying to learn the flute after giving up the piano (her hands were too small), the violin (her chin hurt), the guitar (her fingertips bled), and the trumpet (her upper lip swelled). Mary and Lux, hearing the siren, had run home from their voice lesson across the street with Mr. Jessup. Barging into that crowded bathroom, they registered the same shock as their parents at the sight of Cecilia with her spattered forearms and pagan nudity. Outside, they hugged on a patch of uncut grass that Butch, the brawny boy who mowed it on Saturdays, had missed. Across the street, a truckful of men from the Parks Department attended to some of our dying elms. The EMS siren shrieked, going away, and the botanist and his crew withdrew their insecticide pumps to watch the truck. When it was gone, they began spraying again. The stately elm tree, also visible in the foreground of Exhibit #1, has since succumbed to the fungus spread by Dutch elm beetles, and has been cut down.
The paramedics took Cecilia to Bon Secours Hospital on Kercheval and Maumee. In the emergency room Cecilia watched the attempt to save her life with an eerie detachment. Her yellow eyes didn’t blink, nor did she flinch when they stuck a needle in her arm. Dr. Armonson stitched up her wrist wounds. Within five minutes of the transfusion he declared her out of danger. Chucking her under her chin, he said, “What are you doing here, honey? You’re not even old enough to know how bad life gets.”
And it was then Cecilia gave orally what was to be her only form of suicide note, and a useless one at that, because she was going to live: “Obviously, Doctor,” she said, “you’ve never been a thirteen-year-old girl.”
•
The Lisbon girls were thirteen (Cecilia), and fourteen (Lux), and fifteen (Bonnie), and sixteen (Mary), and seventeen (Therese). They were short, round-buttocked in denim, with roundish cheeks that recalled that same dorsal softness. Whenever we got a glimpse, their faces looked indecently revealed, as though we were used to seeing women in veils. No one could understand how Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon had produced such beautiful children. Mr. Lisbon taught high-school math. He was thin, boyish, stunned by his own gray hair. He had a high voice, and when Joe Larson told us how Mr. Lisbon had cried when Lux was later rushed to the hospital during her own suicide scare, we could easily imagine the sound of his girlish weeping.
Whenever we saw Mrs. Lisbon we looked in vain for some sign of the beauty that must have once been hers. But the plump arms, the brutally cut steel-wool hair, and the librarian’s glasses foiled us every time. We saw her only rarely, in the morning, fully dressed though the sun hadn’t come up, stepping out to snatch up the dewy milk cartons, or on Sundays when the family drove in their paneled station wagon to St. Paul’s Catholic Church on the Lake. On those mornings Mrs. Lisbon assumed a queenly iciness. Clutching her good purse, she checked each daughter for signs of makeup before allowing her to get in the car, and it was not unusual for her to send Lux back inside to put on a less revealing top. None of us went to church, so we had a lot of time to watch them, the two parents leached of color, like photographic negatives, and then the five glittering daughters in their homemade dresses, all lace and ruffle, bursting with their fructifying flesh.
Only one boy had ever been allowed in the house. Peter Sissen had helped Mr. Lisbon install a working model of the solar system in his classroom at school, and in return Mr. Lisbon had invited him for dinner. He told us the girls had kicked him continually under the table, from every direction, so that he couldn’t tell who was doing it. They gazed at him with their blue febrile eyes and smiled, showing their crowded teeth, the only feature of the Lisbon girls we could ever find fault with. Bonnie was the only one who didn’t give Peter Sissen a secret look or kick. She only said grace and ate her food silently, lost in the piety of a fifteen-year-old. After the meal Peter Sissen asked to go to the bathroom, and because Therese and Mary were both in the downstairs one, giggling and whispering, he had to use the girls’, upstairs. He came back to us with stories of bedrooms filled with crumpled panties, of stuffed animals hugged to death by the passion of the girls, of a crucifix draped with a brassiere, of gauzy chambers of canopied beds, and of the effluvia of so many young girls becoming women together in the same cramped space. In the bathroom, running the faucet to cloak the sounds of his search, Peter Sissen found Mary Lisbon’s secret cache of cosmetics tied up in a sock under the sink: tubes of red lipstick and the second skin of blush and base, and the depilatory wax that informed us she had a mustache we had never seen. In fact, we didn’t know whose makeup Peter Sissen had found until we saw Mary Lisbon two weeks later on the pier with a crimson mouth that matched the shade of his descriptions.
He inventoried deodorants and perfumes and scouring pads for rubbing away dead skin, and we were surprised to learn that there were no douches anywhere because we had thought girls douched every night like brushing their teeth. But our disappointment was forgotten in the next second when Sissen told us of a discovery that went beyond our wildest imaginings. In the trash can was one Tampax, spotted, still fresh from the insides of one of the Lisbon girls. Sissen said that he wanted to bring it to us, that it wasn’t gross but a beautiful thing, you had to see it, like a modern painting or something, and then he told us he had counted twelve boxes of Tampax in the cupboard. It was only then that Lux knocked on the door, asking if he had died in there, and he sprang to open it. Her hair, held up by a barrette at dinner, fell over her shoulders now. She didn’t move into the bathroom but stared into his eyes. Then, laughing her hyena’s laugh, she pushed past him, saying, “You done hogging the bathroom? I need something.” She walked to the cupboard, then stopped and folded her hands behind her. “It’s private. Do you mind?” she said, and Peter Sissen sped down the stairs, blushing, and after thanking Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon, hurried off to tell us that Lux Lisbon was bleeding between the legs that very instant, while the fish flies made the sky filthy and the streetlamps came on.
•
When Paul Baldino heard Peter Sissen’s story, he swore that he would get inside the Lisbons’ house and see things even more unthinkable than Sissen had. “I’m going to watch those girls taking their showers,” he vowed. Already, at the age of fourteen, Paul Baldino had the gangster gut and hit-man face of his father, Sammy “the Shark” Baldino, and of all the men who entered and exited the big Baldino house with the two lions carved in stone beside the front steps. He moved with the sluggish swagger of urban predators who smelled of cologne and had manicured nails. We were frightened of him, and of his imposing doughy cousins, Rico Manollo and Vince Fusilli, and not only because his house appeared in the paper every so often, or because of the bulletproof black limousines that glided up the circular drive ringed with laurel trees imported from Italy, but because of the dark circles under his eyes and his mammoth hips and his brightly polished black shoes which he wore even playing baseball. He had also snuck into other forbidden places in the past, and though the information he brought back wasn’t always reliable, we were still impressed with the bravery of his reconnaissance. In sixth grade, when the girls went into the auditorium to see a special film, it was Paul Baldino who had infiltrated the room, hiding in the old voting booth, to tell us what it was about. Out on the playground we kicked gravel and waited for him, and when he finally appeared, chewing a toothpick and playing with the gold ring on his finger, we were breathless with anticipation.
“I saw the movie,” he said. “I know what it’s about. Listen to this. When girls get to be about twelve or so”—he leaned toward us—“their tits bleed.”
Despite the fact that we now knew better, Paul Baldino still commanded our fear and respect. His rhino’s hips had gotten even larger and the circles under his eyes had deepened to a cigar-ash-and-mud color that made him look acquainted with death. This was about the time the rumors began about the escape tunnel. A few years earlier, behind the spiked Baldino fence patrolled by two identical white German shepherds, a group of workmen had appeared one morning. They hung tarpaulins over ladders to obscure what they did, and after three days, when they whisked the tarps away, there, in the middle of the lawn, stood an artificial tree trunk. It was made of cement, painted to look like bark, complete with fake knothole and two lopped limbs pointing at the sky with the fervor of amputee stubs. In the middle of the tree, a chain-sawed wedge contained a metal grill.
Paul Baldino said it was a barbecue, and we believed him. But, as time passed, we noticed that no one ever used it. The papers said the barbecue had cost $50,000 to install, but not one hamburger or hot dog was ever grilled upon it. Soon the rumor began to circulate that the tree trunk was an escape tunnel, that it led to a hideaway along the river where Sammy the Shark kept a speedboat, and that the workers had hung tarps to conceal the digging. Then, a few months after the rumors began, Paul Baldino began emerging in people’s basements, through the storm sewers. He came up in Chase Buell’s house, covered with a gray dust that smelled like friendly shit; he squeezed up into Danny Zinn’s cellar, this time with a flashlight, baseball bat, and a bag containing two dead rats; and finally he ended up on the other side of Tom Faheem’s boiler, which he clanged three times.
