by Alana Massey
The turning point in the novel is when Lux has sex with Trip Fontaine after homecoming, prompting her mother to withdraw the girls from all interaction outside the house that will become their catacomb. Lux begins taking lovers on the roof of the Lisbon house under cover of night while her beleaguered but loyal sisters keep watch. The boys take this as an opportunity for off-label sex education. “For our own part, we learned a great deal about the techniques of love, and because we didn’t know the words to denote what we saw, we had to make up our own. That was why we spoke of ‘yodeling in the canyon’ and ‘tying the tube,’ of ‘groaning in the pit,’ ‘slipping the turtle’s head,’ and ‘chewing the stinkweed,’” they explain. This is perhaps meant to demonstrate their juvenility but inadvertently betrays the extent of their surveillance. That is a lot of sex acts to have witnessed.
The boys’ voyeuristic impulses leave not so much an impression as a wound. “Years later, when we lost our own virginities, we resorted in our panic to pantomiming Lux’s gyrations on the roof so long ago; and even now, if we were to be honest with ourselves, we would have to admit that it is always that pale wraith we make love to,” they write, apparently unashamed that they fantasize about fucking a fourteen-year-old on the brink of death. They do not see Lux’s sex rampage as an act of desperation, the frantic search by a young person to find her own pulse. Or so I can hope. The alternative is that they see the desperation of a broken child with perfect clarity and still find it arousing.
More dreadful still is the fact that the boys track down the men with whom Lux had her starlit dalliances, and they are all inexplicably ready to chat about fucking a fourteen-year-old and revel in the memories of her figure, diminished at this point by what sounds like anorexia. “All sixteen mentioned her jutting ribs, the insubstantiality of her thighs, and one, who went up to the roof with Lux during a warm winter rain, told us how the basins of her collarbones collected water,” the narrators report. I read this and longed to physically disappear from the world so that I might psychically reappear in the male imagination as Lux did, her body defined by its absences rather than its substance. It is perfect because it is not much of anything at all. As someone with naturally deep wells on either side of my clavicle that have been made more hollow by disordered eating from time to time, I knew that ears obstruct rain from pooling there, and lying down would make the rain slide down and out. But it didn’t make the idea of gathering the rain with my hunger any less appealing. I think back to the girl I was in high school, reading these passages and wanting so badly to be Lux Lisbon specifically that I could not see how much I was like her generally.
I did not consider the possibility that I was imprinting as a one-dimensional memory on the men in their mid-twenties who took me to parties where they’d fill me with drugs and alcohol and tell me how different I was from other girls my age. On midnight excursions I’d go on with such men to the beaches of the southernmost points of San Diego, we’d remark in drunken stupors on nonsensical things like how the lights from nearby Tijuana, Mexico, did not reflect the language barrier that our border did and proceed to kiss for hours under their illumination. And yet in the throes of these melancholy and impossibly young dalliances with men and mortality, I still saw my life as pedestrian and Lux’s as so cerebral.
Drawing the boys into the rotting home that they will soon vacate in body bags is an even greater victory for the girls than the suicides themselves. The boys think they are invited to the Lisbon home the night of their planned suicides to help the girls run away with them. The girls reply that they would literally rather die by dying. The unlucky and beautiful Mary survives her attempt to gas herself in the oven and must endure a dreadful month of sleeping and six-times-daily showers before joining her sisters in suicide with a mouthful of sleeping pills. The town awaits her death with the self-interested disposition of vultures.
“In the end we had the pieces of the puzzle, but no matter how we put them together, gaps remained, oddly shaped emptinesses mapped by what surrounded them, like countries we couldn’t name,” the men declare, as they acknowledge their bafflement by the riddle of the Lisbon sisters when they take inventory of the evidence they gathered in the months and years that followed. “The girls took into their own hands decisions better left to God. They became too powerful to live among us, too self-concerned, too visionary, too blind,” the men say, dwelling on what they felt they lost the night of June 15 when the remaining four sisters executed their grand self-executions.
But the Lisbon sisters knew exactly what happened when decisions were left to God. Their own mother’s hypervigilance was born of godly instruction and culminated in the girls’ residential incarceration; the physical decay of their home as its upkeep was neglected grew more unbearable than even death. And to speak of girls in these circumstances as “too powerful” and “too self-concerned” demonstrates the nearsightedness of these men’s entitlement. It is when the men refer to “the outrageousness of a human being thinking only of herself” that it is most clear they had not learned a thing about their alluring neighbors in the intervening decades. In all that time, they never seemed to realize that the impenetrability of the Lisbon fortress was made possible by the bonds of sisterhood the boys could never hope to penetrate.
