The Virgin Suicides

We found Mr. Buell just down the hall from his wife, in a bedroom with a sporting theme. On the shelf stood a photograph of his first wife, whom he had loved ever since divorcing her, and when he rose from his desk to greet us, he was still stooped from the shoulder injury faith had never quite healed. “It was like anything else in this sad society,” he told us. “They didn’t have a relationship with God.” When we reminded him about the laminated picture of the Virgin Mary, he said, “Jesus is the one she should have had a picture of.” Through the wrinkles and unruly white eyebrows we could discern the handsome face of the man who had taught us to pass a football so many years ago. Mr. Buell had been a pilot in the Second World War. Shot down over Burma, he led his men on a hundred-mile hike through the jungle to safety. He never accepted any kind of medicine after that, not even aspirin. One winter he broke his shoulder skiing, and could only be convinced to get an X ray, nothing more. From that time on he winced when we tried to tackle him, and raked leaves one-handed, and no longer flipped daredevil pancakes on Sunday mornings. Otherwise he persevered, and always gently corrected us when we took the Lord’s name in vain. In his bedroom, the shoulder had fused into a graceful humpback. “It’s sad to think about those girls,” he said. “What a waste of life.”

The most popular theory at the time held Dominic Palazzolo to blame. Dominic was the immigrant kid staying with relatives until his family got settled in New Mexico. He was the first boy in our neighborhood to wear sunglasses, and within a week of arriving, he had fallen in love. The object of his desire wasn’t Cecilia but Diana Porter, a girl with chestnut hair and a horsey though pretty face who lived in an ivy-covered house on the lake. Unfortunately, she didn’t notice Dominic peering through the fence as she played fierce tennis on the clay court, nor as she lay, sweating nectar, on the poolside recliner. On our corner, in our group, Dominic Palazzolo didn’t join in conversations about baseball or busing, because he could speak only a few words of English, but every now and then he would tilt his head back so that his sunglasses reflected sky, and would say, “I love her.” Every time he said it he seemed delivered of a profundity that amazed him, as though he had coughed up a pearl. At the beginning of June, when Diana Porter left on vacation to Switzerland, Dominic was stricken. “Fuck the Holy Mother,” he said, despondent. “Fuck God.” And to show his desperation and the validity of his love, he climbed onto the roof of his relatives’ house and jumped off.

We watched him. We watched Cecilia Lisbon watching from her front yard. Dominic Palazzolo, with his tight pants, his Dingo boots, his pompadour, went into the house, we saw him passing the plate-glass picture windows downstairs; and then he appeared at an upstairs window, with a silk handkerchief around his neck. Climbing onto the ledge, he swung himself up to the flat roof. Aloft, he looked frail, diseased, and temperamental, as we expected a European to look. He toed the roof’s edge like a high diver, and whispered, “I love her,” to himself as he dropped past the windows and into the yard’s calculated shrubbery.

He didn’t hurt himself. He stood up after the fall, having proved his love, and down the block, some maintained, Cecilia Lisbon developed her own. Amy Schraff, who knew Cecilia in school, said that Dominic had been all she could talk about for the final week before commencement. Instead of studying for exams, she spent study halls looking up ITALY in the encyclopedia. She started saying “Ciao,” and began slipping into St. Paul’s Catholic Church on the Lake to sprinkle her forehead with holy water. In the cafeteria, even on hot days when the place was thick with the fumes of institutional food, Cecilia always chose the spaghetti and meatballs, as though by eating the same food as Dominic Palazzolo she could be closer to him. At the height of her crush she purchased the crucifix Peter Sissen had seen decorated with the brassiere.

The supporters of this theory always pointed to one central fact: the week before Cecilia’s suicide attempt, Dominic Palazzolo’s family had called him to New Mexico. He went telling God to fuck Himself all over again because New Mexico was even farther from Switzerland, where, right that minute, Diana Porter strolled under summer trees, moving unstoppably away from the world he was going to inherit as the owner of a carpet cleaning service. Cecilia had unleashed her blood in the bath, Amy Schraff said, because the ancient Romans had done that when life became unbearable, and she thought when Dominic heard about it, on the highway, amid the cactus, he would realize that it was she who loved him.

