The Virgin Suicides (5 page)

As the diary progresses, Cecilia begins to recede from her sisters and, in fact, from personal narrative of any kind. The first person singular ceases almost entirely, the effect akin to a camera's pulling away from the characters at the end of a movie, to show, in a series of dissolves, their house, street, city, country, and finally planet, which not only dwarfs but obliterates them. Her precocious prose turns to imersonal subjects, the commercial of the weeping Indian paddling his canoe along a polluted stream, or the body counts from the evening war. In its last third the diary shows two rotating moods. In romantic passages Cecilia despairs over the demise of our elm trees. In cynical entries she suggests the trees aren't sick at all, and that the deforesting is a plot "to make everything flat." Occasional references to this or that conspiracy theory crop up-the Illuminati, the Militaryindustrial complex-but she only feints in that direction, as though the names are so many vague chemical pollutants. From invective she shifts without pause into her poetic reveries again. A couplet about summer from a poem she never finished, is quite nice, we think: The trees like lungsfilling with air My sister, the mean one, pulling my hair The fragment is dated June 26, three days after she returned from the hospital, when we used to see her lying in the front-yard grass.

Little is known of Cecilia's state of mind on the last day of her life.

According to Mr. Lisbon, she seemed pleased about her party. When he went downstairs to check on the preparations, he found Cecilia standing on a chair, tying balloons to the ceiling with red and blue ribbons. "I told her to get down. The doctor said she shouldn't hold her hands over her head. Because of the stitches." She did as commanded, and spent the rest of the day lying on the rug in her bedroom, staring up at her zodiac mobile and listening to the odd Celtic records she'd gotten through a mail-order house. "It was always some soprano singing about marshes and dead roses." The melancholic music alarmed Mr. Lisbon, comparing it as he did to the optimistic tunes of his own youth, but, passing down the hall, he realized that it was certainly no worse than Lux's howling rock music or even the inhuman screech of Therese's ham radio.

From two in the afternoon on, Cecilia soaked in the bathtub. It wasn't unusual for her to take marathon baths, but after what had happened the last time, Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon took no chances. "We made her leave the door open a crack," Mrs. Lisbon said. "She didn't like it, of course.

And now she had new ammunition. That psychiatrist had said Ceel was at the age where she needed a lot of privacy." Throughout the afternoon, Mr. Lisbon kept coming up with excuses to pass by the bathroom. "I'd wait to hear a splash, then I'd go on past. We'd taken everything sharp out of there, of course."

At four-thirty, Mrs. Lisbon sent Lux up to check on Cecilia. When she came back downstairs, she seemed unconcerned, and nothing about her demeanor suggested she had an inkling about what her sister would do later that day. "She's fine," Lux said. "She's stinking up the place with those bath salts."

At five-thirty, Cecilia got out of the bath and dressed for the party.

Mrs. Lisbon heard her going back and forth between her sisters' two bedrooms (Bonnie shared with Mary, Therese with Lux). The rattling of her bracelets comforted her parents because it allowed them to keep track of her movements like an animal with a bell on its collar. From time to time during the hours before we arrived, Mr. Lisbon heard the tinkling of Cecilia's bracelets as she went up and down the stairs, trying on different shoes.

According to what they told us later on separate occasions and in separate states, Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon didn't find Cecilia's behavior strange during the party. "She was always quiet with company," Mrs.

Lisbon said. And perhaps because of their lack of socializing, Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon remembered the party as a successful event. Mrs. Lisbon, in fact, was surprised when Cecilia asked to be excused. "I thought she was having a nice time." Even at this point, the other girls didn't act as though they knew what was about to happen. Tom Faheem recalls Mary telling him about a jumper she wanted to buy at Penney's. Therese and Tim Winer discussed their anxiety over getting into an Ivy League college.

From clues later discovered, it appears Cecilia's ascent to her bedroom was not as quick as we remember it. She took time, for instance, between leaving us and reaching the upstairs to drink juice from a can of pears (she left the can on the counter, punctured with only one hole in disregard of Mrs. Lisbon's prescribed method). Either before or after drinking the juice, she went to the back door. "I thought they were sending her on a trip," Mrs. Pitzenberger said. "She was carrying a suitcase."