The phrase “Lisbon girls” appears in the book fifty-six times. Surprisingly, the phrase “Lisbon sisters” does not appear once. The boys did not seek out the points at which the sisters’ lives intersected, those ties that felt like simple family structure at times and like the binding of the cosmos at others. Anyone with siblings knows that these strange and infuriating creatures with whom we share blood and shelter inform our interior lives more than anyone else, both during childhood and, for some of us, even once we have escaped it. To lose a sibling is to feel mortality closer at hand than in any other death. The suicides were not individual acts of selfishness but a collective act of grief. They grieved over the death of their youngest sister, Cecilia, but they also grieved for one another, seeing flickers of themselves reflected in each other’s faces and recognizing the pain of inheriting an ungentle world that was second in its torment only to the pain of being cloistered away from it.
Siblings are the first people we love irrationally. Their faces and behaviors are like funhouse-mirror versions of our own, formed into different configurations of the same genetic material, but eerily similar to our own. It is similarity but not duplication that renders sisters capable of the envy and competition for which they are well-known. But sisters also share the strange fate of being carriers of their family’s genes but often not of their family’s name, particularly in a Catholic family in the 1970s Midwest. Together they inherit the tradition of womanhood that asks them to fold quietly into the family histories of men. They must surrender much of that which bound them to those they first loved so they can contribute to the immortality project of some other name. Their tenderness toward one another is a function of knowing their finitude as members of the unit into which they were born and inside which they first loved.
No sister in her right mind would willingly draw her sisters closer to the call of death alongside her. Sisters want each other to live. But the Lisbon sisters are not in their right minds. They are driven mad by the knowledge that they are being obsessed over by boys who cannot and should not know them because the boys have neither their interest nor their consent. They respond to this obsession and the self-aggrandizement that makes the boys think they can save the Lisbon sisters by luring them into the promise of exile but deliver only cold reminders of the body’s borders at mortality. The boys are traumatized not by the deaths of the girls but by their own impotence. “It didn’t matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn’t heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house, with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death
, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together,” they recall in the book’s last lines. But the Lisbon sisters heard them loud and clear. They simply declined their offers.
Though Jeffrey Eugenides’s second novel, Middlesex, makes rich use of Greek mythology, it is strangely absent from The Virgin Suicides, where I think it would find kindred spirits. The Pleiades are the seven daughters of Atlas and Pleione who have the misfortune of catching Orion’s eye, leading him to fall in love with them and pursue them across the earth. The gods take pity on them and turn all seven first into doves and then into stars. The seven stars are situated in the sky next to Orion, forever fatigued by his pursuit. There are dozens of variations on this myth, but all center on a unit of girls too grief-stricken to carry on without a member of their family. Without a title like widow or orphan to name the grief of losing siblings, their corpses cascade onto each other in an unknowable and unnamed sorrow.
It is in the variations of these myths scattered around the world that it becomes clear the weight of the heavens was borne not by a man but by a group of young girls. Even as one myself, I invested so much anger in a girl whom I did not know but on whom I laid the weight of many of my own sorrows. I was baffled at the prospect of rejecting an opportunity to be seen because I did not yet know the curse of being seen without also being known. I think of the love of Trip Fontaine for Lux, which was described as “truer than all subsequent loves because it never had to survive.” And then I think of my sister, whose love will survive whether I want it to or not. I think of the stars we were born under, the peculiar pain of inheriting and the particular joy of sharing it from time to time. And then I think of the foil star she gave me when we were girls. It is faded and worn thin now but bears celestial weight in its meaning: She believed I had a right to own a piece of the heavens alongside her. And though the boys look at the Lisbon artifacts like the oddly shaped emptiness of countries they cannot name, I look at the clearly defined shape of my artifact and know that sisters are not to be confined to the finitude of nations but freed to the eternity of the stars.
Broken-Bodied Girls
On the Horror of Little Girls Grown
WATCHING HORROR FILMS AS A child was primarily an exercise in witnessing the injured inflict more injuries. Freddy Krueger’s body is a giant burn that doesn’t heal. The only kindness ever extended by Jason Voorhees over the last three decades has been to cover his deformed head with a hockey mask. The eerily symmetrical torture inflicted on Pinhead’s skull on display in Hellraiser was less merciful. But while these ghoulish men frightened me out of more nights of rest than my mother can likely count, they never inspired the same inconsolable terror that would reverberate in me after encountering the disfigured young girls of the genre—notably, Regan from The Exorcist and the lesser-known but far more gruesome Zelda from Pet Sematary.
Most men in horror movies show no evidence of having ever been children. While a perfunctory nod is given to Jason as a child victim in the first Friday the 13th film, the bloodthirsty adult is too unsympathetic to render his backstory much more than an afterthought. But we meet Regan as a bright-eyed adolescent whose innocent tinkering with a Ouija board was hardly sufficient vice to invite the brutal possession that followed. In Pet Sematary, Zelda is introduced in her sister Rachel’s painful memory of being left by their parents to care for her in the excruciating stages of advanced spinal meningitis. Unlike their adult male counterparts, a major focal point of their respective stories was the girls as victims before they were villains. Growing up, I was afraid of running into Freddy or Jason in a dark alley or a nightmare, but I was more afraid of becoming Regan or Zelda.