The psychiatrist’s report takes up most of the hospital record. After talking with Cecilia, Dr. Hornicker made the diagnosis that her suicide was an act of aggression inspired by the repression of adolescent libidinal urges. To each of three wildly different ink blots, she had responded, “A banana.” She also saw “prison bars,” “a swamp,” “an Afro,” and “the earth after an atomic bomb.” When asked why she had tried to kill herself, she said only, “It was a mistake,” and clammed up when Dr. Hornicker persisted. “Despite the severity of her wounds,” he wrote, “I do not think the patient truly meant to end her life. Her act was a cry for help.” He met with Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon and recommended that they relax their rules. He thought Cecilia would benefit by “having a social outlet, outside the codification of school, where she can interact with males her own age. At thirteen, Cecilia should be allowed to wear the sort of makeup popular among girls her age, in order to bond with them. The aping of shared customs is an indispensable step in the process of individuation.”

From that time on, the Lisbon house began to change. Almost every day, and even when she wasn’t keeping an eye on Cecilia, Lux would suntan on her towel, wearing the swimsuit that caused the knife sharpener to give her a fifteen-minute demonstration for nothing. The front door was always left open, because one of the girls was always running in or out. Once, outside Jeff Maldrum’s house, playing catch, we saw a group of girls dancing to rock and roll in his living room. They were very serious about learning the right ways to move, and we were amazed to learn that girls danced together for fun, while Jeff Maldrum only rapped the glass and made kissing noises until they pulled down the shade. Before they disappeared we saw Mary Lisbon in the back near the bookcase, wearing bell-bottomed blue jeans with a heart embroidered on the seat.

There were other miraculous changes. Butch, who cut the Lisbon grass, was now allowed inside for a glass of water, no longer having to drink from the outside faucet. Sweaty, shirtless, and tattooed, he walked right into the kitchen where the Lisbon girls lived and breathed, but we never asked him what he saw because we were scared of his muscles and his poverty.

We assumed Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon were in agreement about the new leniency, but when we met with Mr. Lisbon years later, he told us his wife had never agreed with the psychiatrist. “She just gave in for a while,” he said. Divorced by that time, he lived alone in an efficiency apartment, the floor of which was covered with shavings from his wood carvings. Whittled birds and frogs crowded the shelves. According to Mr. Lisbon, he had long harbored doubts about his wife’s strictness, knowing in his heart that girls forbidden to dance would only attract husbands with bad complexions and sunken chests. Also, the odor of all those cooped-up girls had begun to annoy him. He felt at times as though he were living in the bird house at the zoo. Everywhere he looked he found hairpins and fuzzy combs, and because so many females roamed the house they forgot he was a male and discussed their menstruation openly in front of him. Cecilia had just gotten her period, on the same day of the month as the other girls, who were all synchronized in their lunar rhythms. Those five days of each month were the worst for Mr. Lisbon, who had to dispense aspirin as though feeding the ducks and comfort crying jags that arose because a dog was killed on TV. He said the girls also displayed a dramatic womanliness during their “monthly time.” They were more languorous, descended the stairs in an actressy way, and kept saying with a wink, “Cousin Herbie’s come for a visit.” On some nights they sent him out to buy more Tampax, not just one box but four or five, and the young store clerks with their thin mustaches would smirk. He loved his daughters, they were precious to him, but he longed for the presence of a few boys.

That was why, two weeks after Cecilia returned home, Mr. Lisbon persuaded his wife to allow the girls to throw the first and only party of their short lives. We all received invitations, made by hand from construction paper, with balloons containing our names in Magic Marker. Our amazement at being formally invited to a house we had only visited in our bathroom fantasies was so great that we had to compare one another’s invitations before we believed it. It was thrilling to know that the Lisbon girls knew our names, that their delicate vocal cords had pronounced their syllables, and that they meant something in their lives. They had had to labor over proper spellings and to check our addresses in the phone book or by the metal numbers nailed to the trees.

As the night of the party approached, we watched the house for signs of decorating or other preparations, but saw none. The yellow bricks retained their look of a church-run orphanage and the silence of the lawn was absolute. The curtains didn’t rustle, nor did a van deliver six-foot submarine sandwiches or drums of potato chips.

