The Virgin Suicides (17 page)

We'd like to tell you with authority what it was like inside the Lisbon house, or what the girls felt being imprisoned in it. Sometimes, drained by this investigation, we long for some shred of evidence, some Rosetta stone that would explain the girls at last. But even though that winter was certainly not a happy one, little more can be averred. Trying to locate the girls' exact pain is like the self-examination doctors urge us to make (we've reached that age). On a regular basis, we're forced to explore with clinical detachment our most private pouch and, pressing it, impress ourselves with its anatomical reality: two turtle eggs bedded in a nest of tiny sea grapes, with tubes snaking in and out, knobbed with nodules of gristle. We're asked to find in this dimly mapped place, amid naturally occurring clots and coils, upstart invaders. We never realized how many bumps we had until we went looking.

And so we lie on our backs, probing, recoiling, probing again, and the seeds of death get lost in the mess God made us.

It's no different with the girls. Hardly have we begun to palpate their grief than we find ourselves wondering whether this particular wound was mortal or not, or whether (in our blind doctoring) it's a wound at all.

It might just as well be a mouth, which is as wet and as warm. The scar might be over the heart or the kneecap. We can't tell. All we can do is go groping up the legs and arms, over the soft bivalvular torso, to the imagined face. It is speaking to us. But we can't hear.

Every night we scanned the girls' bedroom windows. Around dinner tables our conversations inevitably turned to the family's predicament. Would Mr. Lisbon get another job? How would he support his family? How long could the girls endure being cooped up? Even Old Mrs. Karafilis made one of her rare journeys to the first floor (it not being bath day) just to stare down the street at the Lisbon house. We couldn't remember another instance where Old Mrs. Karafilis had taken interest in the world, because ever since we had known her, she had lived in the basement waiting to die. Sometimes Demo Karafilis took us downstairs to play Foosball, and, moving among the heating ducts, spare cots, battered luggage, we would tunnel through to the small room Old Mrs. Karafilis had decorated to resemble Asia Minor. Artificial grapes hung from a ceiling lattice; decorative boxes housed silkworms; the cinder-block walls were painted the precise cerulean blue of the old country's air.

Taped-up postcards served as windows into another time and place where Old Mrs. Karafilis still lived. Green mountains rose in the background, giving way to chipped Ottoman tombs, red-tiled roofs, a puff of steam rising in one Technicolor corner from a man selling hot bread. Demo Karafilis never told us what was wrong with his grandmother, nor did he think it odd they kept her in the basement amid the vast boiler and gurgling drains (our lowland suburb was prone to flooding). Still, the way she stopped before the postcards, licking one thumb and pressing it to the same whitened spot, the way she smiled with her golden teeth, nodding toward the vistas as though greeting passersby, all this told us that Old Mrs. Karafilis had been shaped and saddened by a history we knew nothing about. When she did see us, she said, "Close the light, dolly mou," and we did, leaving her in the dark, fanning herself with the complimentary fan the funeral parlor that had buried her husband sent every Christmas. (The fan, cheap cardboard stapled to a Popsicle stick, showed Jesus praying at Gethsemane, portentous clouds piling up behind him, and on the flip side advertised mortuary services.) Other than to take a bath, Old Mrs. Karafilis came upstairs-a rope tied to her waist, Demo's father lightly pulling, Demo and his brothers assisting behind-only when Train to Istanbul came on television every two years.

Then she'd sit, excited as a girl, leaning forward on the couch and waiting for the ten-second scene where the train passed a few green hills that held her heart. She'd raise both arms, let out a vulture's cry, just as the train-same way every time-disappeared into the tunnel.

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 itthat 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 66evening," 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 byfours, 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 oldfashioned 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 goodbye 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.