He always explained to us that he had been exploring the storm sewer underneath his own house and had gotten lost, but we began to suspect he was playing in his father’s escape tunnel. When he boasted that he would see the Lisbon girls taking their showers, we all believed he was going to enter the Lisbon house the same way he had entered the others. We never learned exactly what happened, though the police interrogated Paul Baldino for over an hour. He told them only what he told us. He said he had crawled into the sewer duct underneath his own basement and had started walking, a few feet at a time. He described the surprising size of the pipes, the coffee cups and cigarette butts left by workmen, and the charcoal drawings of naked women that resembled cave paintings. He told how he had chosen tunnels at random, and how as he passed under people’s houses he could smell what they were cooking. Finally he had come up through the sewer grate in the Lisbons’ basement. After brushing himself off, he went looking for someone on the first floor, but no one was home. He called out again and again, moving through the rooms. He climbed the stairs to the second floor. Down the hall, he heard water running. He approached the bathroom door. He insisted that he had knocked. And then Paul Baldino told how he had stepped into the bathroom and found Cecilia, naked, her wrists oozing blood, and how after overcoming his shock he had run downstairs to call the police first thing, because that was what his father had always taught him to do.
•
The paramedics found the laminated picture first, of course, and in the crisis the fat one put it in his pocket. Only at the hospital did he think to give it to Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon. Cecilia was out of danger by that point, and her parents were sitting in the waiting room, relieved but confused. Mr. Lisbon thanked the paramedic for saving his daughter’s life. Then he turned the picture over and saw the message printed on the back:
The Virgin Mary has been appearing in our city, bringing her message of peace to a crumbling world. As in Lourdes and Fatima, Our Lady has granted her presence to people just like you. For information call 555-MARY
Mr. Lisbon read the words three times. Then he said in a defeated voice, “We baptized her, we confirmed her, and now she believes this crap.”
It was his only blasphemy during the entire ordeal. Mrs. Lisbon reacted by crumpling the picture in her fist (it survived; we have a photocopy here).
Our local newspaper neglected to run an article on the suicide attempt, because the editor, Mr. Baubee, felt such depressing information wouldn’t fit between the front-page article on the Junior League Flower Show and the back-page photographs of grinning brides. The only newsworthy article in that day’s edition concerned the cemetery workers’ strike (bodies piling up, no agreement in sight), but that was on page 4 beneath the Little League scores.
After they returned home, Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon shut themselves and the girls in the house, and didn’t say a word about what had happened. Only when pressed by Mrs. Scheer did Mrs. Lisbon refer to “Cecilia’s accident,” acting as though she had cut herself in a fall. With precision and objectivity, however, already bored by blood, Paul Baldino described to us what he had seen, and left no doubt that Cecilia had done violence to herself.
Mrs. Buck found it odd that the razor ended up in the toilet. “If you were cutting your wrists in the tub,” she said, “wouldn’t you just lay the razor on the side?” This led to the question as to whether Cecilia had cut her wrists while already in the bath water, or while standing on the bath mat, which was bloodstained. Paul Baldino had no doubts: “She did it on the john,” he said. “Then she got into the tub. She sprayed the place, man.”
Cecilia was kept under observation for a week. The hospital records show that the artery in her right wrist was completely severed, because she was left-handed, but the gash in her left wrist didn’t go as deep, leaving the underside of the artery intact. She received twenty-four stitches in each wrist.
She came back still wearing the wedding dress. Mrs. Patz, whose sister was a nurse at Bon Secours, said that Cecilia had refused to put on a hospital gown, demanding that her wedding dress be brought to her, and Dr. Hornicker, the staff psychiatrist, thought it best to humor her. She returned home during a thunderstorm. We were in Joe Larson’s house, right across the street, when the first clap of thunder hit. Downstairs Joe’s mother shouted to close all the windows, and we ran to ours. Outside a deep vacuum stilled the air. A gust of wind stirred a paper bag, which lifted, rolling, into the lower branches of the trees. Then the vacuum broke with the downpour, the sky grew black, and the Lisbons’ station wagon tried to sneak by in the darkness.
We called Joe’s mother to come see. In a few seconds we heard her quick feet on the carpeted stairs and she joined us by the window. It was Tuesday and she smelled of furniture polish. Together we watched Mrs. Lisbon push open her car door with one foot, then climb out, holding her purse over her head to keep dry. Crouching and frowning, she opened the rear door. Rain fell. Mrs. Lisbon’s hair fell into her face. At last Cecilia’s small head came into view, hazy in the rain, swimming up with odd thrusting movements because of the double slings that impeded her arms. It took her a while to get up enough steam to roll to her feet. When she finally tumbled out she lifted both slings like canvas wings and Mrs. Lisbon took hold of her left elbow and led her into the house. By that time the rain had found total release and we couldn’t see across the street.
In the following days we saw Cecilia a lot. She would sit on her front steps, picking red berries off the bushes and eating them, or staining her palms with the juice. She always wore the wedding dress and her bare feet were dirty. In the afternoons, when sun lit the front yard, she would watch ants swarming in sidewalk cracks or lie on her back in fertilized grass staring up at clouds. One of her sisters always accompanied her. Therese brought science books onto the front steps, studying photographs of deep space and looking up whenever Cecilia strayed to the edge of the yard. Lux spread out beach towels and lay suntanning while Cecilia scratched Arabic designs on her own leg with a stick. At other times Cecilia would accost her guard, hugging her neck and whispering in her ear.
Everyone had a theory as to why she had tried to kill herself. Mrs. Buell said the parents were to blame. “That girl didn’t want to die,” she told us. “She just wanted out of that house.” Mrs. Scheer added, “She wanted out of that decorating scheme.” On the day Cecilia returned from the hospital, those two women brought over a Bundt cake in sympathy, but Mrs. Lisbon refused to acknowledge any calamity. We found Mrs. Buell much aged and hugely fat, still sleeping in a separate bedroom from her husband, the Christian Scientist. Propped up in bed, she still wore pearled cat’s-eye sunglasses during the daytime, and still rattled ice cubes in the tall glass she claimed contained only water; but there was a new odor of afternoon indolence to her, a soap-opera smell. “As soon as Lily and I took over that Bundt cake, that woman told the girls to go upstairs. We said, ‘It’s still warm, let’s all have a piece,’ but she took the cake and put it in the refrigerator. Right in front of us.” Mrs. Scheer remembered it differently. “I hate to say it, but Joan’s been potted for years. The truth is, Mrs. Lisbon thanked us quite graciously. Nothing seemed wrong at all. I started to wonder if maybe it was true that the girl had only fallen and cut herself. Mrs. Lisbon invited us out to the sun room and we each had a piece of cake. Joan disappeared at one point. Maybe she went back home to have another belt. It wouldn’t surprise me.”
We found Mr. Buell just down the hall from his wife, in a bedroom with a sporting theme. On the shelf stood a photograph of his first wife, whom he had loved ever since divorcing her, and when he rose from his desk to greet us, he was still stooped from the shoulder injury faith had never quite healed. “It was like anything else in this sad society,” he told us. “They didn’t have a relationship with God.” When we reminded him about the laminated picture of the Virgin Mary, he said, “Jesus is the one she should have had a picture of.” Through the wrinkles and unruly white eyebrows we could discern the handsome face of the man who had taught us to pass a football so many years ago. Mr. Buell had been a pilot in the Second World War. Shot down over Burma, he led his men on a hundred-mile hike through the jungle to safety. He never accepted any kind of medicine after that, not even aspirin. One winter he broke his shoulder skiing, and could only be convinced to get an X ray, nothing more. From that time on he winced when we tried to tackle him, and raked leaves one-handed, and no longer flipped daredevil pancakes on Sunday mornings. Otherwise he persevered, and always gently corrected us when we took the Lord’s name in vain. In his bedroom, the shoulder had fused into a graceful humpback. “It’s sad to think about those girls,” he said. “What a waste of life.”
The most popular theory at the time held Dominic Palazzolo to blame. Dominic was the immigrant kid staying with relatives until his family got settled in New Mexico. He was the first boy in our neighborhood to wear sunglasses, and within a week of arriving, he had fallen in love. The object of his desire wasn’t Cecilia but Diana Porter, a girl with chestnut hair and a horsey though pretty face who lived in an ivy-covered house on the lake. Unfortunately, she didn’t notice Dominic peering through the fence as she played fierce tennis on the clay court, nor as she lay, sweating nectar, on the poolside recliner. On our corner, in our group, Dominic Palazzolo didn’t join in conversations about baseball or busing, because he could speak only a few words of English, but every now and then he would tilt his head back so that his sunglasses reflected sky, and would say, “I love her.” Every time he said it he seemed delivered of a profundity that amazed him, as though he had coughed up a pearl. At the beginning of June, when Diana Porter left on vacation to Switzerland, Dominic was stricken. “Fuck the Holy Mother,” he said, despondent. “Fuck God.” And to show his desperation and the validity of his love, he climbed onto the roof of his relatives’ house and jumped off.
We watched him. We watched Cecilia Lisbon watching from her front yard. Dominic Palazzolo, with his tight pants, his Dingo boots, his pompadour, went into the house, we saw him passing the plate-glass picture windows downstairs; and then he appeared at an upstairs window, with a silk handkerchief around his neck. Climbing onto the ledge, he swung himself up to the flat roof. Aloft, he looked frail, diseased, and temperamental, as we expected a European to look. He toed the roof’s edge like a high diver, and whispered, “I love her,” to himself as he dropped past the windows and into the yard’s calculated shrubbery.
