The Virgin Suicides

by Jeffrey Eugenides

  None of us moved. Buzz Romano, oblivious, kept dancing. Above him, in a pink dress, Bonnie looked clean and festive, like a piñata. It took a minute to sink in. We gazed up at Bonnie, at her spindly legs in their white confirmation stockings, and the shame that has never gone away took over. The doctors we later consulted attributed our response to shock. But the mood felt more like guilt, like coming to attention at the last moment and too late, as though Bonnie were murmuring the secret not only of her death but of her life itself, of all the girls’ lives. She was so still. She had such enormous weight. The soles of her wet shoes were embedded with bits of mica, shining and dripping.

  We had never known her. They had brought us here to find that out.

  How long we stayed like that, communing with her departed spirit, we can’t remember. Long enough for our collective breath to start a breeze through the room that made Bonnie twist on her rope. She spun slowly, and at one point her face broke out of the seaweed of balloons, showing us the reality of the death she’d chosen. It was a world of blackening eye sockets, blood pooling in lower extremities, stiffening joints.

  Already we knew the rest—though we would never be sure about the sequence of events. We argue about it still. Most likely, Bonnie died while we sat in the living room, dreaming of highways. Mary put her head in the oven shortly thereafter, on hearing Bonnie kick the trunk out from under herself. They were ready to assist one another, if need be. Mary might have still been breathing when we passed by on our way downstairs, missing her by less than two feet in the dark, as we later measured. Therese, stuffed with sleeping pills washed down with gin, was as good as dead by the time we entered the house. Lux was the last to go, twenty or thirty minutes after we left. Fleeing, screaming without sound, we forgot to stop at the garage, from which music was still playing. They found her in the front seat, gray-faced and serene, holding a cigarette lighter that had burned its coils into her palm. She had escaped in the car just as we expected. But she had unbuckled us, it turned out, only to stall us, so that she and her sisters could die in peace.

  FIVE

  We knew them now. Knew the way the skinny one drove, with his bursts of acceleration midblock, his cautious turning, his habit of misjudging the Lisbons’ driveway so that he ran over the lawn. We knew the bending sound a siren made as it passed, a phenomenon Therese identified correctly as the Doppler effect the third time the EMS truck came, but not the fourth because she was bent herself by then, winding down and away in slow spirals, a feeling akin to being sucked through your own intestines. We knew that the fat one had sensitive skin and was plagued with razor bumps, that he wore a metal wedge on the heel of his shoe because his left leg was shorter than his right, and that he made an uneven clicking sound as he hitched across the macadam driveway. We knew that the skinny one’s hair tended to get oily, because when they came to get Cecilia his long hair had looked like Bob Seger’s, but now, a year later, the fluff was gone and he looked like a drowned rat. We still didn’t know their real names, but we were beginning to intuit the condition of their paramedic lives, the smell of bandages and oxygen masks, the taste of precalamity dinners on resuscitated mouths, the flavor of life ebbing away on the other side of their own puffing faces, the blood, brain spatter, blue cheeks, bulging eyes, and—on our own block—the succession of limp bodies wearing charm bracelets and gold lockets in the shape of a heart.

  When they came the fourth time they were losing faith. The truck made the same jolting stop, tires skidded, doors flew open, but as they jumped out the paramedics had lost their valiant appearance and were clearly two men afraid of being humiliated. “It’s those two guys again,” said Zachary Larson, five. The fat one gave the skinny one a look and they started for the house, this time taking no equipment. Mrs. Lisbon, face white, answered the door. She pointed inside, saying nothing. When the paramedics entered, she remained in the doorway, tightening the belt of her robe. She straightened the welcome mat with her toe, twice. Soon the paramedics ran out again, changed and electrified, and got the stretcher. A minute later they were carrying Therese out, facedown. Her dress, hiked up around her waist, revealed her unbecoming underwear, the color of an athletic bandage. The buttons in back had popped open to reveal a slice of mushroom-colored back. Her hand kept falling off the stretcher, though each time Mrs. Lisbon replaced it. “Stay,” she commanded, to the hand apparently. But the hand flopped out again. Mrs. Lisbon stopped, her shoulders sagged, she seemed to give up. In the next second she was running, holding on to Therese’s arm and murmuring what some people heard as, “Not you, too,” and Mrs. O’Connor, who had acted in college, as, “But too cruel.”

