The Virgin Suicides (18 page)

Old Mrs. Karafilis never cared much about neighborhood gossip, mostly because she couldn’t understand it, and the part she did understand seemed trivial. As a young woman, she had hidden in a cave to escape being killed by the Turks. For an entire month she had eaten nothing but olives, swallowing the pits to fill herself up. She had seen family members butchered, men strung up in the sun eating their own privates, and now hearing how Tommy Riggs totaled his parents’ Lincoln, or how the Perkinses’ Christmas tree caught fire, killing the cat, she didn’t see the drama. The only time she perked up was when someone mentioned the Lisbon girls, and then it wasn’t to ask questions or get details but to enter into telepathy with them. If we were talking about the girls within her hearing, Old Mrs. Karafilis would lift her head, then raise herself painfully from her chair and cane across the cold cement floor. At one end of the basement a window well let in weak light, and, going up to its cold panes, she stared at a patch of sky visible through a lace of spiderweb. That was as much of the girls’ world as she could see, just the same sky above their house, but it told her enough. It occurred to us that she and the girls read secret signs of misery in cloud formations, that despite the discrepancy in their ages something timeless communicated itself between them, as though she were advising the girls in her mumbling Greek, “Don’t waste your time on life.” Mulch and blown leaves filled the window well, a broken chair from when we’d made a fort. Light shone through Old Mrs. Karafilis’s housedress, as thin and drably patterned as paper toweling. Her sandals were right for wearing to a
hammam
, some steaming place, not across that drafty floor. On the day she heard about the girls’ new incarceration, she jerked her head up, nodded, didn’t smile. But had known already, it seemed.

From her weekly bath of Epsom salts, she talked of the girls, or to them, we couldn’t tell which. We didn’t get too close, or listen at the keyhole, because the few contradictory glimpses we’d gotten of Old Mrs. Karafilis, with her sagging breasts from another century, her blue legs, her undone hair shockingly long and glossy as a girl’s, filled us with embarrassment. Even the sound of the tub running made us blush, her muffled voice coming over it, complaining of aches while the black lady, none too young herself, coaxed her in, the two of them alone with their decrepitude behind the bathroom door, crying out, singing, first the black lady, then Old Mrs. Karafilis singing some Greek song, and finally just the sound of water we couldn’t imagine the color of, sloshing around. Afterward, she’d appear just as pale as before, her head wrapped in a towel. We could hear her lungs inflating as the black lady fitted the rope around Old Mrs. Karafilis’s waist and began lowering her down the stairs. Despite her wish to die as soon as possible, Old Mrs. Karafilis always looked fearful during these descents, gripping the banister, eyes magnified behind rimless glasses. Sometimes as she passed we’d tell her the latest about the girls, and she’d cry,
“Mana!,”
which meant something like “Holy shit!,” Demo said, but she never really seemed surprised. Out past the weekly glimpsed windows, out past the street, lived the world, which had, Old Mrs. Karafilis knew, been dying for years.

In the end, it wasn’t death that surprised her but the stubbornness of life. She couldn’t understand how the Lisbons kept so quiet, why they didn’t wail to heaven or go mad. Seeing Mr. Lisbon stringing Christmas lights, she shook her head and muttered. She let go of the special geriatric banister installed along the first floor, took a few steps at sea level without support, and for the first time in seven years suffered no pain. Demo explained it to us like this: “We Greeks are a moody people. Suicide makes sense to us. Putting up Christmas lights after your own daughter does it—that makes no sense. What my
yia yia
could never understand about America was why everyone pretended to be happy all the time.”

Winter is the season of alcoholism and despair. Count the drunks in Russia or the suicides at Cornell. So many exam-takers threw themselves into the gorge of that hilly campus that the university declared a midwinter holiday to ease the tension (popularly known as “suicide day,” the holiday popped up in a computer search we ran, along with “suicide ride” and “suicide-mobile”). We don’t understand those Cornell kids any better, some Bianca with her first diaphragm and all life ahead of her plunging off the footbridge, cushioned only by her down vest; dark existential Bill, with his clove cigarettes and Salvation Army overcoat, not leaping as Bianca did, but easing himself over the rail and hanging on for dear death before letting go (shoulder muscles show tears in 33 percent of people choosing bridges; the other 67 percent just jump). We mention this now only to show that even college students, free to booze and fornicate, bring about their own ends in large numbers. Imagine what it was like for the Lisbon girls, shut up in their house with no blaring stereo or ready bong around.