No suitcase was ever found. We can only explain Mrs. Pitzenberger's testimony as the hallucination of a bifocal wearer, or a prophecy of the later suicides where luggage played such a central motif. Whatever the truth, Mrs. Pitzenberger saw Cecilia close the back door, and it was only seconds later that she climbed the stairs, as we so distinctly heard from below. She flipped on the lights in her bedroom as she entered, though it was still light out. Across the street, Mr. Buell saw her open her bedroom window. "I waved to her, but she didn't see me," he told us.

Just then his wife groaned from the other room. He didn't hear about Cecilia until after the EMS truck had come and gone. "Unfortunately, we had problems of our own," he said. He went to check on his sick spouse just as Cecilia stuck her head out the window, into the pink, humid, pillowing air.

Flower arrangements arrived at the Lisbon house later than was customary. Because of the nature of the death, most people decided not to send flowers to the Funeral Home, and in general everybody put off placing their orders, unsure whether to let the catastrophe pass in silence or to act as though the death were natural. In the end, however, everybody sent something, white roses in wreaths, clusters of orchids, weeping peonies. Peter Loomis, who delivered for FTD, said flowers crammed the Lisbons' entire living room. Bouquets exploded from chairs and lay scattered across the floor. "They didn't even put them in vases," he said. Most people opted for generic cards that said "With Sympathy" or "Our Condolences," but some of the Waspier types, accustomed to writing notes for all occasions, labored over personal responses. Mrs. Beards used a quote from Walt Whitman we took to murmuring to one another: "All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, / and to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier." Chase Buell peeked at his own mother's card as he slipped it under the Lisbons' door. It read: "I don't know what you're feeling. I won't even pretend."

A few people braved personal calls. Mr. Hutch and Mr. Peters walked over to the Lisbon house on separate occasions, but their reports differed little. Mr. Lisbon invited them in, but before they could broach the painful subject, he sat them down in front of the baseball game. "He kept talking about the bullpen," Mr. Hutch said. "Hell, I pitched in college. I had to straighten him out on a few essentials. First of all, he wanted to trade Miller, though he was our only decent closer. I forgot what I'd gone over there to do." Mr. Peters said, "The guy was only half there. He kept turning the tint control up, so that the infield was practically blue. Then he'd sit back down. Then he'd get up again. One of the girls came in-can you tell them apart?-and brought us a couple beers. Took a swig from his before handing it over."

Neither of the men mentioned the suicide. "I wanted to, I really did,"

said Mr. Hutch. "I just never got around to it." Father Moody showed more perseverance. Mr. Lisbon welcomed the cleric as he had the other men, ushering him to a seat before the baseball game. A few minutes later, as though on cue, Mary served beers. But Father Moody wasn't deflected. During the second inning, he said, "How about we get the Mrs.

down here?

Have a little chat."

Mr. Lisbon hunched toward the screen. "Afraid she's not seeing anybody right now. Under the weather."

"She'll see her priest," Father Moody said.

He stood up to go. Mr. Lisbon held up two fingers. His eyes were watering. "Father," he said. "Doubleplay ball, Father."

Paolo Conelli, an altar boy, overheard Father Moody tell Fred Simpson, the choirmaster, how he had left "that strange man, God forgive me for saying so, but He made him that way," and climbed the front stairs.

Already the house showed signs of uncleanliness, though they were nothing compared to what was to come later. Dust balls lined the steps.

A halfeaten sandwich sat atop the landing where someone had felt too sad to finish it. Because Mrs. Lisbon had stopped doing laundry or even buying detergent, the girls had taken to washing clothes by hand in the bathtub, and when Father Moody passed their bathroom, he saw shirts and pants and underthings draped over the shower curtain. "It sounded quite pleasant, actually," he said. "Like rain." Steam rose from the floor, along with the smell of jasmine soap (weeks later, we asked the cosmetics lady at Jacobsen's for some jasmine soap we could smell).