He didn’t hurt himself. He stood up after the fall, having proved his love, and down the block, some maintained, Cecilia Lisbon developed her own. Amy Schraff, who knew Cecilia in school, said that Dominic had been all she could talk about for the final week before commencement. Instead of studying for exams, she spent study halls looking up ITALY in the encyclopedia. She started saying “Ciao,” and began slipping into St. Paul’s Catholic Church on the Lake to sprinkle her forehead with holy water. In the cafeteria, even on hot days when the place was thick with the fumes of institutional food, Cecilia always chose the spaghetti and meatballs, as though by eating the same food as Dominic Palazzolo she could be closer to him. At the height of her crush she purchased the crucifix Peter Sissen had seen decorated with the brassiere.
The supporters of this theory always pointed to one central fact: the week before Cecilia’s suicide attempt, Dominic Palazzolo’s family had called him to New Mexico. He went telling God to fuck Himself all over again because New Mexico was even farther from Switzerland, where, right that minute, Diana Porter strolled under summer trees, moving unstoppably away from the world he was going to inherit as the owner of a carpet cleaning service. Cecilia had unleashed her blood in the bath, Amy Schraff said, because the ancient Romans had done that when life became unbearable, and she thought when Dominic heard about it, on the highway, amid the cactus, he would realize that it was she who loved him.
The psychiatrist’s report takes up most of the hospital record. After talking with Cecilia, Dr. Hornicker made the diagnosis that her suicide was an act of aggression inspired by the repression of adolescent libidinal urges. To each of three wildly different ink blots, she had responded, “A banana.” She also saw “prison bars,” “a swamp,” “an Afro,” and “the earth after an atomic bomb.” When asked why she had tried to kill herself, she said only, “It was a mistake,” and clammed up when Dr. Hornicker persisted. “Despite the severity of her wounds,” he wrote, “I do not think the patient truly meant to end her life. Her act was a cry for help.” He met with Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon and recommended that they relax their rules. He thought Cecilia would benefit by “having a social outlet, outside the codification of school, where she can interact with males her own age. At thirteen, Cecilia should be allowed to wear the sort of makeup popular among girls her age, in order to bond with them. The aping of shared customs is an indispensable step in the process of individuation.”
From that time on, the Lisbon house began to change. Almost every day, and even when she wasn’t keeping an eye on Cecilia, Lux would suntan on her towel, wearing the swimsuit that caused the knife sharpener to give her a fifteen-minute demonstration for nothing. The front door was always left open, because one of the girls was always running in or out. Once, outside Jeff Maldrum’s house, playing catch, we saw a group of girls dancing to rock and roll in his living room. They were very serious about learning the right ways to move, and we were amazed to learn that girls danced together for fun, while Jeff Maldrum only rapped the glass and made kissing noises until they pulled down the shade. Before they disappeared we saw Mary Lisbon in the back near the bookcase, wearing bell-bottomed blue jeans with a heart embroidered on the seat.
There were other miraculous changes. Butch, who cut the Lisbon grass, was now allowed inside for a glass of water, no longer having to drink from the outside faucet. Sweaty, shirtless, and tattooed, he walked right into the kitchen where the Lisbon girls lived and breathed, but we never asked him what he saw because we were scared of his muscles and his poverty.
We assumed Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon were in agreement about the new leniency, but when we met with Mr. Lisbon years later, he told us his wife had never agreed with the psychiatrist. “She just gave in for a while,” he said. Divorced by that time, he lived alone in an efficiency apartment, the floor of which was covered with shavings from his wood carvings. Whittled birds and frogs crowded the shelves. According to Mr. Lisbon, he had long harbored doubts about his wife’s strictness, knowing in his heart that girls forbidden to dance would only attract husbands with bad complexions and sunken chests. Also, the odor of all those cooped-up girls had begun to annoy him. He felt at times as though he were living in the bird house at the zoo. Everywhere he looked he found hairpins and fuzzy combs, and because so many females roamed the house they forgot he was a male and discussed their menstruation openly in front of him. Cecilia had just gotten her period, on the same day of the month as the other girls, who were all synchronized in their lunar rhythms. Those five days of each month were the worst for Mr. Lisbon, who had to dispense aspirin as though feeding the ducks and comfort crying jags that arose because a dog was killed on TV. He said the girls also displayed a dramatic womanliness during their “monthly time.” They were more languorous, descended the stairs in an actressy way, and kept saying with a wink, “Cousin Herbie’s come for a visit.” On some nights they sent him out to buy more Tampax, not just one box but four or five, and the young store clerks with their thin mustaches would smirk. He loved his daughters, they were precious to him, but he longed for the presence of a few boys.
That was why, two weeks after Cecilia returned home, Mr. Lisbon persuaded his wife to allow the girls to throw the first and only party of their short lives. We all received invitations, made by hand from construction paper, with balloons containing our names in Magic Marker. Our amazement at being formally invited to a house we had only visited in our bathroom fantasies was so great that we had to compare one another’s invitations before we believed it. It was thrilling to know that the Lisbon girls knew our names, that their delicate vocal cords had pronounced their syllables, and that they meant something in their lives. They had had to labor over proper spellings and to check our addresses in the phone book or by the metal numbers nailed to the trees.
As the night of the party approached, we watched the house for signs of decorating or other preparations, but saw none. The yellow bricks retained their look of a church-run orphanage and the silence of the lawn was absolute. The curtains didn’t rustle, nor did a van deliver six-foot submarine sandwiches or drums of potato chips.
Then the night arrived. In blue blazers, with khaki trousers and clip-on neckties, we walked along the sidewalk in front of the Lisbon house as we had so many times before, but this time we turned up the walk, and climbed the front steps between the pots of red geraniums, and rang the doorbell. Peter Sissen acted as our leader, and even looked slightly bored, saying again and again, “Wait’ll you see this.” The door opened. Above us, the face of Mrs. Lisbon took form in the dimness. She told us to come in, we bumped against each other getting through the doorway, and as soon as we set foot on the hooked rug in the foyer we saw that Peter Sissen’s descriptions of the house had been all wrong. Instead of a heady atmosphere of feminine chaos, we found the house to be a tidy, dry-looking place that smelled faintly of stale popcorn. A piece of needlepoint saying “Bless This Home” was framed over the arch, and to the right, on a shelf above the radiator, five pairs of bronzed baby shoes preserved for all time the unstimulating stage of the Lisbon girls’ infancy. The dining room was full of stark colonial furniture. One wall had a painting of Pilgrims plucking a turkey. The living room revealed orange carpeting and a brown vinyl sofa. Mr. Lisbon’s La-Z-Boy flanked a small table on which sat the partially completed model of a sailing ship, without rigging and with the busty mermaid on the prow painted over.
We were directed downstairs to the rec room. The steps were metal-tipped and steep, and as we descended, the light at the bottom grew brighter and brighter, as though we were approaching the molten core of the earth. By the time we reached the last step it was blinding. Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead; table lamps burned on every surface. The green and red linoleum checkerboard flamed beneath our buckled shoes. On a card table, the punch bowl erupted lava. The paneled walls gleamed, and for the first few seconds the Lisbon girls were only a patch of glare like a congregation of angels. Then, however, our eyes got used to the light and informed us of something we had never realized: the Lisbon girls were all different people. Instead of five replicas with the same blond hair and puffy cheeks we saw that they were distinct beings, their personalities beginning to transform their faces and reroute their expressions. We saw at once that Bonnie, who introduced herself now as Bonaventure, had the sallow complexion and sharp nose of a nun. Her eyes watered and she was a foot taller than any of her sisters, mostly because of the length of her neck which would one day hang from the end of a rope. Therese Lisbon had a heavier face, the cheeks and eyes of a cow, and she came forward to greet us on two left feet. Mary Lisbon’s hair was darker; she had a widow’s peak and fuzz above her upper lip that suggested her mother had found her depilatory wax. Lux Lisbon was the only one who accorded with our image of the Lisbon girls. She radiated health and mischief. Her dress fit tightly, and when she came forward to shake our hands, she secretly moved one finger to tickle our palms, giving off at the same time a strange gruff laugh. Cecilia was wearing, as usual, the wedding dress with the shorn hem. The dress was vintage 1920s. It had sequins on the bust she didn’t fill out, and someone, either Cecilia herself or the owner of the used clothing store, had cut off the bottom of the dress with a jagged stroke so that it ended above Cecilia’s chafed knees. She sat on a barstool, staring into her punch glass, and the shapeless bag of a dress fell over her. She had colored her lips with red crayon, which gave her face a deranged harlot look, but she acted as though no one were there.
We knew to stay away from her. The bandages had been removed, but she was wearing a collection of bracelets to hide the scars. None of the other girls had any bracelets on, and we assumed they’d given Cecilia all they had. Scotch tape held the undersides of the bracelets to Cecilia’s skin, so they wouldn’t slide. The wedding dress bore spots of hospital food, stewed carrots and beets. We got our punch and stood on one side of the room while the Lisbon girls stood on the other.