The newspapers, later writing about what they termed a “suicide pact,” treated the girls as automatons, creatures so barely alive that their deaths came as little change. In the sweep of Ms. Perl’s accounts, which boiled two or three months and the suffering of four individuals into a paragraph with a heading “When Youth Sees No Future,” the girls appear as indistinguishable characters marking black
x
’s on a calendar or holding hands in self-styled Black Masses. Suggestions of satanism, or some mild form of black magic, haunt Ms. Perl’s calculations. She made much of the record-burning incident, and often quoted rock lyrics that alluded to death or suicide. Ms. Perl befriended a local deejay and spent an entire night listening to the records that Lux’s schoolmates listed among her favorites. From this “research,” she came up with the find she was most proud of: a song by the band Cruel Crux, entitled “Virgin Suicide.” The chorus follows, though neither Ms. Perl nor we have been able to determine if the album was among those Mrs. Lisbon forced Lux to burn:

Virgin suicide
What was that she cried?
No use in stayin’
On this holocaust ride
She gave me her cherry
She’s my virgin suicide

The song certainly ties in nicely with the notion that a dark force beset the girls, some monolithic evil we weren’t responsible for. Their behavior, however, was anything but monolithic. While Lux trysted on the roof, Therese grew fluorescent sea horses in a drinking glass, and, down the hall, Mary spent hours looking into her portable mirror. Set in an oval of pink plastic, the mirror was surrounded by exposed bulbs like a mirror in an actress’s dressing room. A switch allowed Mary to simulate various times and weathers. There were settings for “morning,” “afternoon,” and “evening,” as well as one for “brite sun” and “overcast.” For hours Mary would sit before the mirror, watching her face swim through the alterations of counterfeit worlds. She wore dark glasses in sunshine, and bundled up under clouds. Mr. Lisbon sometimes saw her flipping the switch back and forth, passing through ten or twenty days at once, and she often got one of her sisters to sit before the mirror so that she could dispense advice. “See, the circles under your eyes come out in overcast. That’s because we’ve got pale skin. In sunlight … just a minute … see, like this, they’re gone. So you should wear more base or concealer on cloudy days. On sunny days, our complexions tend to wash out, so we need color. Lipstick and even eyeshadow.”

The searchlight of Ms. Perl’s prose also tends to wash out the girls’ features. She uses catchphrases to describe the girls, calling them “mysterious” or “loners,” and at one point goes so far as to say they were “attracted to the pagan aspect of the Catholic Church.” What that phrase meant exactly we were never sure, but many people felt it had to do with the girls’ attempt to save the family elm.

Spring had finally arrived. Trees budded. The frozen streets, in thawing, cracked. Mr. Bates recorded new potholes, as he did every year, sending a typed list to the Department of Transportation. In early April, the Parks Department returned to replace ribbons around condemned trees, this time using not red but yellow ribbons printed with the words “This tree has been diagnosed with Dutch elm disease and will be removed in order to inhibit further spread. By order of Parks Dept.” You had to circle a tree three times to read the whole sentence. The elm in the Lisbons’ front yard (see Exhibit #1) was among the condemned, and with the weather still cool a truckful of men arrived to cut it down.

We knew the technique. First a man in a fiberglass cage ascended into the treetop and, after boring a hole into the bark, put his ear to it as though listening for the tree’s failing pulse; then, without ceremony, he began clipping smaller branches, which fell into the grasping orange gloves of the men below. They stacked the branches neatly, as though they were two-by-fours, and then fed them into the buzz saw in the truck’s back. Showers of sawdust shot into the street, and years later, when we found ourselves in old-fashioned bars, the sawdust on the floors always brought back to us the cremation of our trees. After denuding the trunk, the men left to denude others, and for a time the tree stood blighted, trying to raise its stunted arms, a creature clubbed mute, only its sudden voicelessness making us realize it had been speaking all along. In that death-row state, the trees resembled the Baldinos’ barbecue, and we understood that Sammy the Shark had fashioned his escape tunnel with great foresight, to look not as trees did now but as they were coming to look, so that if he was ever forced to escape in the future, he could leave through one of a hundred identical stumps.

