The Virgin Suicides Read online

  We asked him if he put her in the cab, but he said no. “I walked home that night. I didn’t care how she got home. I just took off.” Then: “It’s weird. I mean, I liked her. I really liked her. I just got sick of her right then.”

  As for the other boys, they spent the rest of the night driving around our suburb. They drove past the Little Club, the Yacht Club, the Hunt Club. They drove through The Village, where Halloween displays had given way to Thanksgiving. At 1:30 A.M., unable to stop thinking about the girls whose presence still filled the car, they decided to make one final pass by the Lisbon house. They stopped for Joe Hill Conley to relieve himself behind a tree, then proceeded down Cadieux, speeding past the smallish houses that had once been cottages for summer help. They passed a subdivision where one of our great mansions had stood, its ornamental gardens replaced by redbrick houses with antiqued doors and mammoth garages. They turned onto Jefferson, passing the War Memorial and the black gates of the remaining millionaires, and rode in silence toward the girls who had become real to them at last. As they approached the Lisbons’ house, they saw a light burning in a bedroom window. Parkie Denton held up his hand for the other boys to slap. “Pay dirt,” he said. But their jubilation was short-lived. For even before the car stopped they knew what had happened. “It hit me in the pit of my stomach that those girls weren’t going on any more dates,” Kevin Head told us years later. “The old bitch had locked them up again. Don’t ask me how I knew. I just did.” The window shades had closed like eyelids and the shaggy flower beds made the house look abandoned. In the window where the one light burned, however, the shade rippled. A hand peeled it back, revealing a hot yellow slice of face—Bonnie, Mary, Therese, or even Lux—looking down the street. Parkie Denton tooted his horn, a short hopeful blast, but just as the girl put her palm to the glass, the light went out.

  FOUR

  A few weeks after Mrs. Lisbon shut the house in maximum-security isolation, the sightings of Lux making love on the roof began.

  Following the Homecoming dance, Mrs. Lisbon closed the downstairs shades. All we could see were the girls’ incarcerated shadows, which ran riot in our imaginations. Moreover, as fall turned to winter, the trees in the yard drooped and thickened, concealing the house, even though their leaflessness should have revealed it. A cloud always seemed to hover over the Lisbons’ roof. There was no explanation except the psychic one that the house became obscured because Mrs. Lisbon willed it to. The sky grew darker, and light abandoned the daytime, so that we found ourselves always moving in a timeless murk, the only way to discern the hour the taste of our burps, tooth-pasty in the morning, redolent in the afternoon of the jellied beef of school cafeteria meals.

  Without explanation, the girls were taken out of school. They merely failed to show up one morning, and then again the next. When Mr. Woodhouse asked about the matter, Mr. Lisbon seemed to have no idea the girls were gone. “He kept saying, ‘Have you checked out back?’ ”

  Jerry Burden picked the combination on Mary’s locker to find most of her books left behind. “She had postcards taped up inside. Weird stuff. Couches and shit.” (Actually art museum postcards showing a Biedermeier chair and a pink chintz Chippendale sofa.) Her notebooks were piled on the top shelf, each one bearing the name of a bright new subject she never got to study. Inside American History, amid spasmodic notes, Jerry Burden found the following doodle: a girl with pigtails is bent under the weight of a gigantic boulder. Her cheeks puff out, and her rounded lips expel steam. One widening steam cloud contains the word Pressure, darkly retraced.

  Given Lux’s failure to make curfew, everyone expected a crackdown, but few anticipated it would be so drastic. When we spoke to her years later, however, Mrs. Lisbon maintained that her decision was never intended to be punitive. “At that point being in school was just making things worse,” she said. “None of the other children were speaking to the girls. Except boys, and you knew what they were after. The girls needed time to themselves. A mother knows. I thought if they stayed at home, they’d heal better.” Our interview with Mrs. Lisbon was brief. She met us at the bus station in the small town she now lives in, because the station was the only place that served coffee. Her hands were red-knuckled and her gums had receded. Her tragedy hadn’t made her more approachable, and in fact lent her the unknowable quality of a person who had suffered more than could be expressed. Nevertheless, we wanted to talk to her most of all because we felt that she, being the girls’ mother, understood more than anyone why they had killed themselves. But she said, “That’s what’s so frightening. I don’t. Once they’re out of you, they’re different, kids are.” When we asked her why she had never pursued the psychological counseling Dr. Hornicker offered, Mrs. Lisbon became angry. “That doctor wanted to blame it on us. He thought Ronnie and I were to blame.” A bus came into the station then, and through the open doorway at Gate 2 a gust of carbon monoxide blew over the counter with its stacks of fried doughnuts. Mrs. Lisbon said she had to leave.

