The Virgin Suicides

by Jeffrey Eugenides

  We have a few documents from the time (Exhibits #13–#15)—Therese’s chemistry write-ups, Bonnie’s history paper on Simone Weil, Lux’s frequent forged excuses from phys. ed. She always used the same method, faking the rigid t’s and b’s of her mother’s signature and then, to distinguish her own handwriting, penning her signature, Lux Lisbon, below, the two beseeching L’s reaching out for each other over the ditch of the u and the barbed-wire x. Julie Winthrop also used to skip gym and spent many classes with Lux in the girls’ locker room. “We used to climb up on the lockers and smoke,” she told us. “You couldn’t see us from the ground, and if any teachers came by, they couldn’t tell where the smoke was coming from. They usually thought whoever was smoking had already left.” According to Julie Winthrop, she and Lux were only “cig friends” and didn’t talk much on top of the lockers, too busy inhaling or listening for footsteps. She did say that Lux had an affected hardness that might have been a reaction to pain. “She was always saying, ‘Fuck this school,’ or ‘I can’t wait until I get out of here.’ But so did lots of kids.” Once, however, after they were finished smoking, Julie jumped down off the lockers and started out. When Lux didn’t follow, she called her name. “She still didn’t answer, so I went back and looked on top of the lockers. She was just lying there, hugging herself. She wasn’t making any sound. She was just shaking like she was really cold.”

  Our teachers remembered the girls during this period in various ways, depending on the subject they taught. Mr. Nillis said of Bonnie, “It was pre-cal. We didn’t exactly get touchy-feely”; while Señor Lorca said of Therese, “A big girl! I think smaller, maybe happier. That is the way of the world and men’s hearts.” Apparently, though not a natural at languages, Therese spoke in a credible Castilian accent and had a great capacity for memorizing vocabulary. “She could speak Spanish,” Señor Lorca said, “but not feel it.”

  In her written response to our questions (she wanted time to “ponder and deliberate”), Miss Arndt, the art teacher, said, “Mary’s watercolors did possess what, for lack of a better word, I will call a ‘mournfulness.’ But in my experience, there are really only two kinds of children: the empty-headed ones (Fauvist flowers, dogs, and sailboats) and the intelligent ones (gouaches of urban decay, gloomy abstractions)—much like my own painting in college, and during those three heady years in ‘the Village.’ Could I foresee she would commit suicide? I regret to say, no. At least ten percent of my students were born with modernist tendencies. I ask you: is dullness a gift? intelligence a curse? I’m forty-seven years old and live alone.”

  Day by day, the girls ostracized themselves. Because they stayed in a group, other girls found it difficult to talk or walk with them, and many assumed they wanted to be left alone. And the more the Lisbon girls were left alone, the more they retreated. Sheila Davis told of being in an English study group with Bonnie Lisbon. “We were discussing this book Portrait of a Lady. We had to do a character sketch on Ralph. Bonnie didn’t say much at first. But then she reminded us how Ralph always keeps his hands in his pockets. Then, like a jerk, I go, ‘It’s really sad when he dies.’ I wasn’t even thinking. Grace Hilton elbowed me and I turned purple. It got totally quiet.”

  It was Mrs. Woodhouse, the headmaster’s wife, who came up with the idea for the “Day of Grieving.” She had majored in psychology in college and now, twice a week, volunteered at a Head Start program in the inner city. “They kept writing about the suicide in the paper, but do you know we hadn’t mentioned it once in school all that year?” she told us nearly twenty years later. “I’d wanted Dick to address the matter at Convocation, but he felt otherwise and I had to defer. But little by little, as the volume rose, he came around to my view.” (In fact, Mr. Woodhouse had addressed the subject, if obliquely, during his speech of welcome at Convocation. After introducing the new teachers, he had said, “It has been a long, hard summer for some of us here today. But today begins a new year of hopes and goals.”) Mrs. Woodhouse broached her idea to a few departmental heads during dinner at the modest ranch-style house that came with her husband’s position, and the following week proposed it at a full teachers’ meeting. Mr. Pulff, who left shortly thereafter to pursue a job in advertising, recalled a few of Mrs. Woodhouse’s words that day. “ ‘Grief is natural,’ she said. ‘Overcoming it is a matter of choice.’ I remember it because I used it later for a diet product: ‘Eating is natural. Gaining weight is your choice.’ Maybe you saw it.” Mr. Pulff voted against the Day of Grieving but was in the minority. The date was set.