We had never been to a chaperoned party. We were used to the parties our older brothers threw with our parents out of town, to dark rooms vibrating with heaps of bodies, musical vomiting, beer kegs beached on ice in the bathtub, riots in the hallways, and the destruction of living room sculpture. This was all different. Mrs. Lisbon ladled out more glasses of punch while we watched Therese and Mary play dominoes, and across the room Mr. Lisbon opened his tool kit. He showed us his ratchets, spinning them in his hand so that they whirred, and a long sharp tube he called his router, and another covered with putty he called his scraper, and one more with a pronged end he said was his gouger. His voice was hushed as he spoke about these implements, but he never looked at us, only at the tools themselves, running his fingers over their lengths or testing their sharpness with the tender bulb of his thumb. A single vertical crease deepened in his forehead, and in the middle of his dry face his lips grew moist.
Through all this Cecilia remained on her stool.
We were happy when Joe the Retard showed up. He arrived on his mother’s arm, wearing his baggy Bermuda shorts and his blue baseball cap, and as usual he was grinning with the face he shared with every other mongoloid. He had his invitation tied with a red ribbon around his wrist, which meant that the Lisbon girls had spelled out his name as well as our own, and he came murmuring with his oversize jaw and loose lips, his tiny Japanese eyes, his smooth cheeks shaved by his brothers. Nobody knew exactly how old Joe the Retard was, but for as long as we could remember he had had whiskers. His brothers used to take him onto the porch with a bucket to shave him, yelling for him to keep still, saying if they slit his throat it wouldn’t be their fault, while Joe turned white and became as motionless as a lizard. We also knew that retards didn’t live long and aged faster than other people, which explained the gray hairs peeking out from under Joe’s baseball cap. As children we had expected that Joe the Retard would be dead by the time we became adolescents, but now we were adolescents and Joe was still a child.
Now that he had arrived we were able to show the Lisbon girls all the things we knew about him, how his ears wiggled if you scratched his chin, how he could only say “Heads” when you flipped a coin, never “Tails,” because that was too complicated, even if we said, “Joe, try tails,” he would say, “Heads!” thinking he won every time because we let him. We had him sing the song he always sang, the one Mr. Eugene taught him. He sang, “Oh, the monkeys have no tails in Sambo Wango, oh, the monkeys have no tails in Sambo Wango, oh, the monkeys have no tails, they were bitten off by whales,” and we clapped, and the Lisbon girls clapped, Lux clapped, and leaned against Joe the Retard, who was too dense to appreciate it.
The party was just beginning to get fun when Cecilia slipped off her stool and made her way to her mother. Playing with the bracelets on her left wrist, she asked if she could be excused. It was the only time we ever heard her speak, and we were surprised by the maturity of her voice. More than anything she sounded old and tired. She kept pulling on the bracelets, until Mrs. Lisbon said, “If that’s what you want, Cecilia. But we’ve gone to all this trouble to have a party for you.”
Cecilia tugged the bracelets until the tape came unstuck. Then she froze. Mrs. Lisbon said, “All right. Go up, then. We’ll have fun without you.” As soon as she had permission, Cecilia made for the stairs. She kept her face to the floor, moving in her personal oblivion, her sunflower eyes fixed on the predicament of her life we would never understand. She climbed the steps to the kitchen, closed the door behind her, and proceeded through the upstairs hallway. We could hear her feet right above us. Halfway up the staircase to the second floor her steps made no more noise, but it was only thirty seconds later that we heard the wet sound of her body falling onto the fence that ran alongside the house. First came the sound of wind, a rushing we decided later must have been caused by her wedding dress filling with air. This was brief. A human body falls fast. The main thing was just that: the fact of a person taking on completely physical properties, falling at the speed of a rock. It didn’t matter whether her brain continued to flash on the way down, or if she regretted what she’d done, or if she had time to focus on the fence spikes shooting toward her. Her mind no longer existed in any way that mattered. The wind sound huffed, once, and then the moist thud jolted us, the sound of a watermelon breaking open, and for that moment everyone remained still and composed, as though listening to an orchestra, heads tilted to allow the ears to work and no belief coming in yet. Then Mrs. Lisbon, as though alone, said, “Oh, my God.”
Mr. Lisbon ran upstairs. Mrs. Lisbon ran to the top and stood holding the banister. In the stairwell we could see her silhouette, the thick legs, the great sloping back, the big head stilled with panic, the eyeglasses jutting into space and filled with light. She took up most of the stairs and we were hesitant to go around her until the Lisbon girls did. Then we squeezed by. We reached the kitchen. Through a side window we could see Mr. Lisbon standing in the shrubbery. When we came out the front door we saw that he was holding Cecilia, one hand under her neck and the other under her knees. He was trying to lift her off the spike that had punctured her left breast, traveled through her inexplicable heart, separated two vertebrae without shattering either, and come out her back, ripping the dress and finding the air again. The spike had gone through so fast there was no blood on it. It was perfectly clean and Cecilia merely seemed balanced on the pole like a gymnast. The fluttering wedding dress added to this circusy effect. Mr. Lisbon kept trying to lift her off, gently, but even in our ignorance we knew it was hopeless and that despite Cecilia’s open eyes and the way her mouth kept contracting like that of a fish on a stringer it was just nerves and she had succeeded, on the second try, in hurling herself out of the world.
Two (#u4efa0307-dc2b-51bd-a36b-192563e781a6)
We didn’t understand why Cecilia had killed herself the first time and we understood even less when she did it twice. Her diary, which the police inspected as part of the customary investigation, didn’t confirm the supposition of unrequited love. Dominic Palazzolo was mentioned only once in that tiny rice-paper journal illuminated with colored Magic Markers to look like a Book of Hours or a medieval Bible. Miniature designs crowded the pages. Bubblegum angels swooped from top margins, or scraped their wings between teeming paragraphs. Maidens with golden hair dripped sea-blue tears into the book’s spine. Grape-colored whales spouted blood around a newspaper item (pasted in) listing arrivals to the endangered species list. Six hatchlings cried from shattered shells near an entry made on Easter. Cecilia had filled the pages with a profusion of colors and curlicues, Candyland ladders and striped shamrocks, but the entry about Dominic read, “Palazzolo jumped off the roof today over that rich bitch, Porter. How stupid can you be?”
The paramedics came back again, the same two, though it took us a while to recognize them. Out of fear and politeness we had moved across the street to sit on the hood of Mr. Larson’s Oldsmobile. As we made our exit, none of us had said a word except for Valentine Stamarowski, who called across the lawn, “Thank you for the party, Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon.” Mr. Lisbon was still sunk in bushes up to his waist, his back jerking as though he were trying to pull Cecilia up and off, or as though he were sobbing. On the porch Mrs. Lisbon made the other girls face the house. The sprinkler system, timed to go on at 8:15 p.m., spurted into life just as the EMS truck appeared at the end of the block, moving at about fifteen miles an hour, without flashing lights or siren, as though the paramedics already knew it was hopeless. The skinny one with the mustache climbed out first, then the fat one. They got the stretcher immediately, instead of first checking on the victim, a lapse which we later learned from medical professionals violated procedure. We didn’t know who had called the paramedics or how they knew they were no more than undertakers that day. Tom Faheem said Therese had gone inside and called, but the rest of us remember the remaining four Lisbon girls immobile on the porch until after the EMS truck arrived. No one else on our street was aware of what had happened. The identical lawns down the block were empty. Someone was barbecuing somewhere. Behind Joe Larson’s house we could hear a birdie being batted back and forth, endlessly, by the two greatest badminton players in the world.
The paramedics moved Mr. Lisbon aside so they could examine Cecilia. They found no pulse, but went ahead trying to save her anyway. The fat one hacksawed the fence stake while the skinny one got ready to catch her, because it was more dangerous to pull Cecilia off the barbed end than to leave it piercing her. When the stake snapped loose, the skinny one fell back under Cecilia’s released weight. Then he regained his footing, pivoted, and slipped her onto the stretcher. As they carried her away, the sawed-off stake lifted the sheet like a tent post.
By this time it was nearly nine o’clock. From the roof of Chase Buell’s house where we congregated after getting out of our dress-up clothes to watch what would happen next, we could see, over the heaps of trees throwing themselves into the air, the abrupt demarcation where the trees ended and the city began. The sun was falling in the haze of distant factories, and in the adjoining slums the scatter of glass picked up the raw glow of the smoggy sunset. Sounds we usually couldn’t hear reached us now that we were up high, and crouching on the tarred shingles, resting chins in hands, we made out, faintly, an indecipherable backward-playing tape of city life, cries and shouts, the barking of a chained dog, car horns, the voices of girls calling out numbers in an obscure tenacious game—sounds of the impoverished city we never visited, all mixed and muted, without sense, carried on a wind from that place. Then: darkness. Car lights moving in the distance. Up close, yellow house lights coming on, revealing families around televisions. One by one, we all went home.
