The Virgin Suicides (4 page)

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 sawedoff 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.

There had never been a funeral in our town before, at least not during our lifetimes. The majority of dying had happened during the Second World War when we didn't exist and our fathers were impossibly skinny young men in black-and-white photographs-dads on jungle airstrips, dads with pimples and tattoos, dads with pinups, dads who wrote love letters to the girls who would become our mothers, dads inspired by K rations, loneliness and glandular riot in malarial air into poetic reveries that ceased entirely once they got back home. Now our dads were middleaged, with paunches, and shins rubbed hairless from years of wearing pants, but they were still a long way from death. Their own parents, who spoke foreign languages and lived in converted attics like buzzards, had the finest medical care available and were threatening to live on until the next century. Nobody's grandfather had died, nobody's grandmother, nobody's parents, only a few dogs: Tom Burke's beagle, Muffin, who choked on Bazooka Joe bubble gum, and then that summer, a creature who in dog years was still a puppy-Cecilia Lisbon.

The cemetery workers' strike hit its sixth week the day she died.

Nobody had given much thought to the strike, nor to the cemetery workers' grievances, because most of us had never been to a cemetery.

Occasionally we heard gunshots coming from the ghetto, but our fathers insisted it was only cars backfiring. Therefore, when the newspapers reported that burials in the city had completely stopped, we didn't think it affected us. Likewise, Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon, only in their forties, with a crop of young daughters, had given little thought to the strike, until those same daughters began killing themselves.

Funerals continued, but without the consummation of burial. Caskets were carted out beside undug plots; priests performed eulogies; tears were shed; after which the caskets were taken back to the deep freeze of the mortuary to await a settlement. Cremation enjoyed a rise in popularity.

Mrs. Lisbon, however, objected to this idea, fearing it was heathen, and even pointed to a biblical passage that suggested the dead will rise bodily at the Second Coming, no ashes allowed.

Only one cemetery existed in our suburb, a drowsy field owned by various denominations over the years, from Lutheran through Episcopalian to Catholic. It contained three French Canadian-fur trappers, a line of bakers named Kropp, and J. B. Milbank, who invented a local soft drink resembling root beer. With its leaning headstones, its red gravel drive in the shape of a horseshoe, and its many trees nourished by well-fed carcasses, the cemetery had filled up long ago in the time of the last deaths. Because of this, the funeral director, Mr. Alton, was forced to take Mr. Lisbon on a tour of possible alternatives.

He remembered the trip well. The days of the cemetery strike weren't easily forgotten, but Mr. Alton also confessed, "It was my first suicide. A young kid, too. You couldn't use the same sort of condolences. I was kind of sweating it out, to tell you the truth." On the West Side they visited a quiet cemetery in the Palestinian section, but Mr. Lisbon didn't like the foreign sound of the muezzin calling the people to prayer, and had heard that the neighbors still ritually slaughtered goats in their bathtubs. "Not here," he said, "not here."

Next they toured a small Catholic cemetery that looked perfect, until, coming to the back, Mr. Lisbon saw two miles of leveled land that reminded him of photographs of Hiroshima. "It was Poletown," Mr. Alton told us. "GM bought out like twenty-five thousand Polacks to build this huge automotive plant. They knocked down twenty-four city blocks, then ran out of money. So the place was all rubble and weeds. It was desolate, sure, but only if you were looking out the back fence."

Finally they arrived at a public nondenominational cemetery located between two freeways, and it was here that Cecilia Lisbon was given all the final funerary rites of the Catholic Church except interment.

Officially, Cecilia's death was listed in church records as an

"accident," as were the other girls' a year later. When we asked Father Moody about this, he said, "We didn't want to quibble. How do you know she didn't slip?" When we brought up the sleeping pills, and the noose, and the rest of it, he said, "Suicide, as a mortal sin, is a matter of intent. It's very difficult to know what was in those girls' hearts.

What they were really trying to do."

Most of our parents attended the funeral, leaving us home to protect us from the contamination of tragedy. They all agreed the cemetery was the flattest they had ever seen. There were no headstones or monuments, only granite tablets sunk into the earth, and, on V.F.W. graves, plastic American flags abused by rain, or wire garlands holding dead flowers.

The hearse had trouble getting through the gate because of the picketing, but when the strikers learned the deceased's age, they parted, and even lowered their angry placards. Inside, neglect resulting from the strike was obvious. Dirt was piled around some graves. A digging machine stood frozen with its jaws piercing the sod, as though the union's call had come in the middle of burying someone. Family members acting as caretakers had made touching attempts to spruce up loved ones' final resting places. Excessive fertilizer had scorched one plot a blazing yellow. Excessive watering had turned another into a marsh. Because water had to be carried in by hand (the sprinkler system had been sabotaged), a trail of deep footprints from grave to grave made it appear the dead were walking around at night.

The grass hadn't been cut in nearly seven weeks. Mourners stood ankle-deep as the pallbearers carried out the coffin. Because of the low teenage mortality rate, mortuary suppliers built few caskets to their middling size. They manufactured a small quantity of infant caskets, little bigger than bread boxes. The next size up was full-size, more than Cecilia required. When they had opened her casket at the Funeral Home, all anyone had seen was the satin pillow and the ruffled cushioning of the casket's lid. Mrs. Turner said, "For a minute I thought the thing was empty." But then, making only a shallow imprint because of her eighty-six pounds, pale skin and hair blending with white satin, Cecilia emerged from the background like a figure in an optical illusion. She was dressed not in the wedding gown, which Mrs. Lisbon had thrown away, but in a beige dress with a lace collar, a Christmas gift from her grandmother which she had refused to wear in life. The open section of lid revealed not only her face and shoulders, but her hands with their bitten nails, her rough elbows, the twin prongs of her hips, and even her knees.

