The Virgin Suicides: A Novel by Eugenides Jeffrey

Author:Eugenides, Jeffrey [Eugenides, Jeffrey]
Language: eng
Format: azw, mobi, epub, azw3
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2010-03-31T16:00:00+00:00

FOUR

A few weeks after Mrs. Lisbon shut the house in maximum-security isolation, the sightings of Lux making love on the roof began.

Following the Homecoming dance, Mrs. Lisbon closed the downstairs shades. All we could see were the girls’ incarcerated shadows, which ran riot in our imaginations. Moreover, as fall turned to winter, the trees in the yard drooped and thickened, concealing the house, even though their leaflessness should have revealed it. A cloud always seemed to hover over the Lisbons’ roof. There was no explanation except the psychic one that the house became obscured because Mrs. Lisbon willed it to. The sky grew darker, and light abandoned the daytime, so that we found ourselves always moving in a timeless murk, the only way to discern the hour the taste of our burps, tooth-pasty in the morning, redolent in the afternoon of the jellied beef of school cafeteria meals.

Without explanation, the girls were taken out of school. They merely failed to show up one morning, and then again the next. When Mr. Wood house asked about the matter, Mr. Lisbon seemed to have no idea the girls were gone. “He kept saying, ‘Have you checked out back?’”

Jerry Burden picked the combination on Mary’s locker to find most of her books left behind. “She had postcards taped up inside. Weird stuff. Couches and shit.” (Actually art museum postcards showing a Biedermeier chair and a pink chintz Chippendale sofa.) Her notebooks were piled on the top shelf, each one bearing the name of a bright new subject she never got to study. Inside American History, amid spasmodic notes, Jerry Burden found the following doodle: a girl with pigtails is bent under the weight of a gigantic boulder. Her cheeks puff out, and her rounded lips expel steam. One widening steam cloud contains the word Pressure, darkly retraced.

Given Lux’s failure to make curfew, everyone expected a crackdown, but few anticipated it would be so drastic. When we spoke to her years later, however, Mrs. Lisbon maintained that her decision was never intended to be punitive. “At that point being in school was just making things worse,” she said. “None of the other children were speaking to the girls. Except boys, and you knew what they were after. The girls needed time to themselves. A mother knows. I thought if they stayed at home, they’d heal better.” Our interview with Mrs. Lisbon was brief. She met us at the bus station in the small town she now lives in, because the station was the only place that served coffee. Her hands were red-knuckled and her gums had receded. Her tragedy hadn’t made her more approachable, and in fact lent her the unknowable quality of a person who had suffered more than could be expressed. Nevertheless, we wanted to talk to her most of all because we felt that she, being the girls’ mother, understood more than anyone why they had killed themselves. But she said, “That’s what’s so frightening. I don’t. Once they’re out of you, they’re different, kids are.

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