114. the VIRGIN SUICIDES

Jeffrey Eugenides 1993

An engrossing book I should have read a long time ago. Set in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, it is a compelling read about the story of the Lisbon sisters: Cecilia(13), Lux (14), Bonnie(15), Mary(16), and Therese(17)'s suicides in a unique narration by five males, one of them anonymous, who at the time were mesmerized and obsessed with the girls. They reminisce their teenage encounters with these girls who grew up with 'unusual' parents, recalling the very few times they had contact with them and the many times they have spied on them. With the aid of remembered anecdotes, a collection of photos, letters and bits and pieces of things they later referred to as Exhibits # 1-97, they reconstruct the events following the first suicide by Cecilia to try and explain the mystery behind the tragic acts, in their own attempt for closure, perhaps? A small element of music towards the end was also a special bonus for me.

'On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide-- it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese-- the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope.'(opening line)

'Cecilia had just gotten her period, on the same day of the month as the other girls, who were all synchronized in their lunar rhythms. Those five days of each month were the worst for Mr. Lisbon, who had to dispense aspirin as though feeding the ducks and comfort crying jags that arose because a dog was killed on TV. He said the girls also displayed a dramatic womanliness during their "monthly time." They were more languorous, descended the stairs in an actressy way, and kept saying with a wink, "Cousin Herbie's come for a visit."'(23)

'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 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.'(44)

'I ask you: is dullness a gift? intelligence a curse?'(103)

'Here you have them, as we knew them, as we're still coming to know them: skittish Bonnie, shrinking from the flash; Therese, with her braincase squeezing shut the suspicious slits of her eyes; Mary, proper and posed; and Lux, looking not at the camera but up in the air.'(118)

'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.(141)

'It was crazy to make love on the roof at any time, but to make love on the roof in winter suggested derangement, desperation, self-destructiveness far in the excess of any pleasure snatched beneath the dripping trees. Though some of us saw Lux as force of nature, impervious to chill, an ice goddess generated by the season itself, the majority knew she was only a girl in danger, or in pursuit, of catching her death of cold.'(150)

'At night the cries of cats making love or fighting , their caterwauling in the dark, told us that the world was pure emotion, flung back and forth among its creatures, the agony of the one-eyed Siamese no different from that of the Lisbon girls, and even the trees plunged in feeling.'(159)

'The colors of their eyes were fading, the location of moles, dimples, centipeded scars. It had been so long since the Lisbon girls had smiled we could no longer picture their crowded teeth. "They're just memories now," Chase Buell said sadly. "Time to write them of." But even as he uttered these words, he rebelled against them, as we all did. And rather than consign the girls to oblivion, we gathered their possessions once more, everything we'd gotten hold of during our strange curatorship...'(186)

'The above order, however, does chart the basic progression of our musical conversation. Because Lux had burned her hard rock, the girls' sons were mostly folk music. Stark plaintive voices sought justice and equality. An occasional fiddle evoked the country the country had once been. The singers had bad skin or wore boots. Song after song throbbed from ear to ear, the drumbeats so regular we might have been pressing our ears to the girls' chests.'(197)

'After a long pause, their turntable began grinding again, and we heard the song which even now, in the Muzak of malls makes us stops and stare back into a lost time:

Hey, have you ever tried

Really reaching out for the other side

I maybe climbing on rainbows, But baby, here goes:'(198)

'We were above the street, aloft, at the same height as the Lisbon girls in their crumbling bedrooms, and they were calling to us. We heard wood scrape. Then, for an instant, we saw them-- Lux, Bonnie, Mary, and Therese-- framed in a single window. They looked our way, looked across the void at us. Mary blew us a kiss, or wiped her mouth. The flashlight went off. The window closed. And they were gone.'(205)

'What lingered after them was not life, which always overcomes natural death, but the most trivial list of mundane facts: a clock ticking on a wall, a room dim at noon, and the outrageousness of a human being thinking only of herself.'(248)

Warners Book Edition, 1994

249 pages

Book borrowed from JRMD