•
There had never been a funeral in our town before, at least not during our lifetimes. The majority of dying had happened during the Second World War when we didn’t exist and our fathers were impossibly skinny young men in black-and-white photographs—dads on jungle airstrips, dads with pimples and tattoos, dads with pinups, dads who wrote love letters to the girls who would become our mothers, dads inspired by K rations, loneliness and glandular riot in malarial air into poetic reveries that ceased entirely once they got back home. Now our dads were middle-aged, with paunches, and shins rubbed hairless from years of wearing pants, but they were still a long way from death. Their own parents, who spoke foreign languages and lived in converted attics like buzzards, had the finest medical care available and were threatening to live on until the next century. Nobody’s grandfather had died, nobody’s grandmother, nobody’s parents, only a few dogs: Tom Burke’s beagle, Muffin, who choked on Bazooka Joe bubble gum, and then that summer, a creature who in dog years was still a puppy—Cecilia Lisbon.
The cemetery workers’ strike hit its sixth week the day she died. Nobody had given much thought to the strike, nor to the cemetery workers’ grievances, because most of us had never been to a cemetery. Occasionally we heard gunshots coming from the ghetto, but our fathers insisted it was only cars backfiring. Therefore, when the newspapers reported that burials in the city had completely stopped, we didn’t think it affected us. Likewise, Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon, only in their forties, with a crop of young daughters, had given little thought to the strike, until those same daughters began killing themselves.
Funerals continued, but without the consummation of burial. Caskets were carted out beside undug plots; priests performed eulogies; tears were shed; after which the caskets were taken back to the deep freeze of the mortuary to await a settlement. Cremation enjoyed a rise in popularity. Mrs. Lisbon, however, objected to this idea, fearing it was heathen, and even pointed to a biblical passage that suggested the dead will rise bodily at the Second Coming, no ashes allowed.
Only one cemetery existed in our suburb, a drowsy field owned by various denominations over the years, from Lutheran through Episcopalian to Catholic. It contained three French Canadian fur trappers, a line of bakers named Kropp, and J. B. Milbank, who invented a local soft drink resembling root beer. With its leaning headstones, its red gravel drive in the shape of a horseshoe, and its many trees nourished by well-fed carcasses, the cemetery had filled up long ago in the time of the last deaths. Because of this, the funeral director, Mr. Alton, was forced to take Mr. Lisbon on a tour of possible alternatives.
He remembered the trip well. The days of the cemetery strike weren’t easily forgotten, but Mr. Alton also confessed, “It was my first suicide. A young kid, too. You couldn’t use the same sort of condolences. I was kind of sweating it out, to tell you the truth.” On the West Side they visited a quiet cemetery in the Palestinian section, but Mr. Lisbon didn’t like the foreign sound of the muezzin calling the people to prayer, and had heard that the neighbors still ritually slaughtered goats in their bathtubs. “Not here,” he said, “not here.” Next they toured a small Catholic cemetery that looked perfect, until, coming to the back, Mr. Lisbon saw two miles of leveled land that reminded him of photographs of Hiroshima. “It was Poletown,” Mr. Alton told us. “GM bought out like twenty-five thousand Polacks to build this huge automotive plant. They knocked down twenty-four city blocks, then ran out of money. So the place was all rubble and weeds. It was desolate, sure, but only if you were looking out the back fence.” Finally they arrived at a public nondenominational cemetery located between two freeways, and it was here that Cecilia Lisbon was given all the final funerary rites of the Catholic Church except interment. Officially, Cecilia’s death was listed in church records as an “accident,” as were the other girls’ a year later. When we asked Father Moody about this, he said, “We didn’t want to quibble. How do you know she didn’t slip?” When we brought up the sleeping pills, and the noose, and the rest of it, he said, “Suicide, as a mortal sin, is a matter of intent. It’s very difficult to know what was in those girls’ hearts. What they were really trying to do.”
Most of our parents attended the funeral, leaving us home to protect us from the contamination of tragedy. They all agreed the cemetery was the flattest they had ever seen. There were no headstones or monuments, only granite tablets sunk into the earth, and, on V.F.W. graves, plastic American flags abused by rain, or wire garlands holding dead flowers. The hearse had trouble getting through the gate because of the picketing, but when the strikers learned the deceased’s age, they parted, and even lowered their angry placards. Inside, neglect resulting from the strike was obvious. Dirt was piled around some graves. A digging machine stood frozen with its jaws piercing the sod, as though the union’s call had come in the middle of burying someone. Family members acting as caretakers had made touching attempts to spruce up loved ones’ final resting places. Excessive fertilizer had scorched one plot a blazing yellow. Excessive watering had turned another into a marsh. Because water had to be carried in by hand (the sprinkler system had been sabotaged), a trail of deep footprints from grave to grave made it appear the dead were walking around at night.
The grass hadn’t been cut in nearly seven weeks. Mourners stood ankle-deep as the pallbearers carried out the coffin. Because of the low teenage mortality rate, mortuary suppliers built few caskets to their middling size. They manufactured a small quantity of infant caskets, little bigger than bread boxes. The next size up was full-size, more than Cecilia required. When they had opened her casket at the Funeral Home, all anyone had seen was the satin pillow and the ruffled cushioning of the casket’s lid. Mrs. Turner said, “For a minute I thought the thing was empty.” But then, making only a shallow imprint because of her eighty-six pounds, pale skin and hair blending with white satin, Cecilia emerged from the background like a figure in an optical illusion. She was dressed not in the wedding gown, which Mrs. Lisbon had thrown away, but in a beige dress with a lace collar, a Christmas gift from her grandmother which she had refused to wear in life. The open section of lid revealed not only her face and shoulders, but her hands with their bitten nails, her rough elbows, the twin prongs of her hips, and even her knees.
Only the family filed past the coffin. First the girls walked past, each dazed and expressionless, and, later, people said we should have known by their faces. “It was like they were giving her a wink,” Mrs. Carruthers said. “They should have been bawling, but what did they do? Up to the coffin, peek in, and away. Why didn’t we see it?” Curt Van Osdol, the only kid at the Funeral Home, said he would have copped a last feel, right there in front of the priest and everybody, if only we had been there to appreciate it. After the girls passed by, Mrs. Lisbon, on her husband’s arm, took ten stricken steps to dangle her weak head over Cecilia’s face, rouged for the first and last time ever. “Look at her nails,” Mr. Burton thought he heard her say. “Couldn’t they do something about her nails?”
And then Mr. Lisbon replied: “They’ll grow out. Fingernails keep growing. She can’t bite them now, dear.”
•
Our own knowledge of Cecilia kept growing after her death, too, with the same unnatural persistence. Though she had spoken only rarely and had had no real friends, everybody possessed his own vivid memories of Cecilia. Some of us had held her for five minutes as a baby while Mrs. Lisbon ran back into the house to get her purse. Some of us had played in the sandbox with her, fighting over a shovel, or had exposed ourselves to her behind the mulberry tree that grew like deformed flesh through the chain link fence. We had stood in line with her for smallpox vaccinations, had held polio sugar cubes under our tongues with her, had taught her to jump rope, to light snakes, had stopped her from picking her scabs on numerous occasions, and had cautioned her against touching her mouth to the drinking fountain at Three Mile Park. A few of us had fallen in love with her, but had kept it to ourselves, knowing that she was the weird sister.
Cecilia’s bedroom—when we finally obtained a description from Lucy Brock—confirmed this assessment of her character. In addition to a zodiac mobile, Lucy found a collection of potent amethysts, as well as a pack of Tarot cards under Cecilia’s pillow that still smelled of her incense and hair. Lucy checked—because we asked her to—to see if the sheets had been cleaned, but she said they hadn’t. The room had been left intact as an exhibit. The window from which Cecilia jumped was still open. In the top bureau drawer, Lucy found seven pairs of underpants, each dyed black with Rit. She also found two pairs of immaculate high-tops in the closet. Neither of these things surprised us. We had long known about Cecilia’s black underwear because whenever she’d stood up on her bicycle pedals to gain speed we had looked up her dress. We’d also often seen her on the back steps, scrubbing her high-tops with a toothbrush and cup of Ivory Liquid.
Cecilia’s diary begins a year and a half before her suicide. Many people felt the illuminated pages constituted a hieroglyphics of unreadable despair, though the pictures looked cheerful for the most part. The diary had a lock, but David Barker, who got it from Skip Ortega, the plumber’s assistant, told us that Skip had found the diary next to the toilet in the master bathroom, its lock already jimmied as though Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon had been reading it themselves. Tim Winer, the brain, insisted on examining the diary. We carried it to the study his parents had built for him, with its green desk lamps, contour globe, and gilt-edged encyclopedias. “Emotional instability,” he said, analyzing the handwriting. “Look at the dots on these i’s. All over the place.” And then, leaning forward, showing the blue veins beneath his weakling’s skin, he added: “Basically, what we have here is a dreamer. Somebody out of touch with reality. When she jumped, she probably thought she’d fly.”