  She had done more than take the girls out of school. The next Sunday, arriving home after a spirited church sermon, she had commanded Lux to destroy her rock records. Mrs. Pitzenberger (who happened to be redecorating a room next door) heard the fierce argument. “Now!” Mrs. Lisbon kept repeating, while Lux tried to reason, to negotiate, and finally burst into tears. Through the upstairs hall window, Mrs. Pitzenberger saw Lux stomp to her bedroom, returning with a collection of peach crates. The crates were heavy and Lux slid them down the stairs like sleds. “She acted like she was going to whiz them down. But she always grabbed them before they got out of control.” In the living room, Mrs. Lisbon had the fire going, and Lux, now crying without sound, began to consign her records one by one to the flames. We never learned which albums were condemned at that auto-da-fé, but apparently Lux held up album after album, appealing for Mrs. Lisbon’s mercy. The smell quickly grew overpowering, and the plastic melted over the andirons, so that Mrs. Lisbon told Lux to stop. (She threw out the rest of the albums with that week’s trash.) Still, Will Timber, who was getting a grape pop, said he could smell burning plastic all the way to Mr. Z’s, the party store on Kercheval.

  For the next few weeks we hardly saw the girls at all. Lux never spoke to Trip Fontaine again, nor did Joe Hill Conley call Bonnie, as he had promised. Mrs. Lisbon took the girls to their grandmother’s house to get advice from an old woman who had lived through everything. When we called her in Roswell, New Mexico, where she had moved after living forty-three years in the same single-story house, the old lady (Mrs. Lema Crawford) did not respond to questions about her involvement in the punishment, either out of stubbornness or because of the feedback her hearing aid picked up over the phone. She did refer, however, to her own misfortune at the hands of love some sixty years earlier. “You never get over it,” she said. “But you get to where it doesn’t bother you so much.” And then, before hanging up: “Lovely weather down here. Best thing I ever did was to throw down the old shovel and hoe and get out of that town.”

  The smoky sound of her voice brought the scene to life for us: the old woman at the kitchen table, her skimpy hair up in an elasticized turban; Mrs. Lisbon tight-lipped and grim in a chair opposite; and the four penitents, heads lowered, fingering knickknacks and porcelain figurines. There is no discussion of how they feel or what they want out of life; there is only the descending order—grandmother, mother, daughters—with the backyard outside under rain, and the dead vegetable garden.

  Mr. Lisbon continued to go to work in the mornings and the family continued to attend church on Sundays, but that was it. The house receded behind its mists of youth being choked off, and even our own parents began to mention how dim and unhealthy the place looked. Raccoons were attracted by its miasmic vapors at night, and it wasn’t unusual to find a dead one squashed by a car as it had tried to make its getaway from the Lisbons’ trash cans. One week, on the front porch, Mrs. Lisbon set off tiny smoke bombs that gave off a sulfurous stench. No one had ever seen the g
adgets before, but it was rumored they were a defense against the raccoons. Then, about the time the first cold spell hit, people began to see Lux copulating on the roof with faceless boys and men.

  At first it was impossible to tell what was happening. A cellophane body swept its arms back and forth against the slate tiles like a child drawing an angel in the snow. Then another darker body could be discerned, sometimes in a fast-food restaurant uniform, sometimes wearing an assortment of gold chains, once in the drab gray suit of an accountant. Through the bronchioles of leafless elm branches, from the Pitzenbergers’ attic, we finally made out Lux’s face as she sat wrapped in a Hudson’s Bay blanket, smoking a cigarette, impossibly close in the circle of our binoculars because she moved her lips only inches away but without sound.