Then the night arrived. In blue blazers, with khaki trousers and clip-on neckties, we walked along the sidewalk in front of the Lisbon house as we had so many times before, but this time we turned up the walk, and climbed the front steps between the pots of red geraniums, and rang the doorbell. Peter Sissen acted as our leader, and even looked slightly bored, saying again and again, “Wait’ll you see this.” The door opened. Above us, the face of Mrs. Lisbon took form in the dimness. She told us to come in, we bumped against each other getting through the doorway, and as soon as we set foot on the hooked rug in the foyer we saw that Peter Sissen’s descriptions of the house had been all wrong. Instead of a heady atmosphere of feminine chaos, we found the house to be a tidy, dry-looking place that smelled faintly of stale popcorn. A piece of needlepoint saying “Bless This Home” was framed over the arch, and to the right, on a shelf above the radiator, five pairs of bronzed baby shoes preserved for all time the unstimulating stage of the Lisbon girls’ infancy. The dining room was full of stark colonial furniture. One wall had a painting of Pilgrims plucking a turkey. The living room revealed orange carpeting and a brown vinyl sofa. Mr. Lisbon’s La-Z-Boy flanked a small table on which sat the partially completed model of a sailing ship, without rigging and with the busty mermaid on the prow painted over.

We were directed downstairs to the rec room. The steps were metal-tipped and steep, and as we descended, the light at the bottom grew brighter and brighter, as though we were approaching the molten core of the earth. By the time we reached the last step it was blinding. Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead; table lamps burned on every surface. The green and red linoleum checkerboard flamed beneath our buckled shoes. On a card table, the punch bowl erupted lava. The paneled walls gleamed, and for the first few seconds the Lisbon girls were only a patch of glare like a congregation of angels. Then, however, our eyes got used to the light and informed us of something we had never realized: the Lisbon girls were all different people. Instead of five replicas with the same blond hair and puffy cheeks we saw that they were distinct beings, their personalities beginning to transform their faces and reroute their expressions. We saw at once that Bonnie, who introduced herself now as Bonaventure, had the sallow complexion and sharp nose of a nun. Her eyes watered and she was a foot taller than any of her sisters, mostly because of the length of her neck which would one day hang from the end of a rope. Therese Lisbon had a heavier face, the cheeks and eyes of a cow, and she came forward to greet us on two left feet. Mary Lisbon’s hair was darker; she had a widow’s peak and fuzz above her upper lip that suggested her mother had found her depilatory wax. Lux Lisbon was the only one who accorded with our image of the Lisbon girls. She radiated health and mischief. Her dress fit tightly, and when she came forward to shake our hands, she secretly moved one finger to tickle our palms, giving off at the same time a strange gruff laugh. Cecilia was wearing, as usual, the wedding dress with the shorn hem. The dress was vintage 1920s. It had sequins on the bust she didn’t fill out, and someone, either Cecilia herself or the owner of the used clothing store, had cut off the bottom of the dress with a jagged stroke so that it ended above Cecilia’s chafed knees. She sat on a barstool, staring into her punch glass, and the shapeless bag of a dress fell over her. She had colored her lips with red crayon, which gave her face a deranged harlot look, but she acted as though no one were there.

We knew to stay away from her. The bandages had been removed, but she was wearing a collection of bracelets to hide the scars. None of the other girls had any bracelets on, and we assumed they’d given Cecilia all they had. Scotch tape held the undersides of the bracelets to Cecilia’s skin, so they wouldn’t slide. The wedding dress bore spots of hospital food, stewed carrots and beets. We got our punch and stood on one side of the room while the Lisbon girls stood on the other.

We had never been to a chaperoned party. We were used to the parties our older brothers threw with our parents out of town, to dark rooms vibrating with heaps of bodies, musical vomiting, beer kegs beached on ice in the bathtub, riots in the hallways, and the destruction of living room sculpture. This was all different. Mrs. Lisbon ladled out more glasses of punch while we watched Therese and Mary play dominoes, and across the room Mr. Lisbon opened his tool kit. He showed us his ratchets, spinning them in his hand so that they whirred, and a long sharp tube he called his router, and another covered with putty he called his scraper, and one more with a pronged end he said was his gouger. His voice was hushed as he spoke about these implements, but he never looked at us, only at the tools themselves, running his fingers over their lengths or testing their sharpness with the tender bulb of his thumb. A single vertical crease deepened in his forehead, and in the middle of his dry face his lips grew moist.