  By this time we were back in our beds, shamming sleep. Outside, Sheriff wore an oxygen mask to enter the garage and raise the automatic door. When it opened (so people told us) nothing came out, no smoke as everyone expected, not even a trace of gas that made things shimmer like a mirage—the station wagon sat vibrating, and because Sheriff had brushed another switch accidentally, the windshield wipers were going like mad. The fat one went inside to get Bonnie down from the rafters, balancing one chair on another like a circus performer. They found Mary in the kitchen, not dead but nearly so, her head and torso thrust into the oven as though she were scrubbing it. A second EMS truck came (the only time this happened) bringing two paramedics more efficient than Sheriff and the fat one. They rushed inside and saved Mary’s life. For a while. For what it was worth.

  Technically, Mary survived for more than a month, though everyone felt otherwise. After that night, people spoke of the Lisbon girls in the past tense, and if they mentioned Mary at all it was with the veiled wish that she would hurry up and get it over with. In fact, the final suicides surprised few people. Even we who had tried to save the girls came to consider ourselves temporarily insane. In hindsight, Bonnie’s battered trunk lost its associations with travel and flight and became only what it was: a drop weight for a hanging, like sandbags in old Westerns. Still, while everyone agreed the suicides came as predictably as seasons or old age, we could never agree on an explanation for them. The final suicides seemed to confirm Dr. Hornicker’s theory that the girls had been suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, but Dr. Hornicker later distanced himself from that conclusion. Even if Cecilia’s suicide led to copycatting, that still didn’t explain why Cecilia had killed herself in the first place. At a hastily called Lions Club meeting, Dr. Hornicker, the guest speaker, brought up the possibility of a chemical link, citing a new study of “platelet serotonin receptor indices in suicidal children.” Dr. Kotbaum of the Western Psychiatric Institute had found that many suicidal persons possessed deficient amounts of serotonin, a neurotransmitter essential for the regulation of mood. Since the serotonin study had been published after Cecilia’s suicide, Dr. Hornicker had never measured her serotonin level. He did, however, examine a blood sample taken from Mary, which showed a slight deficiency of serotonin. She was put on medication, and after two weeks of psychological tests and intensive therapy, her blood was tested again. At that time her serotonin level appeared normal.

  As for the other girls, autopsies were performed on each of them, in accordance with a state law requiring investigation in all deaths by suicide. As written, the law gave the police leeway in such cases, and their prior failure to order an autopsy on Cecilia led many to believe they now suspected Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon of foul play, or wished to put pressure on them to move. A single coroner, brought in from the city with two fatigued assistants, opened up the girls’ brains and body cavities, peering inside at the mystery of their despair. They used an assembly-line approach, the assistants rolling each girl past the doctor as he used his table saw, his hose, his vacuum. Photographs were taken, but never released, though we wouldn’t have had the stomach to look at them. We did, however, read the coroner’s report, written in a colorful style that made the girls’ deaths as unreal as the news. He spoke of the incredible cleanliness of the girls’ bodies, the youngest he had ever worked on, showing
no signs of wastage or alcoholism. Their smooth blue hearts looked like water balloons, and the rest of their organs possessed a similar textbook clarity. In older people, or the chronically ill, the organs tend to lose their shape, to distend, change color, grow connections with organs they have nothing to do with, so that most entrails look, as the coroner put it, “like a rubbish dump.” The Lisbon girls, on the other hand, were “like something behind glass. Like an exhibit.” Nevertheless, it saddened the coroner to pierce and shred those unblemished bodies, and a few times he was overcome with emotion. In one margin he scrawled a note to himself: “Seventeen years in this business and I’m a basket case.” He persevered in his function, however, finding the mass of half-digested pills trapped in Therese’s ileum, the strangulated section of Bonnie’s esophagus, the riot of carbon monoxide in Lux’s tepid blood.