  We wondered how she could do such a thing on her own house, with her parents sleeping nearby. True, it was impossible for Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon to see their own roof, and, once installed, Lux and her partners enjoyed relative safety; but there was the unavoidable prior noise of sneaking down to let the boys and men in, of leading them up creaking stairs in a darkness charged with anxious vibrations, night noises humming in their ears, the men sweating, risking statutory rape charges, the loss of their careers, divorce, just to be led up the stairway, through a window, to the roof, where in the midst of their passion they chafed their knees and rolled in stagnant puddles. We never knew how Lux met them. From what we could tell, she didn’t leave the house. She didn’t even leave at night, sneaking out to do it in a vacant lot or down by the lake, but preferred to make love on the premises of her confinement. 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.” 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, always her feet snagged in the gutter, always her single blooming hand steadying itself against the chimney, no matter what our present lovers’ feet and hands are doing. And we’d have to admit, too, that in our most intimate moments, alone at night with our beating hearts, asking God to save us, what comes most often is Lux, succubus of those binocular nights.

  We received reports of her erotic adventures from the most unlikely sources, kids from working-class neighborhoods with feathered haircuts who swore they’d gone to the roof themselves with Lux, and though we quizzed them, trying to find inconsistencies in their stories, we never succeeded. They said it was always too dark inside the house to see, the only thing alive Lux’s hand, urgent and bored at once, tugging them forward by their belt buckles. The floor was an obstacle course. Dan Tyco, with his tackle’s neck, stepped in something soft at the top of the landing and picked it up. Only after Lux led him out the window and up to the roof could he see by moonlight what he held: the half-eaten sandwich Father Moody had encountered five months earlier. Other kids found congealed bowls of spaghetti, empty tin cans, as though Mrs. Lisbon had stopped cooking for the girls and they lived by foraging.

  According to the boys’ descriptions, Lux had lost weight, though we couldn’t tell through the binoculars. 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. A few boys mentioned the acidic taste of her saliva—the taste of digestive fluids with nothing to do—but none of these signs of malnourishment or illness or grief (the small cold sores at the corners of her mouth, the patch of hair missing above her left ear) detracted from Lux’s overwhelming impression of being a carnal angel. They spoke of being pinned to the chimney as if by two great beating wings, and of the slight blond fuzz above her upper lip that felt like plumage. Her eyes shone, burned, intent on her mission as only a creature with no doubts as to either Creation’s glory or its meaninglessness could be. The words the boys used, their shifty eyebrows, fright, bafflement, made it clear they had served as only the most insignificant footholds in Lux’s ascent, and, in the end, even though they had been carried to the peak, they couldn’t tell us what lay beyond. A few of them remarked on the overriding sense of Lux’s measureless charity.

  Though she carried on few extended conversations, we got an idea of her state of mind from the little that got back to us of the little she said. She told Bob McBrearley that she couldn’t live without “getting it regular,” though she delivered the phrase with a Brooklyn accent, as though imitating a movie. A sense of playacting permeated much of her behavior. Willie Tate admitted that, despite her eagerness, “she didn’t seem to like it much,” and many boys described similar inattention. Lifting their heads from the soft shelf of Lux’s neck, they found her eyes open, her brow knitted in thought; or at the height of passion they felt her pick a pimple on their backs. Nevertheless, on the roof, Lux reportedly said pleading things like, “Put it in. Just for a minute. It’ll make us feel close.” Other times she treated the act like some small chore, positioning the boys, undoing zippers and buckles with the weariness of a checkout girl. She oscillated wildly in her contraceptive vigilance. Some reported her administering complex procedures, inserting three or four jellies or creams at once, topping them off with a white spermicide she referred to as “the cream cheese.” Occasionally she sufficed with her “Australian method,” which involved shaking up a Coke bottle and hosing down her insides. In stricter moods she laid down her catchphrase ultimatum: “No erection without protection.” Often she used sanitized pharmaceutical products; other times, presumably cut off by Mrs. Lisbon’s blockade, she fell back on the ingenious methods devised by midwives in centuries past. Vinegar proved useful, as did tomato juice. Love’s tiny seacraft foundered in acidic seas. Lux kept an assortment of bottles, as well as one foul rag, behind the chimney. Nine months later, when the roofers hired by the new young couple found the bottles, they called down to the young wife, “Looks like somebody was having salad up here.”