I watched each of these movies at least a dozen times and so find it difficult to pinpoint my inaugural viewings. The sleepovers and all-nighters I pulled with my older sister bleed into one another and blur what might have indeed been revelatory moments. But my horror-bingeing definitely hit its peak (or its rock bottom, depending on your chosen addiction model) in the sixth grade, that especially cruel point in youth at which half the girls have crossed over into puberty while the other half have remained behind. Both groups are humiliated by belonging to their respective camp, indulging in misguided fantasies that the grass might be green anywhere on the landscape of early adolescence.
Even at age eleven, I knew The Exorcist was more than a chronicle of the terrible things that happen when you dabble in games of the occult. It was about sacrifice and faith, innocence lost, and the human body as the battleground for good and evil. Regan’s possession demonstrated the latter in a series of progressively more ruinous and humiliating bodily changes. Her voice grows unrecognizable. Her body is subjected to violent and uncontrollable flailing. Her head memorably twists fully around, defying the generally rigid laws of the spinal cord. In the twenty-fifth-anniversary rerelease, a previously cut scene of Regan’s body contorted into an insect-like pose and scampering down a flight of stairs found its way into new nightmares. These physical disfigurements are mirrored by her descent into moral disfigurement, punctuated by memorably profane proclamations like “Your mother sucks cock in hell!”
Though Pet Sematary mercifully spares its audience from a lot of screen time with Zelda, the particular horror of her disease leaves an indelible mark. “She started to look like this monster,” her sister Rachel recalls through tears; Zelda’s entire spine and rib cage are revealed through withering skin as she lurches toward her frightened sister. She is at once pitiful and terrifying, her expression pained as her head turns 360 degrees and she gurgles a cry for her sister’s help. Zelda chokes to death in this scene and returns only as a gruesome and vengeful specter that warns, “I’m coming for you, Rachel, and this time, I’ll get you.” Her spinal disfigurement is healed in death, but the harshness of her prominent bones remains as she screeches, “I’m going to twist your back like mine so you’ll never get out of bed again! Never get out of bed again! Never get out of bed again!” She lets out a sinister cackle at the amusing prospect of such torture being inflicted on a loved one.
The Scary Little Girl is at this point a tired horror cliché thrown haphazardly into films to draw foreshadowing pictures with crayons and allude to voices that adults cannot hear. But Regan and Zelda were frightening not because of eerie childlike qualities but because of monstrous adult ones. Their disfiguring physical transformations saw these once-innocent girls become sexual and ruthless in Regan’s case and pitiless and manipulative in Zelda’s. They were the victims of possession and disease that first incapacitated their bodies and then deformed their innocence, polluting childhood values with outsized variations on adult ones.
There is a third girl who haunts me, too, but not because of any physical scars making me cringe at the prospect of the pain at their origin points. It is instead the speed at which her body transforms both literally and figuratively from an emblem of innocence into a vessel of unadulterated evil. That girl is the title character in Carrie, an ostracized, harmless teen whose traumatic first menstrual period occurs in the film’s memorable opening scene, a harbinger of the outpouring of blood that will soon be unleashed on her the night of the prom. “They’re all gonna laugh at you,” her mother warned, predicting that Carrie would endure that universal adolescent nightmare that is far worse than being drenched in pig’s blood. When they do laugh at her, her heretofore unfocused telekinetic power has a purpose: to slaughter everyone in sight, laughing or not. Though Carrie’s mother is remembered as a religious psychotic, her belief that it was nothing short of satanic influence that gave Carrie the powers is not so far from our culture’s approach to the process of girls growing out of childhood. Little girls are good until they touch sin, at which point they grow ravenous for the stuff.
The great solace of the sleepover was the opportunity for a welcome retreat from negotiating my value in the presence of newly established bodily assets like breasts and new bends in my profile where there had once been straight lines. But the films we watched a
t them were stark reminders of the impending threat of adolescent change that would render our bodies unrecognizable, despite our protests, and in turn, transform our moral understanding of the world. It is easy to reject spiteful thoughts in a social environment not set about with the romance and ambition that plague the teen years. It is easy to reject the unseemliness of sex when you don’t live in a body that is physically prepared to engage in it. But once the body is prepared to gestate new life, the genre told me, the body is also ready to bring destruction and even death. When a girl’s body retreats so that a woman’s can take its place, it is ready to betray the innocent mind still inside it as it grows more amenable to the latent evil that was waiting to be unlocked the entire time.
The horror genre is awash in male villains whose primarily facial disfigurements are thinly veiled metaphors for the moral disfigurements that prompt them to violently terrorize their victims. But it was these broken-bodied girls who haunted me well into adulthood as fracture points between the innocence of youth and the moral decay of adulthood. The border ran in a jagged, bloody line across the screen as we watched in transfixed terror in the darkened living rooms and basement rec rooms of our youth, the screen cruelly offering light but no salvation.
Charlotte in Exile
A Case for the Liberation of Scarlett Johansson from Lost in Translation