We know portions of the diary by heart now. After we got it up to Chase Buell’s attic, we read portions out loud. We passed the diary around, fingering pages and looking anxiously for our names. Gradually, however, we learned that although Cecilia had stared at everybody all the time, she hadn’t thought about any of us. Nor did she think about herself. The diary is an unusual document of adolescence in that it rarely depicts the emergence of an unformed ego. The standard insecurities, laments, crushes, and daydreams are nowhere in evidence. Instead, Cecilia writes of her sisters and herself as a single entity. It’s often difficult to identify which sister she’s talking about, and many strange sentences conjure in the reader’s mind an image of a mythical creature with ten legs and five heads, lying in bed eating junk food, or suffering visits from affectionate aunts. Most of the diary told us more about how the girls came to be than why they killed themselves. We got tired of hearing about what they ate (“Monday, February 13. Today we had frozen pizza …”), or what they wore, or which colors they favored. They all detested creamed corn. Mary had chipped her tooth on the monkey bars and had a cap. (“I told you,” Kevin Head said, reading that.) And so we learned about their lives, came to hold collective memories of times we hadn’t experienced, harbored private images of Lux leaning over the side of a ship to stroke her first whale, and saying, “I didn’t think they would stink so much,” while Therese answered, “It’s the kelp in their baleens rotting.” We became acquainted with starry skies the girls had gazed at while camping years before, and the boredom of summers traipsing from back yard to front to back again, and even a certain indefinable smell that arose from toilets on rainy nights, which the girls called “sewery.” We knew what it felt like to see a boy with his shirt off, and why it made Lux write the name Kevin in purple Magic Marker all over her three-ring binder and even on her bras and panties, and we understood her rage coming home one day to find that Mrs. Lisbon had soaked her things in Clorox, bleaching all the “Kevins” out. We knew the pain of winter wind rushing up your skirt, and the ache of keeping your knees together in class, and how drab and infuriating it was to jump rope while the boys played baseball. We could never understand why the girls cared so much about being mature, or why they felt compelled to compliment each other, but sometimes, after one of us had read a long portion of the diary out loud, we had to fight back the urge to hug one another or to tell each other how pretty we were. We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together. We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn’t fathom them at all. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.
As the diary progresses, Cecilia begins to recede from her sisters and, in fact, from personal narrative of any kind. The first person singular ceases almost entirely, the effect akin to a camera’s pulling away from the characters at the end of a movie, to show, in a series of dissolves, their house, street, city, country, and finally planet, which not only dwarfs but obliterates them. Her precocious prose turns to impersonal subjects, the commercial of the weeping Indian paddling his canoe along a polluted stream, or the body counts from the evening war. In its last third the diary shows two rotating moods. In romantic passages Cecilia despairs over the demise of our elm trees. In cynical entries she suggests the trees aren’t sick at all, and that the deforesting is a plot “to make everything flat.” Occasional references to this or that conspiracy theory crop up—the Illuminati, the Military-Industrial complex—but she only feints in that direction, as though the names are so many vague chemical pollutants. From invective she shifts without pause into her poetic reveries again. A couplet about summer from a poem she never finished, is quite nice, we think:
The trees like lungs filling with air My sister, the mean one, pulling my hair
The fragment is dated June 26, three days after she returned from the hospital, when we used to see her lying in the front-yard grass.
•
Little is known of Cecilia’s state of mind on the last day of her life. According to Mr. Lisbon, she seemed pleased about her party. When he went downstairs to check on the preparations, he found Cecilia standing on a chair, tying balloons to the ceiling with red and blue ribbons. “I told her to get down. The doctor said she shouldn’t hold her hands over her head. Because of the stitches.” She did as commanded, and spent the rest of the day lying on the rug in her bedroom, staring up at her zodiac mobile and listening to the odd Celtic records she’d gotten through a mail-order house. “It was always some soprano singing about marshes and dead roses.” The melancholic music alarmed Mr. Lisbon, comparing it as he did to the optimistic tunes of his own youth, but, passing down the hall, he realized that it was certainly no worse than Lux’s howling rock music or even the inhuman screech of Therese’s ham radio.
From two in the afternoon on, Cecilia soaked in the bathtub. It wasn’t unusual for her to take marathon baths, but after what had happened the last time, Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon took no chances. “We made her leave the door open a crack,” Mrs. Lisbon said. “She didn’t like it, of course. And now she had new ammunition. That psychiatrist had said Ceel was at the age where she needed a lot of privacy.” Throughout the afternoon, Mr. Lisbon kept coming up with excuses to pass by the bathroom. “I’d wait to hear a splash, then I’d go on past. We’d taken everything sharp out of there, of course.”
At four-thirty, Mrs. Lisbon sent Lux up to check on Cecilia. When she came back downstairs, she seemed unconcerned, and nothing about her demeanor suggested she had an inkling about what her sister would do later that day. “She’s fine,” Lux said. “She’s stinking up the place with those bath salts.”
At five-thirty, Cecilia got out of the bath and dressed for the party. Mrs. Lisbon heard her going back and forth between her sisters’ two bedrooms (Bonnie shared with Mary, Therese with Lux). The rattling of her bracelets comforted her parents because it allowed them to keep track of her movements like an animal with a bell on its collar. From time to time during the hours before we arrived, Mr. Lisbon heard the tinkling of Cecilia’s bracelets as she went up and down the stairs, trying on different shoes.
According to what they told us later on separate occasions and in separate states, Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon didn’t find Cecilia’s behavior strange during the party. “She was always quiet with company,” Mrs. Lisbon said. And perhaps because of their lack of socializing, Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon remembered the party as a successful event. Mrs. Lisbon, in fact, was surprised when Cecilia asked to be excused. “I thought she was having a nice time.” Even at this point, the other girls didn’t act as though they knew what was about to happen. Tom Faheem recalls Mary telling him about a jumper she wanted to buy at Penney’s. Therese and Tim Winer discussed their anxiety over getting into an Ivy League college.
From clues later discovered, it appears Cecilia’s ascent to her bedroom was not as quick as we remember it. She took time, for instance, between leaving us and reaching the upstairs to drink juice from a can of pears (she left the can on the counter, punctured with only one hole in disregard of Mrs. Lisbon’s prescribed method). Either before or after drinking the juice, she went to the back door. “I thought they were sending her on a trip,” Mrs. Pitzenberger said. “She was carrying a suitcase.”
No suitcase was ever found. We can only explain Mrs. Pitzenberger’s testimony as the hallucination of a bifocal wearer, or a prophecy of the later suicides where luggage played such a central motif. Whatever the truth, Mrs. Pitzenberger saw Cecilia close the back door, and it was only seconds later that she climbed the stairs, as we so distinctly heard from below. She flipped on the lights in her bedroom as she entered, though it was still light out. Across the street, Mr. Buell saw her open her bedroom window. “I waved to her, but she didn’t see me,” he told us. Just then his wife groaned from the other room. He didn’t hear about Cecilia until after the EMS truck had come and gone. “Unfortunately, we had problems of our own,” he said. He went to check on his sick spouse just as Cecilia stuck her head out the window, into the pink, humid, pillowing air.
Three (#u4efa0307-dc2b-51bd-a36b-192563e781a6)
Flower arrangements arrived at the Lisbon house later than was customary. Because of the nature of the death, most people decided not to send flowers to the Funeral Home, and in general everybody put off placing their orders, unsure whether to let the catastrophe pass in silence or to act as though the death were natural. In the end, however, everybody sent something, white roses in wreaths, clusters of orchids, weeping peonies. Peter Loomis, who delivered for FTD, said flowers crammed the Lisbons’ entire living room. Bouquets exploded from chairs and lay scattered across the floor. “They didn’t even put them in vases,” he said. Most people opted for generic cards that said “With Sympathy” or “Our Condolences,” but some of the Waspier types, accustomed to writing notes for all occasions, labored over personal responses. Mrs. Beards used a quote from Walt Whitman we took to murmuring to one another: “All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, / and to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.” Chase Buell peeked at his own mother’s card as he slipped it under the Lisbons’ door. It read: “I don’t know what you’re feeling. I won’t even pretend.”
A few people braved personal calls. Mr. Hutch and Mr. Peters walked over to the Lisbon house on separate occasions, but their reports differed little. Mr. Lisbon invited them in, but before they could broach the painful subject, he sat them down in front of the baseball game. “He kept talking about the bullpen,” Mr. Hutch said. “Hell, I pitched in college. I had to straighten him out on a few essentials. First of all, he wanted to trade Miller, though he was our only decent closer. I forgot what I’d gone over there to do.” Mr. Peters said, “The guy was only half there. He kept turning the tint control up, so that the infield was practically blue. Then he’d sit back down. Then he’d get up again. One of the girls came in—can you tell them apart?—and brought us a couple beers. Took a swig from his before handing it over.”
Neither of the men mentioned the suicide. “I wanted to, I really did,” said Mr. Hutch. “I just never got around to it.”