  It was crazy to make love on the roof at any time, but to make love on the roof in winter suggested derangement, desperation, self-destructiveness far in excess of any pleasure snatched beneath the dripping trees. Though some of us saw Lux as a force of nature, impervious to chill, an ice goddess generated by the season itself, the majority knew she was only a girl in danger, or in pursuit, of catching her death of cold. Therefore we were not surprised when, three weeks into Lux’s airborne displays, the EMS truck appeared yet again. By this, its third rescue, the truck had become as familiar as Mrs. Buell’s hysterical voice calling Chase home. When it rocketed up the drive, familiarity blinded us to its new snow tires, the rings of salt encrusting each fender. We saw Sheriff—the skinny one with the mustache—leaping from the driver’s seat even before he did so, and after that every sight had déjà vu written all over it. We were prepared for the nightgowned girls to streak past the windows, for lights to chart the paramedics’ progress toward the victim, first the foyer light going on, then the hall light, the upstairs hall, the bedroom on the right, until the pinball-machine house was lit up in sectors. It was after 9 P.M. and no moon showed. Birds had built nests in the old streetlamps, so that light filtered down through straw and moulted feathers. The birds had flown south long ago, but in dappled beams Sheriff and the fat one appeared once again in the doorway of the Lisbon house. They were carrying the stretcher, just as we expected, but when the porch light came on we were not prepared for what we saw: Lux Lisbon, sitting up, very much alive.

  She appeared to be in pain, but as they carried her out of the house she had the presence of mind to snatch up a Reader’s Digest, which she later read cover to cover in the hospital. In fact, despite her convulsions (she was clutching her stomach), Lux had dared to put on a
coat of the forbidden pink lipstick that tasted—so the boys on the roof told us—like strawberries. Woody Clabault’s sister had the same brand, and once, after we got into his parents’ liquor cabinet, we made him put on the lipstick and kiss each one of us so that we, too, would know what it tasted like. Beyond the flavor of the drinks we improvised that night—part ginger ale, part bourbon, part lime juice, part scotch—we could taste the strawberry wax on Woody Clabault’s lips, transforming them, before the artificial fireplace, into Lux’s own. Rock music blared from the tape player; we threw ourselves about in chairs, bodilessly floating to the couch from time to time to dip our heads into the strawberry vat, but the next day we refused to remember that any of this had happened, and even now it’s the first time we’ve spoken of it. At any rate, the memory of that night was superseded by that of Lux’s being hoisted into the EMS truck, because, despite discrepancies of time and space, it was Lux’s lips we tasted, not Clabault’s.

  Her hair clearly needed washing. George Pappas, who reached the truck before Sheriff closed the door, described how blood had pooled in Lux’s cheeks. “You could see veins,” he said. Holding the magazine in one hand, clutching her midsection with the other, she rode the stretcher as though it were a bobbing lifeboat. Her thrashing, cries, scowls of agony only emphasized the inertness of Cecilia, whom we now saw in memory as even deader than she had actually been. Mrs. Lisbon didn’t jump into the truck as she had previously but remained on the lawn, waving as though Lux had boarded a bus to summer camp. Neither Mary, Bonnie, nor Therese came outside. Discussing it later, many of us felt we suffered a mental dislocation at that moment, which only grew worse through the course of the remaining deaths. The prevailing symptom of this state was an inability to recall any sound. Truck doors slammed silently; Lux’s mouth (eleven fillings, according to Dr. Roth’s records) screamed silently; and the street, the creaking tree limbs, the streetlight clicking different colors, the electric buzz of the pedestrian crossing box—all these usually clamorous voices hushed, or had begun shrieking at a pitch too high for us to hear, though they sent chills up our spines. Sound returned only once Lux had gone. Televisions erupted with canned laughter. Fathers splashed, soaking aching backs.