The Virgin Suicides (7 page)

Once we got to the Lisbons’ windows, our new inexplicable feelings for the girls came to the fore. As we slapped off bugs, we saw Mary Lisbon in the kitchen, holding a box of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese. She appeared to be contemplating whether or not to open it. She read the directions, turned the box over to look at the vivid picture of the noodles, and then put the box back on the counter. Anthony Turkis, pressing his face to the window, said, “She should eat something.” She picked up the box again. Hopefully, we watched. But then she turned and disappeared.

Outside it grew dark. Lights came on down the block, but not in the Lisbon house. We couldn’t see in any better, and in fact the glass panes began to reflect our own gaping faces. It was only nine o’clock, but everything confirmed what people had been saying: that since Cecilia’s suicide the Lisbons could hardly wait for night to forget themselves in sleep. Up in a bedroom window, Bonnie’s three votive candles glimmered in a reddish haze, but otherwise the house absorbed the shadows of night. Insects started up in their hiding places all around, vibrating the minute we turned our backs. Everyone called them crickets, but we never found any in the sprayed bushes or aerated lawns, and had no idea what they looked like. They were merely sound. Our parents had been more intimate with crickets. For them the buzzing apparently didn’t sound mechanical. It came from every direction, always from a height just above our heads, or just below, and always with the suggestion that the insect world felt more than we did. As we stood charmed into stillness, listening to the crickets, Mr. Lisbon came out the side door and thanked us. His hair looked even grayer than usual, but grief hadn’t altered the highness of his voice. He had on overalls, one knee covered by sawdust. “Feel free to use the hose,” he said, and then he looked at the Good Humor truck passing by, the jingle of the bell seemed to trigger a memory, he smiled, or winced—we couldn’t tell which—and returned inside.

We went with him only later, invisibly, with the ghosts of our questions. Apparently, as he stepped back inside, he saw Therese come out of the dining room. She was stuffing her mouth with candy—M&M’s, by the colors—but stopped immediately on seeing him. She swallowed an unchewed chunk. Her high forehead glowed in the light from the street and her cupid’s lips were redder, smaller, and more shapely than he remembered, especially in contrast to her cheeks and chin, which had gained weight. Her eyelashes were crusted, as though recently glued shut. At that moment Mr. Lisbon had the feeling that he didn’t know who she was, that children were only strangers you agreed to live with, and he reached out in order to meet her for the first time. He rested his hands on her shoulders, then dropped them to his sides. Therese brushed the hair out of her face, smiled, and began walking slowly up the stairs.

Mr. Lisbon went on his usual nighttime rounds, checking to see that the front door was locked (it wasn’t), that the garage light was off (it was), and that none of the burners on the stove had been left on (none had). He turned off the light in the first-floor bathroom, where he found Kyle Krieger’s retainer in the sink, left from when he’d taken it out during the party to eat cake. Mr. Lisbon ran the retainer under water, examining the pink shell form-fitted to the roof of Kyle’s mouth, the crenellations in the plastic that encircled the turret of his teeth, the looping front wire bent at key spots (you could see plier marks) to provide modulated pressure. Mr. Lisbon knew his parental and neighborly duty entailed putting the retainer in a Ziploc bag, calling the Kriegers, and telling them their expensive orthodontal device was in safe keeping. Acts like these—simple, humane, conscientious, forgiving—held life together. Only a few days earlier he would have been able to perform them. But now he took the retainer and dropped it in the toilet. He pressed the handle. The retainer, jostled in the surge, disappeared down the porcelain throat, and, when waters abated, floated triumphantly, mockingly, out. Mr. Lisbon waited for the tank to refill and flushed again, but the same thing happened. The replica of the boy’s mouth clung to the white slope.

At that point something flashed in the corner of his eye. “I thought I saw somebody, but when I looked, there was nothing there.” Nor did he see anything as he came around the back hall into the foyer and up the front stairs. On the second floor he listened at the girls’ doors, but heard only Mary coughing in her sleep, Lux playing a radio softly, singing along. He stepped into the girls’ bathroom. A beam of light from the risen moon penetrated the window, lighting up a portion of mirror. Amid smudged fingerprints, a small circle had been wiped clean where his daughters contemplated their images, and above the mirror itself Bonnie had taped a white construction-paper dove. Mr. Lisbon parted his lips in a grimace and saw in the clean circle the one dead canine tooth beginning to turn green on the left side of his mouth. The doors to the girls’ shared bedrooms were not completely closed. Breathings and murmurings issued from them. He listened to the sounds as though they could tell him what the girls were feeling and how to comfort them. Lux switched her radio off, and everything was silent. “I couldn’t go in,” Mr. Lisbon confessed to us years later. “I didn’t know what to say.” Only as he left the bathroom, heading for the oblivion of sleep himself, did Mr. Lisbon see Cecilia’s ghost. She was standing in her old bedroom, dressed in the wedding dress again, having somehow shed the beige dress with the lace collar she’d worn in her coffin. “The window was still open,” Mr. Lisbon said. “I don’t think we’d ever remembered to shut it. It was all clear to me. I knew I had to close that window or else she’d go on jumping out of it forever.”