Father Moody stood outside the bathroom, too bashful to enter that moist cave that existed as a common room between the girls' two shared bedrooms. Inside, if he hadn't been a priest and had looked, he would have seen the throne-like toilet where the Lisbon girls defecated publicly, the bathtub they used as a couch, filling it with pillows so that two sisters could luxuriate while so another curled her hair. He would have seen the radiator stacked with glasses and Coke cans, the clamshell soap dish employed, in a pinch, as an ashtray. From the age of twelve Lux spent hours in the john smoking cigarettes, exhaling either out the window or into a wet towel she then hung outside. But Father Moody saw none of this. He only passed through the tropical air current and that was all. Behind him he felt the colder drafts of the house, circulating dust motes and that particular family smell every house had, you knew it when you came in-Chase Buell's house smelled like skin, Joe Larson's like mayonnaise, the Lisbons' like stale popcorn, we thought, though Father Moody, going there after the deaths had begun, said, "It was a mix between a funeral parlor and broom closet. All those flowers.

All that dust." He wanted to step back into the current of jasmine, but as he stood, listening to rain beading bathroom tiles and washing away the girls' footprints, he heard voices. He made a quick circuit of the hallway, calling out for Mrs. Lisbon, but she didn't respond. Returning to the top of the stairs, he had started down when he saw the Lisbon girls through a partly open doorway. "At that point, those girls had no intention of repeating Cecilia's mistake. I know everyone thinks it was a plan, or that we handled it poorly, but they were just as shocked as I was." Father Moody rapped softly on the door and asked for permission to enter. "They were sitting on the floor together, and I could tell they'd been crying. I think they were having some kind of slumber party. They had pillows all over.

I hate to mention it, and I remember scolding myself for even thinking it at the time, but it was unmistakable: they hadn't bathed."

We asked Father Moody whether he had discussed Cecilia's death or the girls' grief, but he said he hadn't. "I brought it up a few times, but they didn't take up the subject. I've learned you can't force it. The time has to be right and the heart willing." When we asked him to sum up his impression of the girls' emotional state at that point, he said,

"Buffeted but not broken." In the first few days after the funeral, our interest in the Lisbon girls only increased. Added to their loveliness was a new mysterious suffering, perfectly silent, visible in the blue puffiness beneath their eyes or the way they would sometimes stop in mid-stride, look down, and shake their heads as though disagreeing with life. Grief made them wander. We heard reports of the girls walking aimlessly through Eastland, down the lighted mall with its timid fountains and hot dogs impaled beneath heat lamps. Now and then they fingered a blouse, or dress, but bought nothing. Woody Clabault saw Lux Lisbon talking to a motorcycle gang outside Hudson's. One biker asked her to go for a ride, and after looking in the direction of her house more than ten miles away, she accepted. She hugged his waist. He kicked the machine into life. Later, Lux was seen walking home alone, carrying her shoes.

In the Kriegers' basement, we lay on a strip of leftover carpeting and dreamed of all the ways we could soothe the Lisbon girls. Some of us wanted to lie down in the grass with them, or play the guitar and sing them songs. Paul Baldino wanted to take them to Metro Beach so they could all get a tan. Chase Buell, more and more under the sway of his father the Christian Scientist, said only that the girls needed "help not of this world." But when we asked him what he meant, he shrugged and said, "Nothing." Nevertheless, when the girls walked by, we often found him crouching by a tree, moving his lips with his eyes closed.

Not everyone thought about the girls, however. Even before Cecilia's funeral, some people could talk of nothing but the dangerousness of the fence she'd jumped on. "It was an accident waiting to happen," said Mr.

Frank, who worked in insurance. "You couldn't get a policy to cover it."

"Our kids could jump on it, too," Mrs. Zaretti insisted during coffee hour following Sunday Mass. Not long after, a group of fathers began digging the fence out free of charge. It turned out the fence stood on the Bateses' property. Mr. Buck, a lawyer, negotiated with Mr. Bates about the fence's removal and didn't speak to Mr. Lisbon at all.

Everyone assumed, of course, that the Lisbons would be grateful.

We had rarely seen our fathers in work boots before, toiling in the earth and wielding brand-new root clippers. They struggled with the fence, bent over like Marines hoisting the flag on Iwo Jima. It was the greatest show of common effort we could remember in our neighborhood, all those lawyers, doctors, and mortgage bankers locked arm in arm in the trench, with our mothers bringing out orange Kool-Aid, and for a moment our century was noble again. Even the sparrows on the telephone lines seemed to be watching. No cars passed. The industrial fog of our city made the men resemble figures hammered into pewter, but by late afternoon they still couldn't uproot the fence. Mr. Hutch got the idea of hacksawing the bars as the paramedics had, and for a while the men took turns sawing, but their paper-pushing arms gave out quickly.