  Most people remember the Day of Grieving as an obscure holiday. The first three hours of school were canceled and we remained in our homerooms. Teachers passed out mimeographs related to the day’s theme, which was never officially announced, as Mrs. Woodhouse felt it inappropriate to single out the girls’ tragedy. The result was that the tragedy was diffused and universalized. As Kevin Tiggs put it, “It seemed like we were supposed to feel sorry for everything that ever happened, ever.” Teachers had latitude to present material of their own choosing. Mr. Hedlie, the English teacher who rode his bicycle to school with his trouser cuffs secured in metal clips, handed out a collection of poems by the Victorian poet Christina Rossetti. Deborah Ferentell remembered a few lines from one poem entitled “Rest”:

  O Earth, lie heavily upon her eyes;

  Seal her sweet eyes weary of watching, Earth;

  Lie close around her; leave no room for mirth

  With its harsh laughter, nor for sound of sighs.

  She hath no questions, she hath no replies.

  The Reverend Pike spoke of the Christian message of death and rebirth, working in a story of his own heartrending loss when his college football team failed to clinch the division title. Mr. Tonover, who taught chemistry and still lived with his mother, was at a loss for words on the occasion, and let his students cook peanut brittle over a Bunsen burner. Other classes, dividing into groups, played games where they envisioned themselves as architectural structures. “If you were a building,” the leader would ask, “what kind of building would you be?” They had to describe these structures in great detail and then make improvements. The Lisbon girls, stranded in separate homerooms, declined to play, or kept asking to be excused to go to the bathroom. None of the teachers insisted on their participating, with the result that all the healing was done by those of us without wounds. At midday, Becky Talbridge saw the Lisbon girls together in the girls’ bathroom in the Science Wing. “They’d brought chairs in from the hall and they were just sitting there, waiting it out. Mary had a run in her nylon—can you believe she wore nylons?—and she was fixing it with fingernail polish. Her sisters were sort of watching her but they seemed pretty bored. I went into the stall, but I could feel them out there and I couldn’t, you know, go.”

  Mrs. Lisbon never learned about the Day of Grieving. Neither her husband nor her daughters mentioned it when they returned home that day. Mr. Lisbon had of course been present at the teachers’ meeting when Mrs. Woodhouse made her proposal, but accounts differ as to his reaction. Mr. Rodriguez remembered him as “nodding his head, but not saying anything,” while Miss Shuttleworth recalled that he left the meeting shortly after it began and never returned. “He never heard about the Day of Grieving. He left in a state of distraction and a winter coat,” she said, still quizzing us on rhetorical constructions (in this case, zeugma) which we had to identify before being excused from her presence. When Miss Shuttleworth came into the room for her interview, we stood in respect as we always had, and even though we were approaching middle age, a few of us balding, she still referred to us as “infants,” as she had in her classroom so long ago. She still had the plaster bust of Cicero on her desk and the imitation Grecian urn we had given her upon graduation, and still exuded the air of a powdered celibate polymath. “I don’t think Mr. Lisbon knew about the Dies Lacrimarum until it was well under way. I passed by his classroom during second period and he was at the blackboard, in his chair, instructing
. I don’t think anyone had had the fortitude to acquaint him with the day’s activities.” Indeed, when we spoke to him years later, Mr. Lisbon possessed only a vague memory of the Day of Grieving. “Try decade,” he told us.