  Ms. Perl, whose story came out in the evening paper, was the first to point out the significance of the date. The girls, it turned out, had killed themselves on June 16, the anniversary of Cecilia’s wrist-slitting. Ms. Perl made much of this, speaking of “ominous foreshadowing” and “eerie coincidence,” and single-handedly initiated the feeding frenzy of speculation that continues to this day. In her subsequent articles—one every two or three days for two weeks—she shifted her tone from the sympathetic register of a fellow mourner to the steely precision of what she never succeeded in being: an investigative reporter. Scouring the neighborhood in her blue Pontiac, she cobbled together reminiscences into an airtight conclusion, far less truthful than our own, which is full of holes. Fed the emetic of Ms. Perl’s insistent questions, Amy Schraff, Cecilia’s old friend, disgorged a memory of presuicidal days: one boring afternoon, Cecilia had made her lie on her bed beneath the zodiac mobile. “Close your eyes and keep them closed,” she had said. The door opened and the other sisters entered the room. They placed their hands over Amy’s face and body. “Who do you want to contact?” Cecilia asked. “My grandmother,” Amy replied. The hands were cool on her face. Someone lit incense. A dog barked. Nothing happened.

  From that episode, no more indicative of spiritualism than a Ouija board’s turning up amid the usual Milton Bradleys, Ms. Perl based her claim that the suicides were an esoteric ritual of self-sacrifice. Her third story, under the headline “Suicides May Have Been Pact,” outlines the generic conspiracy theory, which held that the girls planned the suicides in concert with an undetermined astrological event. Cecilia had merely entered first, while her sisters waited in the wings. Candles lit the stage. In the orchestra pit, Cruel Crux began to wail. The Playbill we held in the audience showed a picture of the Virgin. Ms. Perl choreographed it all nicely. What she could never explain, however, was why the girls chose the date of Cecilia’s suicide attempt rather than her actual death some three weeks later on July 9.

  But this discrepancy stopped no one. Once the copycat suicides occurred, the media descended on our street without letup. Our three local television stations sent news teams, and even a national correspondent showed up in a motor home. He’d heard about the suicides at a truck stop in the southwestern corner of our state, and had come up to see for himself. “I doubt I’ll shoot anything,” he said. “I’m supposed to be the color guy.” Still, he parked the motor home down the block, and from then on we saw him lounging on its plaid seats, or cooking hamburgers on the miniature stove. Undeterred by the parents’ delicate condition, the local news teams ran stories immediately. It was then we saw the footage of the Lisbon house taken months earlier, a soggy pan of roof and stark front door, leading to a recap where every night the same five faces filed by, Cecilia in her yearbook photo, followed by her sisters in theirs. Live hookups were still new at the time, and often microphones went dead, or lights burned out, leaving reporters speaking in the dark. Spectators not yet bored with television competed to get their heads into the frame. Each day the reporters attempted to interview Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon, and each day they failed. By showtime, however, they seemed to have gained access to the girls’ very bedrooms, given all the intimate treasures they brought back. One reporter held up a wedding dress made the same year as Cecilia’s, and except for the unshorn hem, we couldn’t tell them apart. Another reporter ended his broadcast by reading a letter Therese had written to the Brown admissions office—“ironically,” as he put it, “only three days before she put an end to any dreams of college … or of anything else.” Gradually, the reporters began referring to the Lisbon girls by first names, and neglected to interview medical experts in favor of collecting reminiscences. Like us, they became custodians of the girls’ lives, and had they completed the job to our satisfaction, we might never have been forced to wander endlessly down the paths of hypothesis and memory. For less and less did the reporters ask why the girls had killed themselves. Instead, they talked about the girls’ hobbies and academic awards. Wanda Brown, on Channel 7, unearthed a photo of a bikinied Lux at the community swimming pool, allowing a lifeguard to reach down from his chair and apply zinc oxide to her bunnyish nose. Every night the reporters revealed a new anecdote or photo, but their discoveries bore no relation to what we knew to be true, and after a while it began to seem as though they were talking about different people. Channel 4’s Pete Patillo referred to Therese’s “love of horses,” though we’d never seen Therese near a horse, and Tom Thomson, on Channel 2, often mixed up the girls’ names. The reporters cited as fact the most apocryphal accounts, and confused details of stories they got basically right (in this way Cecilia’s black underwear appeared on the wax dummy Pete Patillo passed off as Mary). Knowing the rest of the city accepted the news as gospel only demoralized us further. Outsiders, in our opinion, had no right to refer to Cecilia as “the crazy one,” because they hadn’t earned their shorthand by a long distillation of firsthand knowledge. For the first time ever we sympathized with the President because we saw how wildly our sphere of influence was misrepresented by those in no position to know what was going on. Even our parents seemed to agree more and more with the television version of things, listening to the reporters’ inanities as though they could tell us the truth about our own lives.