Only the family filed past the coffin. First the girls walked past, each dazed and expressionless, and, later, people said we should have known by their faces. "It was like they were giving her a wink," Mrs.

Carruthers said. "They should have been bawling, but what did they do?

Up to the coffin, peek in, and away. Why didn't we see it?" Curt Van Osdol, the only kid at the Funeral Home, said he would have copped a last feel, right there in front of the priest and everybody, if only we had been there to appreciate it. After the girls passed by, Mrs. Lisbon, on her husband's arm, took ten stricken steps to dangle her weak head over Cecilia's face, rouged for the first and last time ever. "Look at her nails," Mr. Burton thought he heard her say. "Couldn't they do something about her nails?"

And then Mr. Lisbon replied: "They'll grow out. Fingernails keep growing. She can't bite them now, dear." Our own knowledge of Cecilia kept growing after her death, too, with the same unnatural persistence.

Though she had spoken only rarely and had had no real friends, everybody possessed his own vivid memories of Cecilia. Some of us had held her for five minutes as a baby while Mrs. Lisbon ran back into the house to get her purse. Some of us had played in the sandbox with her, fighting over a shovel, or had exposed ourselves to her behind the mulberry tree that grew like deformed flesh through the chain link fence. We had stood in line with her for smallpox vaccinations, had held polio sugar cubes under our tongues with her, had taught her to jump rope, to light snakes, had stopped her from picking her scabs on numerous occasions, and had cautioned her against touching her mouth to the drinking fountain at Three Mile Park. A few of us had fallen in love with her, but had kept it to ourselves, knowing that she was the weird sister.

Cecilia's bedroom-when we finally obtained a description from Lucy Brock-confirmed this assessment of her character. In addition to a zodiac mobile, Lucy found a collection of potent amethysts, as well as a pack of Tarot cards under Cecilia's pillow that still smelled of her incense and hair. Lucy checked -because we asked her to-to see if the sheets had been cleaned, but she said they hadn't. The room had been left intact as an exhibit. The window from which Cecilia jumped was still open. In the top bureau drawer, Lucy found seven pairs of underpants, each dyed black with Rit. She also found two pairs of immaculate high-tops in the closet. Neither of these things surprised us. We had long known about Cecilia's black underwear because whenever she'd stood up on her bicycle pedals to gain speed we had looked up her dress. We'd also often seen her on the back steps, scrubbing her high-tops with a toothbrush and cup of Ivory Liquid.

Cecilia's diary begins a year and a half before her suicide. Many people felt the illuminated pages constituted a hieroglyphics of unreadable despair, though the pictures looked cheerful for the most part. The diary had a lock, but David Barker, who got it from Skip Ortega, the plumber's assistant, told us that Skip had found the diary next to the toilet in the master bathroom, its lock already jimmied as though Mr.

and Mrs. Lisbon had been reading it themselves. Tim Winer, the brain, insisted on examining the diary. We carried it to the study his parents had built for him, with its green desk lamps, contour globe, and gilt-edged encyclopedias. "Emotional instability," he said, analyzing the handwriting. "Look at the dots on these i's. All over the place."

And then, leaning forward, showing the blue veins beneath his weakling's skin, he added: "Basically, what we have here is a dreamer. Somebody out of touch with reality. When she jumped, she probably thought she'd fly."

We know portions of the diary by heart now. After we got it up to Chase Buell's attic, we read portions out loud. We passed the diary around, fingering pages and looking anxiously for our names. Gradually, however, we learned that although Cecilia had stared at everybody all the time, she hadn't thought about any of us. Nor did she think about herself. The diary is an unusual document of adolescence in that it rarely depicts the emergence of an unformed ego. The standard insecurities, laments, crushes, and daydreams are nowhere in evidence. Instead, Cecilia writes of her sisters and herself as a single entity. It's often difficult to identify which sister she's talking about, and many strange sentences conjure in the reader's mind an image of a mythical creature with ten legs and five heads, lying in bed eating junk food, or suffering visits from affectionate aunts. Most of the diary told us more about how the girls came to be than why they killed themselves. We got tired of hearing about what they ate ("Monday, February 13. Today we had frozen pizza .. ."), or what they wore, or which colors they favored. They all detested creamed corn. Mary had chipped her tooth on the monkey bars and had a cap. ("I told you," Kevin Head said, reading that.) And so we learned about their lives, came to hold collective memories of times we hadn't experienced, harbored private images of Lux leaning over the side of a ship to stroke her first whale, and saying, "I didn't think they would stink so much," while Therese answered, "It's the kelp in their baleens rotting." We became acquainted with starry skies the girls had gazed at while camping years before, and the boredom of summers traipsing from back yard to front to back again, and even a certain indefinable smell that arose from toilets on rainy nights, which the girls called "sewery." We knew what it felt like to see a boy with his shirt off, and why it made Lux write the name Kevin in purple Magic Marker all over her three-ring binder and even on her bras and panties, and we understood her rage coming home one day to find that Mrs. Lisbon had soaked her things in Clorox, bleaching all the "Kevins" out. We knew the pain of winter wind rushing up your skirt, and the ache of keeping your knees together in class, and how drab and infuriating it was to jump rope while the boys played baseball. We could never understand why the girls cared so much about being mature, or why they felt compelled to compliment each other, but sometimes, after one of us had read a long portion of the diary out loud, we had to fight back the urge to hug one another or to tell each other how pretty we were. We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together. We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn't fathom them at all. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.