Father Moody showed more perseverance. Mr. Lisbon welcomed the cleric as he had the other men, ushering him to a seat before the baseball game. A few minutes later, as though on cue, Mary served beers. But Father Moody wasn’t deflected. During the second inning, he said, “How about we get the Mrs. down here? Have a little chat.”
Mr. Lisbon hunched toward the screen. “Afraid she’s not seeing anybody right now. Under the weather.”
“She’ll see her priest,” Father Moody said.
He stood up to go. Mr. Lisbon held up two fingers. His eyes were watering. “Father,” he said. “Double-play ball, Father.”
Paolo Conelli, an altar boy, overheard Father Moody tell Fred Simpson, the choirmaster, how he had left “that strange man, God forgive me for saying so, but He made him that way,” and climbed the front stairs. Already the house showed signs of uncleanliness, though they were nothing compared to what was to come later. Dust balls lined the steps. A half-eaten sandwich sat atop the landing where someone had felt too sad to finish it. Because Mrs. Lisbon had stopped doing laundry or even buying detergent, the girls had taken to washing clothes by hand in the bathtub, and when Father Moody passed their bathroom, he saw shirts and pants and underthings draped over the shower curtain. “It sounded quite pleasant, actually,” he said. “Like rain.” Steam rose from the floor, along with the smell of jasmine soap (weeks later, we asked the cosmetics lady at Jacobsen’s for some jasmine soap we could smell). Father Moody stood outside the bathroom, too bashful to enter that moist cave that existed as a common room between the girls’ two shared bedrooms. Inside, if he hadn’t been a priest and had looked, he would have seen the throne-like toilet where the Lisbon girls defecated publicly, the bathtub they used as a couch, filling it with pillows so that two sisters could luxuriate while another curled her hair. He would have seen the radiator stacked with glasses and Coke cans, the clamshell soap dish employed, in a pinch, as an ashtray. From the age of twelve Lux spent hours in the john smoking cigarettes, exhaling either out the window or into a wet towel she then hung outside. But Father Moody saw none of this. He only passed through the tropical air current and that was all. Behind him he felt the colder drafts of the house, circulating dust motes and that particular family smell every house had, you knew it when you came in—Chase Buell’s house smelled like skin, Joe Larson’s like mayonnaise, the Lisbons’ like stale popcorn, we thought, though Father Moody, going there after the deaths had begun, said, “It was a mix between a funeral parlor and broom closet. All those flowers. All that dust.” He wanted to step back into the current of jasmine, but as he stood, listening to rain beading bathroom tiles and washing away the girls’ footprints, he heard voices. He made a quick circuit of the hallway, calling out for Mrs. Lisbon, but she didn’t respond. Returning to the top of the stairs, he had started down when he saw the Lisbon girls through a partly open doorway.
“At that point, those girls had no intention of repeating Cecilia’s mistake. I know everyone thinks it was a plan, or that we handled it poorly, but they were just as shocked as I was.” Father Moody rapped softly on the door and asked for permission to enter. “They were sitting on the floor together, and I could tell they’d been crying. I think they were having some kind of slumber party. They had pillows all over. I hate to mention it, and I remember scolding myself for even thinking it at the time, but it was unmistakable: they hadn’t bathed.”
We asked Father Moody whether he had discussed Cecilia’s death or the girls’ grief, but he said he hadn’t. “I brought it up a few times, but they didn’t take up the subject. I’ve learned you can’t force it. The time has to be right and the heart willing.” When we asked him to sum up his impression of the girls’ emotional state at that point, he said, “Buffeted but not broken.”
•
In the first few days after the funeral, our interest in the Lisbon girls only increased. Added to their loveliness was a new mysterious suffering, perfectly silent, visible in the blue puffiness beneath their eyes or the way they would sometimes stop in mid-stride, look down, and shake their heads as though disagreeing with life. Grief made them wander. We heard reports of the girls walking aimlessly through Eastland, down the lighted mall with its timid fountains and hot dogs impaled beneath heat lamps. Now and then they fingered a blouse, or dress, but bought nothing. Woody Clabault saw Lux Lisbon talking to a motorcycle gang outside Hudson’s. One biker asked her to go for a ride, and after looking in the direction of her house more than ten miles away, she accepted. She hugged his waist. He kicked the machine into life. Later, Lux was seen walking home alone, carrying her shoes.
In the Kriegers’ basement, we lay on a strip of leftover carpeting and dreamed of all the ways we could soothe the Lisbon girls. Some of us wanted to lie down in the grass with them, or play the guitar and sing them songs. Paul Baldino wanted to take them to Metro Beach so they could all get a tan. Chase Buell, more and more under the sway of his father the Christian Scientist, said only that the girls needed “help not of this world.” But when we asked him what he meant, he shrugged and said, “Nothing.” Nevertheless, when the girls walked by, we often found him crouching by a tree, moving his lips with his eyes closed.
Not everyone thought about the girls, however. Even before Cecilia’s funeral, some people could talk of nothing but the dangerousness of the fence she’d jumped on. “It was an accident waiting to happen,” said Mr. Frank, who worked in insurance. “You couldn’t get a policy to cover it.”
“Our kids could jump on it, too,” Mrs. Zaretti insisted during coffee hour following Sunday Mass. Not long after, a group of fathers began digging the fence out free of charge. It turned out the fence stood on the Bateses’ property. Mr. Buck, a lawyer, negotiated with Mr.. Bates about the fence’s removal and didn’t speak to Mr. Lisbon at all. Everyone assumed, of course, that the Lisbons would be grateful.
We had rarely seen our fathers in work boots before, toiling in the earth and wielding brand-new root clippers. They struggled with the fence, bent over like Marines hoisting the flag on Iwo Jima. It was the greatest show of common effort we could remember in our neighborhood, all those lawyers, doctors, and mortgage bankers locked arm in arm in the trench, with our mothers bringing out orange Kool-Aid, and for a moment our century was noble again. Even the sparrows on the telephone lines seemed to be watching. No cars passed. The industrial fog of our city made the men resemble figures hammered into pewter, but by late afternoon they still couldn’t uproot the fence. Mr. Hutch got the idea of hacksawing the bars as the paramedics had, and for a while the men took turns sawing, but their paper-pushing arms gave out quickly. Finally they tied the fence to the back of Uncle Tucker’s four-wheel-drive Bronco. Nobody cared that Uncle Tucker didn’t have a license (driving examiners always smelled booze on him, even if he quit drinking three days before the test they still smelled it evaporating from his pores). Our fathers just cried, “Hit it!” and Uncle Tucker floored his accelerator, but the fence didn’t budge. By midafternoon they abandoned the effort and took up a collection to hire a professional hauling service. An hour later, a lone man showed up in a tow truck, attached a hook to the fence, pressed a button to make his giant winch revolve, and with a deep earth sound, the murdering fence came loose. “You can see blood,” Anthony Turkis said, and we looked to see if the blood that hadn’t been there at the time of the suicide had arrived after the fact. Some said it was on the third spike, some said the fourth, but it was as impossible as finding the bloody shovel on the back of AbbeyRoad where all the clues proclaimed that Paul was dead.
None of the Lisbons helped with the fence removal. From time to time, however, we saw their faces blinking at the windows. Just after the truck pulled the fence free, Mr. Lisbon himself came out the side door and coiled up a garden hose. He didn’t move to the trench. He raised one hand in a neighborly salute and returned inside. The man lashed the fence, in sections, to his truck and—getting paid for it—gave Mr. Bates the worst lawn job we’d ever seen. We were amazed our parents permitted this, when lawn jobs usually justified calling the cops. But now Mr. Bates didn’t scream or try to get the truck’s license plate, nor did Mrs. Bates, who had once wept when we set off firecrackers in her state-fair tulips—they said nothing, and our parents said nothing, so that we sensed how ancient they were, how accustomed to trauma, depressions, and wars. We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the world they really believed in, and that for all their caretaking and bitching about crabgrass they didn’t give a damn about lawns.
After the truck drove away, our fathers gathered around the hole once more, staring down at wriggling earthworms, kitchen spoons, the one rock Paul Little swore was an Indian arrowhead. They leaned on shovels, mopping brows, even though they hadn’t done anything. Everyone felt a lot better, as though the lake had been cleaned up, or the air, or the other side’s bombs destroyed. There wasn’t much you could do to save us, but at least the fence was gone. Despite the devastation of his lawn, Mr. Bates did some edging, and the old German couple appeared in their grape arbor to drink dessert wine. As usual they wore their Alpine hats, Mr. Hessen’s with a tiny green feather, while their schnauzer sniffed at the end of his leash. Grapes burst above their heads. Mrs. Hessen’s humped back dove and surfaced amid her swelling rosebushes as she sprayed.