  For a long time no one agreed on the success of the various attempts to address Cecilia’s suicide. Mrs. Woodhouse thought the Day of Grieving had served a vital purpose, and many teachers were pleased that the silence around the subject had been broken. A psychological counselor came on staff once a week, sharing the small office of the school nurse. Any student feeling the need to talk was encouraged to go. We never did, but every Friday peeked in to see if any of the Lisbon girls met with the counselor. Her name was Miss Lynn Kilsem, but a year later, after the rest of the suicides, she disappeared without a word. Her degree in social work turned out to be fake, and no one is sure if her name was really Lynn Kilsem, or who she was, or where she went off to. In any case, she is one of the few people we haven’t been able to track down, and in the characteristic irony of fate, one of the few people who might have been able to tell us something. For apparently the girls went to see Miss Kilsem regularly on Fridays, though we never saw them amid the paltry medical supplies of that poor excuse for a nurse’s office. Miss Kilsem’s patient records were lost in an office fire five years later (a coffeemaker, an old extension cord) and we have no exact information regarding the sessions. Muffie Perry, however, who had been using Miss Kilsem as a sports psychologist, often recalled seeing Lux or Mary in the office, and sometimes Therese and Bonnie as well. We had a great deal of trouble locating Muffie Perry herself, owing to the many rumors involving her married name. Some said she was now Muffie Friewald, others Muffie von Rechewicz, but when we finally dug her up, tending the rare orchids her grandmother had bequeathed to the Belle Isle Botanical Garden, she told us her name was still Muffie Perry, period, as it had been in the days of her field hockey triumphs. We didn’t recognize her at first, what with the sucking vines and thick creepers, the misty hothouse air, and even when we cajoled her to stand under the artificial grow lamp, we saw that she had swelled and puckered, that her great goal-scoring back was hunched, but that her tiny teeth in their bright gums were unchanged. The decadence of Belle Isle contributed to our gloomy reappraisal. We remembered the delicate fig-shaped island, stranded between the American Empire and peaceful Canada, as it had been years ago, with its welcoming red-white-and-blue flag-shaped flower bed, splashing fountains, European casino, and horse paths leading through woods where Indians had bent trees into giant bows. Now grass grew in patches down to the littered beach where children fished with pop tops tied to string. Paint flaked from once-bright gazebos. Drinking fountains rose from mud puddles laid with broken-brick stepping stones. Along the road the granite face of the Civil War Hero had been spray-painted black. Mrs. Huntington Perry had donated her prize orchids to the Botanical Garden in the time before the riots, when civic moneys still ran high, but since her death the eroding tax base had forced cutbacks that had laid off one skilled gardener a year, so that plants that had survived transplantation from equatorial regions to bloom again in that false paradise now withered, weeds sprang up amid scrupulous identification tags, and fake sunlight flowed for only a few hours per day. The only thing that remained was the steam vapor, beading the sloping greenhouse windows and filling our nostrils with the moisture and aroma of a rotting world.

  It was the decay that brought Muffie Perry back. Her grandmother’s cycnoches had nearly died of blight; parasites overran her three extraordinary dendrobiums; and the bank of miniature masdevallias, whose purple velvet petals tipped in blood Mrs. Huntington Perry had herself bred through elaborate hybridization, looked for all the world like a rack of cheap nursery pansies. Her granddaughter had been volunteering her time in the hope of restoring the flowers to former glory, but she told us it was hopeless, hopeless. The plants were expected to grow in the light of a dungeon. Hoodlums jumped the back fence and ran through the greenhouse, uprooting plants for the fun of it. Muffie Perry had wounded one vandal by wielding a garden trowel. We had a hard time directing her attention back from the world of cracked windows, heaped dirt, unpaid admissions, and rats nesting in Egyptian bulrushes. Gradually, however, feeding the tiny faces of the orchids with an eyedropper filled with what looked like milk, she told us how the girls had appeared during their sessions with Miss Kilsem. “At first they were still pretty depressed-looking. Mary had these huge circles under her eyes. Like a mask.” Muffie Perry could still remember the office’s superstitious smell of antiseptic, which she always thought was the odor of the girls’ grief. They would be just leaving when she came in, their eyes downcast, their shoes untied, but they always remembered to take a chocolate mint from the dish the nurse kept on a table by the door. They left Miss Kilsem bobbing in the wake of whatever they’d told her. Often she sat at her desk, eyes closed, thumbs to acupressure points, and didn’t speak for a full minute. “I’ve always had a hunch that Miss Kilsem was the one they confided in,” Muffie Perry said. “For whatever reason. Maybe that’s why she took off.”