According to his story, he didn’t cry out. He didn’t want to make contact with the shade of his daughter, to learn why she had done herself in, to ask forgiveness, or to rebuke her. He merely rushed forward, brushing past, to close the window. As he did, however, the ghost turned, and he saw that it was only Bonnie, wrapped in a bedsheet. “Don’t worry,” she said, quietly. “They took the fence out.”

In a handwritten note displaying the penmanship perfected during his graduate school days in Zurich, Dr. Hornicker called Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon in for a second consultation, but they didn’t go. Instead, from what we observed during the remainder of the summer, Mrs. Lisbon once more took charge of the house while Mr. Lisbon receded into a mist. When we saw him after that, he had the sheepish look of a poor relation. By late August, in the weeks of preparation before school, he began leaving by the back door as though sneaking out. His car would whine inside the garage and, when the automatic door rose, would emerge tentatively, lopsided like an animal missing a leg. Through the windshield we could see Mr. Lisbon at the wheel, his hair still wet and his face sometimes dabbed with shaving cream, but he made no expression when the tailpipe hit the end of the driveway, sending up sparks, as it did every time. At six o’clock he returned home. As he came up the drive, the garage door shuddered to engulf him, and then we wouldn’t see him until the next morning, when the clanging tailpipe announced his departure.

The only extensive contact with the girls occurred late in August, when Mary showed up without an appointment at Dr. Becker’s orthodontal office. We talked to him years later, while dozens of plaster dental casts grinned crookedly down at us from glass cabinets. Each set of teeth bore the name of the unfortunate child who’d been made to swallow the cement, and the sight took us back to the medieval torture of our own orthodontal histories. Dr. Becker spoke for some time before we paid attention, for once again we could feel him hammering metal clasps over our molars, or stringing our upper and lower teeth together with rubber bands. Our tongues searched out pockets of scar tissue left by jutting back braces, and even fifteen years later the fissures still seemed sweet with blood. But Dr. Becker was saying, “I remember Mary because she came in without her parents. No kid had ever done that before. When I asked her what she wanted, she put two fingers in her mouth and pulled up her front lip. Then she said, ‘How much?’ She was worried her parents wouldn’t be able to pay.”

Dr. Becker declined to give Mary Lisbon an estimate. “Bring your mother in and we’ll talk about it,” he said. In fact, the process would have been extensive, as Mary, like her sisters, appeared to have two extra canine teeth. Disappointed, she lay back in the dentist’s chair, her feet raised, while a silver tube chirred water into a sucking cup. “I had to leave her sitting in the chair,” Dr. Becker said. “I had five other kids waiting. Later my nurse told me she heard the girl crying.”

The girls didn’t appear as a group until Convocation. On September 7, a day whose coolness dampened hopes for an Indian summer, Mary, Bonnie, Lux, and Therese came to school as though nothing had happened. Once again, despite their closed ranks, we could see the new differences among them, and we felt that if we kept looking hard enough we might begin to understand what they were feeling and who they were. Mrs. Lisbon hadn’t taken the girls to buy new school clothes, so they wore last year’s. Their prim dresses were too tight (despite everything, the girls had continued to develop) and they looked uncomfortable. Mary had spruced up her outfit with accessories: a bracelet bunch of wooden cherries the same bright red as her scarf. Lux’s school tartan, too short by now, exposed her naked knees and an inch of thigh. Bonnie wore a tent-like something, with meandering trim. Therese had on a white dress that looked like a lab coat. Nevertheless, the girls filed in with an unexpected dignity as a hush fell over the auditorium. Bonnie had picked a simple bouquet of late-season dandelions from the school green. She held them under Lux’s chin to see if she liked butter. Their recent shock was undetectable, but sitting down they left a folding seat empty as though saving it for Cecilia.