  After the suicide free-for-all, Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon gave up the attempt to lead a normal life. Mrs. Lisbon stopped attending church, and when Father Moody went to the house to console her, no one answered the door. “I kept ringing the bell,” he told us. “No dice.” During Mary’s entire stay in the hospital, Mrs. Lisbon appeared only once. Herb Pitzenberger saw her come out onto the back porch with a stack of manuscript pages. Putting them into a pile, she lit them. We never learned what they were.

  About this time, Ms. Carmina D’Angelo received a call from Mr. Lisbon, asking her to put the house back on the market (he’d taken it off shortly after Cecilia’s suicide). Ms. D’Angelo tactfully pointed out that the present condition of the house would not facilitate the sale, but Mr. Lisbon responded, “I realize. I’ve got a guy coming in.”

  It turned out to be Mr. Hedlie, the English teacher from school. Out of work for the summer, he arrived in his VW bug, its bumper sticker still supporting the last failed Democratic candidate for President. When he got out, he was wearing not his former schoolmaster’s blazer and trousers, but a bright green-and-yellow dashiki and a pair of lizard sandals. His hair covered his ears and he moved with the bohemian slouch of teachers during vacation, resuming unruly lives. Despite his look of a commune leader, he set to work in earnest, carting out over three days a mountain of refuse from the Lisbon house. While Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon went to stay in a motel, Mr. Hedlie took charge of the house, throwing away snow skis, watercolor paints, bags of clothes, a Hula Hoop. He dragged the worn-out brown sofa outside, cutting it in two when it wouldn’t fit through the doorway. He filled trash bags with potholders, old coupons, heaps of accumulated twist-ties, superseded keys. We saw him attacking the overgrowth of each room, hacking away with his dustpan, and on the third day he began wearing a surgical mask because of the dust. He never spoke to us anymore in obscure Greek ph
rases, or took interest in our sandlot baseball games, but arrived every morning with the hopeless expression of a man draining a swamp with a kitchen sponge. As he lifted rugs and threw out towels, he unleashed the odors of the house in waves, and many people thought he wore the surgical mask to protect himself not from dust but from the exhalations of the Lisbon girls that still lived in bedding and drapes, in peeling wallpaper, in patches of carpet preserved brand-new beneath dressers and nightstands. The first day Mr. Hedlie restricted himself to the first floor, but the second day he ventured into the sacked seraglio of the Lisbon girls’ bedrooms, wading ankle-deep in garments that gave off the music of a past time. Pulling Cecilia’s Nepalese scarf from behind a headboard, he was greeted, at each fringy end, with the tinkling of green corroded bells. Bedsprings sang two-note plaints when stood on end. Pillows snowed dead skin.

  He emptied six shelves from the upstairs closet, throwing out stacked bath towels and washcloths, frayed mattress liners bearing rose or lemon-colored stains, blankets sopped with the picnic of the girls’ spilled sleep. On the top shelf he found and pitched household medical supplies—a hot-water bottle the texture of inflamed skin, a midnight-blue jar of Vicks VapoRub fingerprinted inside, a shoe box full of ointments for ringworm and conjunctivitis, salves applied to nether regions, aluminum tubes dented, squeezed, or rolled up like party favors. Also: orange baby aspirin the girls had chewed as candy, an old thermometer (oral, alas) in its black plastic case, along with a variety of other implements pressed, inserted, applied into or onto the girls’ bodies; in short, all the earthly concoctions Mrs. Lisbon had used over the years to keep the girls alive and well.