The Virgin Suicides

by Jeffrey Eugenides

  This was when we found the albums of the Grand Rapids Gospelers, Tyrone Little and the Believers, and the rest. Every evening when Mr. Hedlie left, coated with a white film that aged him thirty years, we went through the mixture of treasure and junk he set out at the curb. The extraordinary latitude Mr. Lisbon had given him surprised us, for Mr. Hedlie disposed of not only replaceable items such as shoe polish tins (gouged to silver centers) but family photographs, a working Water Pik, and a strip of butcher paper marking the growth of each Lisbon daughter at one-year intervals. The last thing Mr. Hedlie threw out was the empty television set, which Jim Crotter took up to his bedroom, only to find inside the stuffed iguana Therese had taught biology with, its tail torn off and the trapdoor in its abdomen missing, exposing various numbered plastic organs. We, of course, took the family photographs and, after organizing a permanent collection in our tree house, divided the rest by choosing straws. Most of the photographs had been taken years before, in what appears to be a happier time of almost endless family cookouts. One photograph shows the girls sitting Indian style, balanced on the lawn’s seesaw (the photographer has tilted the camera) by the counterweight of a smoking hibachi uphill. (We regret to say that this photograph, Exhibit #47, was recently found missing from its envelope.) Another favorite is the series of totem-pole shots, taken at a tourist attraction, with each girl substituting her face for a sacred animal.

  But despite all this new evidence of the girls’ lives, and of the sudden drop-off of family togetherness (the photos virtually cease about the time Therese turned twelve), we learned little more about the girls than we knew already. It felt as though the house could keep disgorging debris forever, a tidal wave of unmatched slippers and dresses scarecrowed on hangers, and after sifting through it all we would still know nothing. There came an end to the outflow, however. Three days after Mr. Hedlie forged into the house, he came out, opening the front door for the first time and proceeding down the front steps to place beside the FOR SALE sign another, smaller sign that read, GARAGE SALE. That day, and for two days following, Mr. Hedlie offered up an inventory that encompassed not only the chipped dishware of a garage sale but the heavy durable goods offered at the liquidation of an estate. Everyone went, not to buy but just to enter the Lisbon house, which had been transformed into a clean spacious area smelling of pine cleaner. Mr. Hedlie had thrown out all the linens, anything that had belonged to the girls, anything broken, leaving only furniture, tables polished with linseed oil, kitchen chairs, mirrors, beds, each item bearing a neat white tag showing the price in his effeminate handwriting. The prices were final; he did not haggle. We roamed the house, upstairs and down, touching beds the girls would never sleep on again or mirrors that would never again hold their images. Our parents didn’t buy used furniture, and certainly didn’t buy furniture tainted with death, but they browsed like the others who came in response to the newspaper ad. A bearded Greek Orthodox priest showed up with a group of rotund widows. After cawing like crows and turning up their noses at everything, the widows furnished the priest’s new rectory bedroom with Mary’s canopy bed, Therese’s walnut dresser, Lux’s Chinese lantern, and Cecilia’s crucifix. Others arrived, carting away the contents of the house bit by bit. Mrs. Krieger found her son Kyle’s retainer on a display table outside the garage, and after failing to persuade Mr. Hedlie that it belonged to her son, bought it back for three dollars. The last thing we saw was a man with a paintbrush mustache loading the sailing ship model into the trunk of his Eldorado.