The girls didn’t miss a single day of classes, nor did Mr. Lisbon, who taught with his usual enthusiasm. He continued to pump students for answers by pretending to strangle them, and scratched out equations in a cloud of chalk dust. At lunchtime, however, rather than going to the teachers’ lounge, he began to eat in his classroom, bringing a cafeteria apple and plate of cottage cheese back to his desk. He showed other odd behavior. We saw him walking along the Science Wing, conversing with spider plants hanging from the geodesic panes. After the first week, he taught from his swivel chair, wheeling back and forth to the blackboard and never standing up, explaining that this was because of his blood-sugar level. After school, as assistant soccer coach, he stood behind the goal, listlessly calling out the score, and when practice finished, wandered the chalk-dusted field, collecting soccer balls in a soiled canvas bag.

He drove to school alone, an hour earlier than his late-sleeping, bused-in daughters. Entering the main door, past the suit of armor (our athletic teams were called the Knights), he went straight into his classroom where the nine planets of our solar system hung from perforated ceiling panels (sixty-six holes in each square, according to Joe Hill Conley, who counted them during class). Nearly invisible white strings attached the planets to a track. Each day they rotated and revolved, the whole cosmos controlled by Mr. Lisbon, who consulted an astronomy chart and turned a crank next to the pencil sharpener. Beneath the planets hung black-and-white triangles, orange helices, blue cones with detachable noses. On his desk Mr. Lisbon displayed a Soma cube, solved for all time in a ribbon of Scotch tape. Beside the blackboard a wire clamp held five sticks of chalk so that he could draw sheet music for his male singing group. He had been a teacher so long he had a sink in his room.

The girls, on the other hand, entered through the side door, past the bed of dormant daffodils tended each spring by the headmaster’s slim, industrious wife. Scattering to separate lockers, they reunited in the cafeteria during juice break. Julie Freeman had been Mary Lisbon’s best friend, but after the suicide they stopped talking. “She was a neat kid, but I just couldn’t deal with it. She sort of freaked me out. Also I was starting to go out with Todd by then.” The sisters walked with poise down the halls, carrying books over their chests and staring at a fixed point in space we couldn’t see. They were like Aeneas, who (as we translated him into existence amid the cloud of Dr. Timmerman’s B.O.) had gone down to the underworld, seen the dead, and returned, weeping on the inside.

Who knew what they were thinking or feeling? Lux still giggled stupidly, Bonnie fingered the rosary deep in the pocket of her corduroy skirt, Mary wore her suits that made her resemble the First Lady, Therese kept her protective goggles on in the halls—but they receded from us, from the other girls, from their father, and we caught sight of them standing in the courtyard, under drizzle, taking bites from the same doughnut, looking up at the sky, letting themselves get slowly drenched.

We spoke to them in snatches, each of us adding a sentence to a communal conversation. Mike Orriyo was first. His locker was next to Mary’s, and one day he peeked over its rim and said, “How’s it going?” Her head was bent forward, throwing her hair over her face, and he wasn’t sure she’d heard him until she mumbled, “Not bad.” Without turning to meet his eyes, she slammed the metal locker shut and moved away, clutching her books. After a few steps she tugged down the back of her skirt.

The next day he waited for her and, when she opened her locker, added a new phrase: “I’m Mike.” This time Mary said something distinct through her hair: “I know who you are. I’ve only been at this school for like my whole life.” Mike Orriyo wanted to say something more, but when she finally turned to face him, he went mute. He stood staring at her, opening his mouth uselessly, until she said, “You don’t have to talk to me.”

Other guys were more successful. Chip Willard, the detention king, walked up to Lux as she was sitting in a pool of sunshine—it was one of the last warm days of the year—and while we watched from a second-story dormer, he sat down beside her. Lux was wearing her school tartan and white kneesocks. Her Top-Siders looked new. Before Willard had walked up, she’d been idly rubbing them in the dirt. Then she spread her legs out, propped her hands behind her back, and turned her face toward the last rays of the season. Willard moved into her sun and spoke. She brought her legs together, scratched one knee, and drew them apart. Willard settled his bulk on the soft ground. He leaned toward her, grinning, and even though he had never said anything intelligent within our hearing, he made Lux laugh. He seemed to know what he was doing, and we were astounded at the knowledge he had gained in the basements and bleachers of his delinquency. He crumpled a dead leaf over Lux’s head. Bits fell down the back of her shirt and she hit him. The next thing we knew, they were walking together around back of the school, out past the tennis courts, through the row of memorial elms, and to the towering fence that marked the property of the mansions on the private drive beyond.