  Whether the girls confided in Miss Kilsem or not, the therapy seemed to help. Almost immediately their moods brightened. Coming in for her appointment, Muffie Perry heard them laughing or talking excitedly. The window would sometimes be open, and both Lux and Miss Kilsem would be smoking against the rules, or the girls would have raided the candy dish, strewing Miss Kilsem’s desk with wadded wrappers.

  We noticed the change, too. The girls seemed less tired. In class they stared out the window less, raised their hands more, spoke up. They momentarily forgot the stigma attached to them and took part again in school activities. Therese attended Science Club meetings in Mr. Tonover’s bleak classroom with its fire-retardant tables and deep black sinks. Mary helped the divorced lady sew costumes for the school play two afternoons a week. Bonnie even showed up at a Christian fellowship meeting at the house of Mike Firkin, who later became a missionary and died of malaria in Thailand. Lux tried out for the school musical, and because Eugie Kent had a crush on her, and Mr. Oliphant the theater director had a crush on Eugie Kent, she got a small part in the chorus, singing and dancing as though she were happy. Eugie said later that Mr. Oliphant’s blocking always kept Lux onstage while Eugie was off, so that he could never find her in the darkness backstage to wrap himself up in the curtains with her. Four weeks later, of course, after the girls’ final incarceration, Lux dropped out of the play, but those who saw it performed said that Eugie Kent sang his numbers in his usual strident unremarkable voice, more in love with himself than with the chorus girl whose absence no one noticed.

  By this time autumn had turned grim, locking the sky in steel. In Mr. Lisbon’s classroom, the planets shifted a few inches each day, and it was clear, if you looked up, that the earth had turned its blue face away from the sun, that it was sweeping down its own dark alley in space, over where cobwebs collected in the ceiling corner, out of reach of the janitor’s broom. As summer’s humidity became a memory, the summer itself began to seem unreal, until we lost sight of it. Poor Cecilia appeared in our consciousness at odd moments, most often as we were just waking up, or staring out a car-pool window streaked with rain—she rose up in her wedding dress, muddy with the afterlife, but then a horn would honk, or our radio alarms would unleash a popular song, and we snapped back to reality. Other people filed Cecilia’s memory away even more easily. When they spoke of her, it was to say that they had always expected Cecilia to meet a bad end, and that far from viewing the Lisbon girls as a single species, they had always seen Cecilia as apart, a freak of nature. Mr. Hillyer summed up the majority sentiment at the time: “Those girls have a bright future ahead of them. That other one was just going to end up a kook.” Little by little, people ceased to discuss the mystery of Cecilia’s suicide, preferring to see it as inevitable, or as something best left behind. Though Mrs. Lisbon continued her shadowy existence, rarely leaving the house and getting her groceries delivered, no one objected,
and some even sympathized. “I feel sorriest for the mother,” Mrs. Eugene said. “You would always wonder if there was something you could have done.” As for the suffering, surviving girls, they grew in stature like the Kennedys. Kids once again sat next to them on the bus. Leslie Tompkins borrowed Mary’s brush to tame her long red hair. Julie Winthrop smoked with Lux atop the lockers, and said the shaking episode was not repeated. Day by day, the girls appeared to be getting over their loss.

  It was during this convalescent period that Trip Fontaine made his move. Without consulting anyone or confessing his feelings for Lux, Trip Fontaine walked into Mr. Lisbon’s classroom and stood at attention before his desk. He found Mr. Lisbon alone, in his swivel chair, staring vacantly at the planets hanging above his head. A youthful cowlick sprang from his gray hair. “It’s fourth period, Trip,” he said wearily. “I don’t have you until fifth.”

  “I’m not here for math today, sir.”

  “You’re not?”

  “I’m here to tell you that my intentions toward your daughter are entirely honorable.”

  Mr. Lisbon’s eyebrows rose, but his expression was used up, as though six or seven boys had made the same declaration that very morning.

  “And what might those intentions be?”