The Virgin Suicides (24 page)

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 uncut 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 Mr. 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.

Because no furniture remained, we didn’t think the Lisbons would be long. Nevertheless, three hours went by and they did not reappear. With a fungo bat, Chase Buell hit a Wiffle ball into their yard, but came back saying he didn’t see a single living soul inside. Later he tried to hit another Wiffle ball, but it got stuck in the trees. We didn’t see Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon come out the rest of that day, or evening. It was in the middle of the night that they finally left. Nobody saw them go except Uncle Tucker. Years later, when we interviewed him, he was completely sober and recovered from his decades of abuse, and in contrast to everyone else, including ourselves, who looked much the worse for wear, Uncle Tucker looked much better. We asked him if he remembered seeing the Lisbons leave and he said he did. “I was outside, having a smoke. It was about two in the morning. I heard the door open across the street and then they came out. The mother looked bombed. The husband sort of helped her in. And then they drove away. Fast. Got the hell out.”

When we awoke the next morning, the Lisbon house was empty. It looked even more run-down than ever and seemed to have collapsed from the inside, like a lung. Once the new young couple took possession of the house, we had time, amid the scraping, painting, and roofing, the uprooting of bushes and planting of Asiatic ground cover, to coalesce our intuitions and theories into a story we could live with. The new young couple knocked out the front windows (still bearing our finger- and noseprints) and installed sliding plate-glass windows with airtight seals. A team of men in white overalls and caps sandblasted the house, then over the next two weeks sprayed it with a thick white paste. The foreman, whose tag said “Mike,” told us that “the new Kenitex method” would eliminate the need to repaint once and for all. “Pretty soon everybody’s going to be Kenitexing,” he said as the men moved about with spray guns, coating the house. When they finished, the Lisbon house was transformed into a giant wedding cake dripping frosting, but it took less than a year for chunks of Kenitex to begin falling off like gobs of bird shit. We thought it just revenge on the new young couple who had set themselves so purposefully to removing signs of the Lisbon girls we still held dear: the slate roof, where Lux had made love, covered with sandpapery shingles; the back flower bed, whose soil Therese had analyzed for lead content, laid with red bricks so that the young wife could pick flowers without getting her feet wet; the girls’ rooms themselves made into private spaces for the new young couple to pursue their individual interests—a desk and computer in Lux and Therese’s old room, a loom in Mary and Bonnie’s. The bathtub where our naiads once floated, Lux poking cigarettes above the water like reeds to breathe through, was ripped out to make room for a fiberglass Jacuzzi. At curbside, we examined the tub, fighting the urge to lie down in it. The little kids who did jump in couldn’t appreciate the significance. The new young couple turned the house into a sleek empty space for meditation and serenity, covering with Japanese screens the shaggy memories of the Lisbon girls.