  Though the exterior of the house remained in disrepair, the interior was presentable once again, and within the next few weeks Ms. D’Angelo managed to sell the house to the young couple who live there now, though they can no longer be called young. Back then, however, in the first flush of having money to burn, they made an offer that Mr. Lisbon accepted, despite its being far below what he had paid. The house was almost completely empty at that point, the only thing left being Cecilia’s shrine, a woolly mass of candle drippings fused to the windowsill, which Mr. Hedlie had superstitiously neglected to touch. We thought we might never see Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon again, and even then we began the impossible process of trying to forget about them. Our parents seemed better able to do this, returning to their tennis foursomes and cocktail cruises. They reacted to the final suicides with mild shock, as though they’d been expecting them or something worse, as though they’d seen it all before. Mr. Conley adjusted the tweed necktie he wore even while cutting the grass and said, “Capitalism has resulted in material well-being but spiritual bankruptcy.” He went on to deliver a living room lecture about human needs and the ravages of competition, and even though he was the only Communist we knew, his ideas differed from everyone else’s only in degree. Something sick at the heart of the country had infected the girls. Our parents thought it had to do with our music, our godlessness, or the loosening of morals regarding sex we hadn’t even had. Mr. Hedlie mentioned that fin-de-siècle Vienna witnessed a similar outbreak of suicides on the part of the young, and put the whole thing down to the misfortune of living in a dying empire. It had to do with the way the mail wasn’t delivered on time, and how potholes never got fixed, or the thievery at City Hall, or the race riots, or the 801 fires set around the city on Devil’s night. The Lisbon girls became a symbol of what was wrong with the country, the pain it inflicted on even its most innocent citizens, and in order to make things better a parents’ group donated a bench in the girls’ memory to our school. Originally slated to commemorate just Cecilia (the project had been put in motion eight months earlier, after the Day of Grieving), the bench was rededicated just in time to include the other girls as well. It was a small bench, made from a tree from the Upper Peninsula. “Virgin timber,” Mr. Krieger said, who had retooled the machinery at his air-filter factory in order to make the bench. The plaque bore the simple inscription IN MEMORY OF THE LISBON GIRLS, DAUGHTERS OF THIS COMMUNITY.

  Mary was still alive at this point, of course, but the plaque did not acknowledge that fact. She returned from the hospital a few days later, after a two-week stay. Knowing they wouldn’t have come, Dr. Hornicker hadn’t even asked Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon to attend the therapy sessions. He ran Mary through the same battery of tests Cecilia had taken, but found no evidence of a psychiatric illness such as schizophrenia or manic depression. “Her scores showed her to be a relatively well-adjusted adolescent. Her future wasn’t bright, of course. I recommended ongoing therapy to deal with the trauma. But we had her serotonin up, and she looked good.”

  She came back to a house without furniture. Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon, back from the motel, were camping out in the master bedroom. Mary was also given a sleeping bag. Mr. Lisbon, understandably reticent about the days following the triple suicide, told us little about the condition Mary returned home in. Eleven years before, when the girls were just children, the family had arrived at the house one week before the moving van. They had had to camp out then, too, sleeping on the floor and reading bedtime stories by a kerosene lantern, and, oddly, that memory came back to Mr. Lisbon during his last days in the house. “Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I’d forget everything that had happened. I’d go down the hall, and for a moment, we’d just moved in again. The girls were asleep in their tent in the living room.”

  Left alone on the other end of those days, Mary lay in her sleeping bag, on the hard floor of the bedroom she no longer had to share. The sleeping bag was the old kind, with pilled flannel lining picturing dead ducks above red-capped hunters and a trout leaping with a hook in its mouth. She zipped the bag up so that only the top of her face showed, even though it was summer. She slept late, spoke little, and took six showers a day.

  From our viewpoint, the Lisbons’ sadness was beyond comprehension, and when we saw them in those last days, we were amazed at anything they did. How could they actually sit down to eat? Or come out to the back porch in the evening to enjoy the breeze? How could Mrs. Lisbon, as she did one afternoon, stagger outside, and across her unc
ut lawn, to pick one of Mrs. Bates’s snapdragons? She held it to her nose, seemed dissatisfied with its fragrance, tucked it into her pocket like a used Kleenex, and walked to the street, squinting at the neighborhood without her glasses. Mr. Lisbon, too, every afternoon, parked the station wagon in the shade, opening the hood to pore over the engine. “You have to keep busy,” Mr. Eugene said, commenting on his behavior. “What else can you do?”

  Mary went down the street and took her first voice lesson from Mr. Jessup in a year. She hadn’t scheduled a lesson, but Mr. Jessup couldn’t turn her away. He sat at the piano, leading Mary through scales, and then put his head in a metal trash can to demonstrate how it resonated against his trained vibrato. Mary sang the Nazi song from Cabaret, the one she and Lux had practiced the day the tragedies began, and Mr. Jessup said that all her travails had lent her voice a dolefulness and maturity beyond her years. “She left without paying for the lesson,” he said, “but it was the least I could do.”