At some point, we looked up into the sky to see that all the fish flies had died. The air was no longer brown but blue. Using kitchen brooms, we swept bugs from poles and windows and electrical lines. We stuffed them into bags, thousands upon thousands of insect bodies with wings of raw silk, and Tim Winer, the brain, pointed out how the fish flies’ tails resembled those of lobsters. “They’re smaller,” he said, “but possess the same basic design. Lobsters are classified in the phylum Arthropoda, same as insects. They’re bugs. And bugs are only lobsters that have learned to fly.”
No one ever understood what got into us that year, or why we hated so intensely the crust of dead bugs over our lives. Suddenly, however, we couldn’t bear the fish flies carpeting our swimming pools, filling our mailboxes, blotting out stars on our flags. The collective action of digging the trench led to cooperative sweeping, bag-carting, patio-hosing. A score of brooms kept time in all directions as the pale ghosts of fish flies dropped from walls like ash. We examined their tiny wizards’ faces, rubbing them between our fingers until they gave off the scent of carp. We tried to light them but they wouldn’t burn (which made the fish flies seem deader than anything). We hit bushes, beat rugs, turned on windshield wipers full blast. Fish flies clogged sewer grates so that we had to stuff them down with sticks. Crouching over sewers, we could hear the river under the city flowing away. We dropped rocks and listened for the splash.
We didn’t stop with our own houses. Once our walls were clean, Mr. Buell told Chase to start cleaning bugs off the Lisbon house. Because of his religious beliefs, Mr. Buell often went the extra mile, raking ten feet into the Hessens’ yard, or shoveling their walk and even throwing down rock salt. It wasn’t odd for him to tell Chase to start sweeping the Lisbons’ house, even though they lived across the street and not next door. Because Mr. Lisbon only had daughters, boys and men had gone over in the past to help him drag away lightning-struck limbs, and as Chase approached, holding his broom over his head like a regimental banner, nobody said a word. Then, however, Mr. Krieger told Kyle to go over and sweep some, and Mr. Hutch sent Ralph, and soon we were all over at the Lisbon house, brushing walls and scraping away bug husks. They had even more than we did, the walls an inch thick, and Paul Baldino asked us the riddle, “What smells like fish, is fun to eat, but isn’t fish?”
Once we got to the Lisbons’ windows, our new inexplicable feelings for the girls came to the fore. As we slapped off bugs, we saw Mary Lisbon in the kitchen, holding a box of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese. She appeared to be contemplating whether or not to open it. She read the directions, turned the box over to look at the vivid picture of the noodles, and then put the box back on the counter. Anthony Turkis, pressing his face to the window, said, “She should eat something.” She picked up the box again. Hopefully, we watched. But then she turned and disappeared.
Outside it grew dark. Lights came on down the block, but not in the Lisbon house. We couldn’t see in any better, and in fact the glass panes began to reflect our own gaping faces. It was only nine o’clock, but everything confirmed what people had been saying: that since Cecilia’s suicide the Lisbons could hardly wait for night to forget themselves in sleep. Up in a bedroom window, Bonnie’s three votive candles glimmered in a reddish haze, but otherwise the house absorbed the shadows of night. Insects started up in their hiding places all around, vibrating the minute we turned our backs. Everyone called them crickets, but we never found any in the sprayed bushes or aerated lawns, and had no idea what they looked like. They were merely sound. Our parents had been more intimate with crickets. For them the buzzing apparently didn’t sound mechanical. It came from every direction, always from a height just above our heads, or just below, and always with the suggestion that the insect world felt more than we did. As we stood charmed into stillness, listening to the crickets, Mr. Lisbon came out the side door and thanked us. His hair looked even grayer than usual, but grief hadn’t altered the highness of his voice. He had on overalls, one knee covered by sawdust. “Feel free to use the hose,” he said, and then he looked at the Good Humor truck passing by, the jingle of the bell seemed to trigger a memory, he smiled, or winced—we couldn’t tell which—and returned inside.
We went with him only later, invisibly, with the ghosts of our questions. Apparently, as he stepped back inside, he saw Therese come out of the dining room. She was stuffing her mouth with candy—M&M’s, by the colors—but stopped immediately on seeing him. She swallowed an unchewed chunk. Her high forehead glowed in the light from the street and her cupid’s lips were redder, smaller, and more shapely than he remembered, especially in contrast to her cheeks and chin, which had gained weight. Her eyelashes were crusted, as though recently glued shut. At that moment Mr. Lisbon had the feeling that he didn’t know who she was, that children were only strangers you agreed to live with, and he reached out in order to meet her for the first time. He rested his hands on her shoulders, then dropped them to his sides. Therese brushed the hair out of her face, smiled, and began walking slowly up the stairs.
Mr. Lisbon went on his usual nighttime rounds, checking to see that the front door was locked (it wasn’t), that the garage light was off (it was), and that none of the burners on the stove had been left on (none had). He turned off the light in the first-floor bathroom, where he found Kyle Krieger’s retainer in the sink, left from when he’d taken it out during the party to eat cake. Mr. Lisbon ran the retainer under water, examining the pink shell form-fitted to the roof of Kyle’s mouth, the crenellations in the plastic that encircled the turret of his teeth, the looping front wire bent at key spots (you could see plier marks) to provide modulated pressure. Mr. Lisbon knew his parental and neighborly duty entailed putting the retainer in a Ziploc bag, calling the Kriegers, and telling them their expensive orthodontal device was in safe keeping. Acts like these—simple, humane, conscientious, forgiving—held life together. Only a few days earlier he would have been able to perform them. But now he took the retainer and dropped it in the toilet. He pressed the handle. The retainer, jostled in the surge, disappeared down the porcelain throat, and, when waters abated, floated triumphantly, mockingly, out. Mr. Lisbon waited for the tank to refill and flushed again, but the same thing happened. The replica of the boy’s mouth clung to the white slope.
At that point something flashed in the corner of his eye. “I thought I saw somebody, but when I looked, there was nothing there.” Nor did he see anything as he came around the back hall into the foyer and up the front stairs. On the second floor he listened at the girls’ doors, but heard only Mary coughing in her sleep, Lux playing a radio softly, singing along. He stepped into the girls’ bathroom. A beam of light from the risen moon penetrated the window, lighting up a portion of mirror. Amid smudged fingerprints, a small circle had been wiped clean where his daughters contemplated their images, and above the mirror itself Bonnie had taped a white construction-paper dove. Mr. Lisbon parted his lips in a grimace and saw in the clean circle the one dead canine tooth beginning to turn green on the left side of his mouth. The doors to the girls’ shared bedrooms were not completely closed. Breathings and murmurings issued from them. He listened to the sounds as though they could tell him what the girls were feeling and how to comfort them. Lux switched her radio off, and everything was silent. “I couldn’t go in,” Mr. Lisbon confessed to us years later. “I didn’t know what to say.” Only as he left the bathroom, heading for the oblivion of sleep himself, did Mr. Lisbon see Cecilia’s ghost. She was standing in her old bedroom, dressed in the wedding dress again, having somehow shed the beige dress with the lace collar she’d worn in her coffin. “The window was still open,” Mr. Lisbon said. “I don’t think we’d ever remembered to shut it. It was all clear to me. I knew I had to close that window or else she’d go on jumping out of it forever.”
According to his story, he didn’t cry out. He didn’t want to make contact with the shade of his daughter, to learn why she had done herself in, to ask forgiveness, or to rebuke her. He merely rushed forward, brushing past, to close the window. As he did, however, the ghost turned, and he saw that it was only Bonnie, wrapped in a bedsheet. “Don’t worry,” she said, quietly. “They took the fence out.”
•
In a handwritten note displaying the penmanship perfected during his graduate school days in Zurich, Dr. Hornicker called Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon in for a second consultation, but they didn’t go. Instead, from what we observed during the remainder of the summer, Mrs. Lisbon once more took charge of the house while Mr. Lisbon receded into a mist. When we saw him after that, he had the sheepish look of a poor relation. By late August, in the weeks of preparation before school, he began leaving by the back door as though sneaking out. His car would whine inside the garage and, when the automatic door rose, would emerge tentatively, lopsided like an animal missing a leg. Through the windshield we could see Mr. Lisbon at the wheel, his hair still wet and his face sometimes dabbed with shaving cream, but he made no expression when the tail pipe hit the end of the driveway, sending up sparks, as it did every time. At six o’clock he returned home. As he came up the drive, the garage door shuddered to engulf him, and then we wouldn’t see him until the next morning, when the clanging tail pipe announced his departure.
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Jeffrey Eugenides
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: In a quiet suburb of Detroit, the five Lisbon sisters – beautiful, eccentric, and obsessively watched by the neighborhood boys – commit suicide one by one over the course of a single year.As the boys observe them from afar, transfixed, they piece together the mystery of the family’s fatal melancholy, in this hypnotic and unforgettable novel of adolescent love, disquiet, and death.Jeffrey Eugenides evokes the emotions of youth with haunting sensitivity and dark humour and creates a coming-of-age story unlike any of our time. ‘The Virgin Suicides’ was adapted into a critically acclaimed film by Sofia Coppola.