The Virgin Suicides

“[T]hey put Cecilia on a stretcher and carried her out of the house to the truck in the driveway. She looked like a tiny Cleopatra on an imperial litter.”

“”What are you doing here, honey? You’re not even old enough to know how bad life gets.” … “Obviously, Doctor,” she said, “you’ve never been a thirteen-year-old girl.”

“Whenever we saw Mrs. Lisbon we looked in vain for some sign of the beauty that must have once been hers.”

“[T]he two parents leached of color, like photographic negatives, and then the five glittering daughters in their homemade dresses, all lace and ruffle[.]”

“”It’s sad to think about those girls,” he said. “What a waste of life.””

“When asked why she had tried to kill herself, she said only, “It was a mistake[.]””

“It was thrilling to know that the Lisbon girls knew our names, that their delicate vocal cords had pronounced their syllables, and that they meant something in their lives.”

“[T]he silence of the lawn was absolute.”

“Then, however, our eyes got used to the light and informed us of something we had never realized: the Lisbon girls were all different people.”

“The bandages had been removed, but she was wearing a collection of bracelets to hide the scars.”

“Through all this Cecilia remained on her stool.”

“She kept her face to the floor, moving in her personal oblivion, her sunflower eyes fixed on the predicament of her life we would never understand.”

“Her mind no longer existed in any way that mattered.”

“We didn’t understand why Cecilia had killed herself the first time and we understood even less when she did it twice.”

“Most of our parents attended the funeral, leaving us home to protect us from the contamination of tragedy.”

“… and for a moment our century was noble again.”

“We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the world they really believed in, and that for all their caretaking a bitching about crabgrass they didn’t give a damn about lawns.”

“And bugs are only lobsters that have learned to fly.”

“”Don’t worry”, she said quietly. “They took the fence out.””

“”I’ve never gotten over that girl, man. Never.””

“Though he retrieved his books from his locker, we knew they were only props and that he was destined for capitalism and not scholarship, as his drug deals already augured.”

“The room seemed full of a sweet viscous liquid, a honey nearly light as air… Time slowed down.”

“”Every second is eternal”

“He didn’t understand how she had bewitched him, nor why having done so she promptly forgot his existence[.]”

“[I]n desperate moods he asked his mirror why the only girl he was crazy about was the only girl not crazy about him.”

“Paralyzed by love, Trip didn’t move once as tornadoes flashed on the screen, and it was fifteen minutes before he got up the courage to place a sliver of forearm along the armrest.”

“Trip Fontaine didn’t see any signs of twistedness in the girls, but later he did say, “You would have killed yourself just to have something to do.””

“… but the bright nearby fact of her presence burned in his mind.”

“Even though that lightning attack lasted only three minutes, it left its mark on him.”

“”Most people never taste that kind of love” … “At least I tasted it once, man.””

“The year of the suicides the Lisbons’ leaves went unraked.”

“Back in summer, the city newspapers had neglected to report on Cecilia’s suicide because of its sheer prosaicness.”

“First of all, the rest of the town had forgotten about Cecilia’s suicide by that point, whereas the growing disrepair of the Lisbon house constantly reminded us of the trouble within.”

“We listened to them, but it was clear they’d received too much therapy to know the truth.”

“But it was always the same: their white faces drifting in slow motion past us, while we pretended we hadn’t been looking for them at all, that we didn’t know they existed.”

“Could I foresee she would commit suicide? I regret to say, no. At least ten percent of my students were born with modernist tendencies.”

“… many assumed they wanted to be left alone. And the more the Lisbon girls were left alone, the more they retreated.”

“… with the result that all the healing was done by those of us without wounds.”

“… she got a small part in the chorus, singing and dancing as though she were happy.”

“As summer’s humidity became a memory, the summer itself began to seem unreal, until we lost sight of it.”

“Her canoes never led to campfires.”

“Even up close, the girls didn’t look depressed.”

“They were, after all, our neighbors.”

“The light rain had stopped for a moment and the stars were out, in patches.”

“”We just want to live. If anyone would let us.”

“He began to weep, looking out from the garage, as music filled the street like air. “It was the kind of music they play when you die,” he said.”

“… just as the girl put her palm to the glass, the light went out.”

“All we could see were the girls’ incarcerated shadows, which ran riot in our imaginations.”

“The sky grew darker, and light abandoned the daytime, so that we found ourselves always moving in a timeless murk[.]”

“Her tragedy hasn’t made her more approachable, and in fact lent her the unknowable quality of a person who had suffered more than could be expressed.”

“”You never get over it,” she said. “But you get to where it doesn’t bother you so much.””

“Her eyes shone, burned, intent on her mission as only a creature with no doubts as to either Creation’s glory or its meaninglessness could be.”

“[S]he was only a girl in danger, or in pursuit, of catching her death of cold.”

“But even her delight had a manic quality to it.”

“Then, in a marginal aside, he dropped his medical manner and jotted: “Lemmings.””

‘”Now the soft decay of the house began to show up more clearly.”

“He was dismissed. And returned to a house where, some nights, lights never went on, not even in the evening, nor did the front door open.”

“But that was in the days when they expected perils to come from without, and nothing made less sense by that time than a survival room buried in a house itself becoming one big coffin.”

“We never realized how many bumps we had until we went looking.”

“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.”

“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.”

“[A] creature clubbed mute, only its sudden voicelessness making us realize it had been speaking all along.”

“People felt they owned the trees.”

“The truth was this: we were beginning to forget the Lisbon girls, and we could remember nothing else.”

“How long could we remain true to the girls? How long could we keep their memory pure?”

“[B]ut most often she watched the candles as if their outcome held her own, the flames almost extinguishing themselves, but, by some greed of oxygen, persisting.”

“Thinking back, we decided the girls had been trying to talk to us all along, to elicit our help, but we’d been too infatuated to listen.”

“But then she came closer and we say the light in her eyes we have been looking for ever since.”

“Sometime during this reverie, the house went silent.”

“Cecilia’s party had never been cleaned up.”

“She had tied the rope to the same beam as the decorations.”

“We had never known her. They had brought us here to find that out.”

“Fleeing, screaming without sound, we forgot to stop at the garage, from which music was still playing.”

“… and if they mentioned Mary at all it was with the veiled wish that she would hurry up and get it over with.”

“In fact, the final suicides surprised few people. Even we who had tried to save the girls came to consider ourselves temporarily insane.”

“The Lisbon girls, on the other hand, were “like something behind glass. Like an exhibit.” Nevertheless, it saddened the coroner to pierce and shred those unblemished bodies[.]”

“The hadn’t bothered to use the siren.”

“No one attended the final mass burial of the Lisbon girls”

“As for Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon, tragedy had beaten them into mindless submission. They followed the priest from graveside to graveside, saying little.”

“We hadn’t kept our tomb sufficiently airtight, and our sacred objects are perishing.”

“It didn’t matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn’t heard us calling…. calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together.”