Through all this Cecilia remained on her stool.

We were happy when Joe the Retard showed up. He arrived on his mother’s arm, wearing his baggy Bermuda shorts and his blue baseball cap, and as usual he was grinning with the face he shared with every other mongoloid. He had his invitation tied with a red ribbon around his wrist, which meant that the Lisbon girls had spelled out his name as well as our own, and he came murmuring with his oversize jaw and loose lips, his tiny Japanese eyes, his smooth cheeks shaved by his brothers. Nobody knew exactly how old Joe the Retard was, but for as long as we could remember he had had whiskers. His brothers used to take him onto the porch with a bucket to shave him, yelling for him to keep still, saying if they slit his throat it wouldn’t be their fault, while Joe turned white and became as motionless as a lizard. We also knew that retards didn’t live long and aged faster than other people, which explained the gray hairs peeking out from under Joe’s baseball cap. As children we had expected that Joe the Retard would be dead by the time we became adolescents, but now we were adolescents and Joe was still a child.

Now that he had arrived we were able to show the Lisbon girls all the things we knew about him, how his ears wiggled if you scratched his chin, how he could only say “Heads” when you flipped a coin, never “Tails,” because that was too complicated, even if we said, “Joe, try tails,” he would say, “Heads!” thinking he won every time because we let him. We had him sing the song he always sang, the one Mr. Eugene taught him. He sang, “Oh, the monkeys have no tails in Sambo Wango, oh, the monkeys have no tails in Sambo Wango, oh, the monkeys have no tails, they were bitten off by whales,” and we clapped, and the Lisbon girls clapped, Lux clapped, and leaned against Joe the Retard, who was too dense to appreciate it.

The party was just beginning to get fun when Cecilia slipped off her stool and made her way to her mother. Playing with the bracelets on her left wrist, she asked if she could be excused. It was the only time we ever heard her speak, and we were surprised by the maturity of her voice. More than anything she sounded old and tired. She kept pulling on the bracelets, until Mrs. Lisbon said, “If that’s what you want, Cecilia. But we’ve gone to all this trouble to have a party for you.”

Cecilia tugged the bracelets until the tape came unstuck. Then she froze. Mrs. Lisbon said, “All right. Go up, then. We’ll have fun without you.” As soon as she had permission, Cecilia made for the stairs. She kept her face to the floor, moving in her personal oblivion, her sunflower eyes fixed on the predicament of her life we would never understand. She climbed the steps to the kitchen, closed the door behind her, and proceeded through the upstairs hallway. We could hear her feet right above us. Halfway up the staircase to the second floor her steps made no more noise, but it was only thirty seconds later that we heard the wet sound of her body falling onto the fence that ran alongside the house. First came the sound of wind, a rushing we decided later must have been caused by her wedding dress filling with air. This was brief. A human body falls fast. The main thing was just that: the fact of a person taking on completely physical properties, falling at the speed of a rock. It didn’t matter whether her brain continued to flash on the way down, or if she regretted what she’d done, or if she had time to focus on the fence spikes shooting toward her. Her mind no longer existed in any way that mattered. The wind sound huffed, once, and then the moist thud jolted us, the sound of a watermelon breaking open, and for that moment everyone remained still and composed, as though listening to an orchestra, heads tilted to allow the ears to work and no belief coming in yet. Then Mrs. Lisbon, as though alone, said, “Oh, my God.”