  It was full-fledged summer once again, over a year from the time Cecilia had slit her wrists, spreading the poison in the air. A spill at the River Rouge Plant increased phosphates in the lake, producing a scum of algae so thick it clogged outboard engines. Our beautiful lake began to look like a lily pond, carpeted with an undulating foam. Fishermen tossed rocks from the bank, knocking holes to lower their lines through. The swamp smell that arose was outrageous amid the genteel mansions of the automotive families and the green elevated paddle tennis courts and the graduation parties held under illuminated tents. Debutantes cried over the misfortune of coming out in a season everyone would remember for its bad smell. The O’Connors, however, came up with the ingenious solution of making the theme of their daughter Alice’s debutante party “Asphyxiation.” Guests arrived in tuxedos and gas masks, evening gowns and astronaut helmets, and Mr. O’Connor himself wore a deep-sea diver’s suit, opening the glass face mask to guzzle his bourbon and water. At the party’s zenith, when Alice was rolled out in an artificial lung rented for the night from Henry Ford Hospital (Mr. O’Connor was on the board), the rotting smell pervading the air seemed only a crowning touch of festive atmosphere.

  Like everyone else, we went to Alice O’Connor’s coming-out party to forget about the Lisbon girls. The black bartenders in red vests served us alcohol without asking for I.D., and in turn, around 3 A.M., we said nothing when we saw them loading leftover cases of whiskey into the trunk of a sagging Cadillac. Inside, we got to know girls who had never considered taking their own lives. We fed them drinks, danced with them until they became unsteady, and led them out to the screened-in veranda. They lost their high heels on the way, kissed us in the humid darkness, and then slipped away to throw up demurely in the outside bushes. Some of us held their heads as they vomited, then let them rinse their mouths with beer, after which we got back to kissing again. The girls were monstrous in their formal dresses, each built around a wire cage. Pounds of hair were secured atop their heads. Drunk, and kissing us, or passing out in chairs, they were bound for college, husbands, child-rearing, unhappiness only dimly perceived—bound, in other words, for life.

  In the party glow, adult faces grew red. Mrs. O’Connor fell out of a wing chair, her hooped skirt going over her head. Mr. O’Connor pulled one of his daughter’s friends into the bathroom with him. Everyone from the neighborhood passed through the O’Connor house that night, singing the old-time songs the bald band played, or wandering back corridors, through the dusty playroom, or into the elevator that no longer worked. Raising champagne glasses, people said our industry was coming back, our nation, our way of life. Guests strolled outside beneath Venetian lanterns that led down to the lake. Under moonlight, the algae scum looked like shag carpeting, the entire lake a sunken living room. Someone fell in, was rescued, and laid on the pier. “I’ve had it,” he said, laughing. “Good-bye, cruel world!” He tried to roll into the lake again, but his friends stopped him.

  “You don’t understand me,” he said. “I’m a teenager. I’ve got problems!”

  “Be quiet,” a woman’s voice scolded. “They’ll hear you.”

  The back of the Lisbon house was visible through clumped trees, but no lights showed, probably because the electricity had been turned off by then. We went back inside, where people were having a good time. The waiters were serving small silver bowls of green ice cream. A tear-gas canister was set off on the dance floor, propelling a harmless mist. Mr. O’Connor danced with Alice. Everyone toasted her future.

  We stayed until daybreak. As we came out into the first alcoholic dawn of our lives (a bleachy fade-in, overused through the years now by the one-note director), our lips were swollen from kissing and our mouths throbbing with the taste of girls. Already we had been married and divorced, in a sense, and Tom Faheem found a love letter left in his pants pocket by the last person to rent the tux. The fish flies that had hatched during the night were still quivering on trees and streetlights, and made the sidewalk squishy under our feet, like walking through yams. The day threatened to be muggy. We took off our jackets and shuffled along, up the O’Connors’ street, around the corner, and down our own. In the distance, at the Lisbon house, the EMS truck sat, flashing its lights. They hadn’t bothered to use the siren.