Normally, people came out to say good-bye to their trees. It wasn’t uncommon to see a family gathered on the lawn at a safe distance from the chain saws, a tired mom and dad with two or three long-haired teenagers, and a poodle with a ribbon in its hair. People felt they owned the trees. Their dogs had marked them daily. Their children had used them for home plate. The trees had been there when they’d moved in, and had promised to be there when they moved out. But when the Parks Department came to cut them down, it was clear our trees were not ours but the city’s, to do with as it wished.

The Lisbons, however, didn’t come out during the de-branching. The girls looked on from an upstairs window, their faces cold-cream white. Lunging and retreating, the elevated man sheared off the elm’s great green crown. He chopped off the sick limb that had sagged and sprouted yellow leaves last summer. He proceeded to cut off the healthy limbs, too, and left the tree trunk rising like a gray pillar in the Lisbons’ front yard. When the men drove away, we weren’t sure whether it was dead or alive.

For the next two weeks we waited for the Parks Department to finish the job, but it took them three weeks to return. This time two men with chain saws climbed out of the truck. They circled the trunk, taking its measure, then steadied saws on thighs and pulled the starter cords. We were down in Chase Buell’s basement at the time, playing bumper pool, but the whine reached us through the exposed rafters overhead. The aluminum heating vents rattled. The bright balls trembled on the green felt. The sound of the chain saws filled our heads like a dentist’s drill, and we ran outside to see the men moving in on the elm. They wore goggles against flying chips, but otherwise dragged about with the boredom of men accustomed to slaughter. They lifted the snarling guide bars. One spit out tobacco juice. Then, revving the motors, they were just about to tear the tree apart when the foreman jumped out of the truck, furiously waving his arms. Across the lawn, in a phalanx, the Lisbon girls were running toward the men. Mrs. Bates, who was looking on, said she thought the girls were going to fling themselves on the chain saws. “They were heading straight for them. And their eyes looked wild.” The Parks Department men didn’t know what the foreman was jumping up and down about. “I was blind-sided,” one said. “The girls ducked right under my saw. Thank God I saw them in time.” Both men did, and held their saws in the air, backing off. The Lisbon girls ran past them. They might have been playing a game. They looked behind them as though afraid of being tagged. But then they reached the safety zone. The men turned off their chain saws and the pulsing air subsided into silence. The girls surrounded the tree, linking hands in a daisy chain.

“Go away,” said Mary. “This is our tree.”

They weren’t facing the men but the tree itself, pressing their cheeks against the trunk. While Therese and Mary had shoes on, Bonnie and Lux had run out barefoot, which led many to believe the rescue had been a spontaneous idea. They hugged the trunk, which rose above them into nothingness.

“Girls, girls,” the foreman said. “You’re too late. The tree’s already dead.”

“That’s what you say,” said Mary.

“It’s got beetles. We have to take it down so they won’t spread to other trees.”

“There’s no scientific evidence that removal limits infestation,” said Therese. “These trees are ancient. They have evolutionary strategies to deal with beetles. Why don’t you just leave it up to nature?”

“If we left it up to nature, there’d be no trees left.”

“That’s what it’s going to be like anyway,” said Lux.

“If boats didn’t bring the fungus from Europe in the first place,” Bonnie said, “none of this would have ever happened.”

“You can’t put the genie back in the bottle, girls. Now we’ve got to use our own technology to see what we can save.”

Actually, none of this might have been spoken. We’ve pieced it together through partial accounts, and can attest only to the general substance. The girls did feel the trees would survive better on their own, and did place the blame for the disease on human arrogance. But many people felt this was a smoke screen. That particular elm, as everyone knew, had been Cecilia’s favorite. Its tarred knothole still retained her small handprint. Mrs. Scheer recalled Cecilia often standing under the tree in springtime, trying to catch the whirling propellers of its seeds. (For our own part, we recall those green seeds housed in a single fibrous wing, and how they helicoptered to the ground, but we can’t be sure whether they came from the elms or from, say, the chestnuts, and none of us has a botany handbook handy, so popular with rangers and realists.) At any rate, many people in our neighborhood found it easy to imagine why the girls might connect the elm with Cecilia. “They weren’t saving it,” said Mrs. Scheer. “They were saving her memory.”