Mr. Lisbon ran upstairs. Mrs. Lisbon ran to the top and stood holding the banister. In the stairwell we could see her silhouette, the thick legs, the great sloping back, the big head stilled with panic, the eyeglasses jutting into space and filled with light. She took up most of the stairs and we were hesitant to go around her until the Lisbon girls did. Then we squeezed by. We reached the kitchen. Through a side window we could see Mr. Lisbon standing in the shrubbery. When we came out the front door we saw that he was holding Cecilia, one hand under her neck and the other under her knees. He was trying to lift her off the spike that had punctured her left breast, traveled through her inexplicable heart, separated two vertebrae without shattering either, and come out her back, ripping the dress and finding the air again. The spike had gone through so fast there was no blood on it. It was perfectly clean and Cecilia merely seemed balanced on the pole like a gymnast. The fluttering wedding dress added to this circusy effect. Mr. Lisbon kept trying to lift her off, gently, but even in our ignorance we knew it was hopeless and that despite Cecilia’s open eyes and the way her mouth kept contracting like that of a fish on a stringer it was just nerves and she had succeeded, on the second try, in hurling herself out of the world.

Two

We didn’t understand why Cecilia had killed herself the first time and we understood even less when she did it twice. Her diary, which the police inspected as part of the customary investigation, didn’t confirm the supposition of unrequited love. Dominic Palazzolo was mentioned only once in that tiny rice-paper journal illuminated with colored Magic Markers to look like a Book of Hours or a medieval Bible. Miniature designs crowded the pages. Bubblegum angels swooped from top margins, or scraped their wings between teeming paragraphs. Maidens with golden hair dripped sea-blue tears into the book’s spine. Grape-colored whales spouted blood around a newspaper item (pasted in) listing arrivals to the endangered species list. Six hatchlings cried from shattered shells near an entry made on Easter. Cecilia had filled the pages with a profusion of colors and curlicues, Candyland ladders and striped shamrocks, but the entry about Dominic read, “Palazzolo jumped off the roof today over that rich bitch, Porter. How stupid can you be?”

The paramedics came back again, the same two, though it took us a while to recognize them. Out of fear and politeness we had moved across the street to sit on the hood of Mr. Larson’s Oldsmobile. As we made our exit, none of us had said a word except for Valentine Stamarowski, who called across the lawn, “Thank you for the party, Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon.” Mr. Lisbon was still sunk in bushes up to his waist, his back jerking as though he were trying to pull Cecilia up and off, or as though he were sobbing. On the porch Mrs. Lisbon made the other girls face the house. The sprinkler system, timed to go on at 8:15 p.m., spurted into life just as the EMS truck appeared at the end of the block, moving at about fifteen miles an hour, without flashing lights or siren, as though the paramedics already knew it was hopeless. The skinny one with the mustache climbed out first, then the fat one. They got the stretcher immediately, instead of first checking on the victim, a lapse which we later learned from medical professionals violated procedure. We didn’t know who had called the paramedics or how they knew they were no more than undertakers that day. Tom Faheem said Therese had gone inside and called, but the rest of us remember the remaining four Lisbon girls immobile on the porch until after the EMS truck arrived. No one else on our street was aware of what had happened. The identical lawns down the block were empty. Someone was barbecuing somewhere. Behind Joe Larson’s house we could hear a birdie being batted back and forth, endlessly, by the two greatest badminton players in the world.

The paramedics moved Mr. Lisbon aside so they could examine Cecilia. They found no pulse, but went ahead trying to save her anyway. The fat one hacksawed the fence stake while the skinny one got ready to catch her, because it was more dangerous to pull Cecilia off the barbed end than to leave it piercing her. When the stake snapped loose, the skinny one fell back under Cecilia’s released weight. Then he regained his footing, pivoted, and slipped her onto the stretcher. As they carried her away, the sawed-off stake lifted the sheet like a tent post.

By this time it was nearly nine o’clock. From the roof of Chase Buell’s house where we congregated after getting out of our dress-up clothes to watch what would happen next, we could see, over the heaps of trees throwing themselves into the air, the abrupt demarcation where the trees ended and the city began. The sun was falling in the haze of distant factories, and in the adjoining slums the scatter of glass picked up the raw glow of the smoggy sunset. Sounds we usually couldn’t hear reached us now that we were up high, and crouching on the tarred shingles, resting chins in hands, we made out, faintly, an indecipherable backward-playing tape of city life, cries and shouts, the barking of a chained dog, car horns, the voices of girls calling out numbers in an obscure tenacious game—sounds of the impoverished city we never visited, all mixed and muted, without sense, carried on a wind from that place. Then: darkness. Car lights moving in the distance. Up close, yellow house lights coming on, revealing families around televisions. One by one, we all went home.