  That was the morning the paramedics appeared for the last time, moving much too slowly in our opinion, and the fat one made the crack about its not being TV. By this time they’d been to the house so often they didn’t even knock, just walked right in, past the fence that was no longer there, into the kitchen to see if the gas oven was on, then down to the basement where they found the beam clean, and finally upstairs where the second bedroom they checked contained what they were looking for: the last Lisbon daughter, in a sleeping bag, and full of sleeping pills.

  She had on so much makeup that the paramedics had the odd feeling she had already been prepared for viewing by an undertaker, and this impression lasted until they saw that her lipstick and eyeshadow were smudged. She had clawed herself a little, at the end. She was dressed in a black dress and veil, which reminded some people of Jackie Kennedy’s widow’s weeds, and it was true: the final procession out the front door, with the two paramedics like uniformed pallbearers, and the sound of postholiday firecrackers going off on the next block over, did call to mind the solemnity of a national figure being laid to rest. Neither Mr. nor Mrs. Lisbon appeared, so it was up to us to send her off, and, for the last time, we came and stood at attention. Vince Fusilli held up his lighter as though at a rock concert. It was the best we could do for an eternal flame.

  For a while we tried to accept the general explanations, which qualified the Lisbon girls’ pain as merely historic, springing from the same source as other teenage suicides, every death part of a trend. We tried to go back to our old lives, to let the girls rest in peace, but a haunted quality persisted about the Lisbon house, making us see, whenever we looked, a flame shape arcing from the roof, or swinging in an upstairs window. Many of us continued to have dreams in which the Lisbon girls appeared to us more real than they had been in life, and we awoke certain that their scent of the next world remained on our pillows. Almost daily we met to go over the evidence once again, reciting portions of Cecilia’s journal (the description of Lux testing a chilly sea, one knee up, flamingo-like, was popular with us then). Nevertheless, we always ended these sessions with the feeling that we were retracing a path that led nowhere, and we grew more and more sullen and frustrated.

  As luck would have it, on the day of Mary’s suicide, the cemetery workers’ strike was settled after 409 days of arbitration. The strike’s length had caused mortuaries to fill up months ago, and the many bodies awaiting burial now came back from out of state, in refrigerated trucks, or by airplane, depending on the wealth of the deceased. On the Chrysler Freeway one truck got into an accident, flipping over, and the front page of the newspaper ran a photo showing metal caskets spilling from the truck like ingots. No one attended the final mass burial of the Lisbon girls other than M
r. and Mrs. Lisbon; Mr. Calvin Honnicutt, a cemetery worker just back on the job; and Father Moody. Because of limited available space, the girls’ graves did not lie side by side but widely separated, so that the funeral party had to make the rounds, going from grave to grave at the excruciatingly slow speed of cemetery traffic. Father Moody claimed the constant getting into and out of the limousine made him lose track of which girl lay at which grave. “I had to keep the eulogies sort of general,” he said. “There was a lot of confusion at the cemetery that day. You’re talking a year’s worth of departed. The place was pretty well dug up.” As for Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon, tragedy had beaten them into mindless submission. They followed the priest from graveside to graveside, saying little. Mrs. Lisbon, under sedation, kept looking up into the sky, as though at birds. Mr. Honnicutt told us, “I’d been working seventeen hours straight by that point, wired on NoDoz. I’d buried over fifty people that shift alone. Still, when I saw that lady, it broke me up.”

  We saw Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon when they returned from the cemetery. With dignity, they got out of the limousine and walked toward their house, each one parting the front shrubs to find access to the porch steps. They picked their way amid the broken pieces of slate. For the first time ever, we noticed a similarity between Mrs. Lisbon’s face and the faces of her daughters, but that may have been due to the black veil some people recall her as wearing. We ourselves don’t remember a veil and think that detail only an elaboration of romantic memory. Still, we do have the image of Mrs. Lisbon turning toward the street and showing her face as never before, to those of us kneeling at dining room windows or peering through gauzy curtains, those of us sweating in Pitzenberger’s attic, the rest of us looking over car hoods or from troughs serving as first, second, and third base, from behind barbecues or from the apex of a swing’s arc—she turned, she sent her blue gaze out in every direction, the same color gaze the girls had had, icy and spectral and unknowable, and then she turned back and followed her husband into the house.