The Virgin Suicides (6 page)

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. “Double-play 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 half-eaten 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 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 midstride, 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. Finally they tied the fence to the back of Uncle Tucker’s four-wheel-drive Bronco. Nobody cared that Uncle Tucker didn’t have a license (driving examiners always smelled booze on him, even if he quit drinking three days before the test they still smelled it evaporating from his pores). Our fathers just cried, “Hit it!” and Uncle Tucker floored his accelerator, but the fence didn’t budge. By midafternoon they abandoned the effort and took up a collection to hire a professional hauling service. An hour later, a lone man showed up in a tow truck, attached a hook to the fence, pressed a button to make his giant winch revolve, and with a deep earth sound, the murdering fence came loose. “You can see blood,” Anthony Turkis said, and we looked to see if the blood that hadn’t been there at the time of the suicide had arrived after the fact. Some said it was on the third spike, some said the fourth, but it was as impossible as finding the bloody shovel on the back of
Abbey Road
where all the clues proclaimed that Paul was dead.

None of the Lisbons helped with the fence removal. From time to time, however, we saw their faces blinking at the windows. Just after the truck pulled the fence free, Mr. Lisbon himself came out the side door and coiled up a garden hose. He didn’t move to the trench. He raised one hand in a neighborly salute and returned inside. The man lashed the fence, in sections, to his truck and—getting paid for it—gave Mr. Bates the worst lawn job we’d ever seen. We were amazed our parents permitted this, when lawn jobs usually justified calling the cops. But now Mr. Bates didn’t scream or try to get the truck’s license plate, nor did Mrs. Bates, who had once wept when we set off firecrackers in her state-fair tulips—they said nothing, and our parents said nothing, so that we sensed how ancient they were, how accustomed to trauma, depressions, and wars. 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 and bitching about crabgrass they didn’t give a damn about lawns.

After the truck drove away, our fathers gathered around the hole once more, staring down at wriggling earthworms, kitchen spoons, the one rock Paul Little swore was an Indian arrowhead. They leaned on shovels, mopping brows, even though they hadn’t done anything. Everyone felt a lot better, as though the lake had been cleaned up, or the air, or the other side’s bombs destroyed. There wasn’t much you could do to save us, but at least the fence was gone. Despite the devastation of his lawn, Mr. Bates did some edging, and the old German couple appeared in their grape arbor to drink dessert wine. As usual they wore their Alpine hats, Mr. Hessen’s with a tiny green feather, while their schnauzer sniffed at the end of his leash. Grapes burst above their heads. Mrs. Hessen’s humped back dove and surfaced amid her swelling rosebushes as she sprayed.

At some point, we looked up into the sky to see that all the fish flies had died. The air was no longer brown but blue. Using kitchen brooms, we swept bugs from poles and windows and electrical lines. We stuffed them into bags, thousands upon thousands of insect bodies with wings of raw silk, and Tim Winer, the brain, pointed out how the fish flies’ tails resembled those of lobsters. “They’re smaller,” he said, “but possess the same basic design. Lobsters are classified in the phylum
Arthropoda
, same as insects. They’re bugs. And bugs are only lobsters that have learned to fly.”

No one ever understood what got into us that year, or why we hated so intensely the crust of dead bugs over our lives. Suddenly, however, we couldn’t bear the fish flies carpeting our swimming pools, filling our mailboxes, blotting out stars on our flags. The collective action of digging the trench led to cooperative sweeping, bag-carting, patio-hosing. A score of brooms kept time in all directions as the pale ghosts of fish flies dropped from walls like ash. We examined their tiny wizards’ faces, rubbing them between our fingers until they gave off the scent of carp. We tried to light them but they wouldn’t burn (which made the fish flies seem deader than anything). We hit bushes, beat rugs, turned on windshield wipers full blast. Fish flies clogged sewer grates so that we had to stuff them down with sticks. Crouching over sewers, we could hear the river under the city flowing away. We dropped rocks and listened for the splash.

We didn’t stop with our own houses. Once our walls were clean, Mr. Buell told Chase to start cleaning bugs off the Lisbon house. Because of his religious beliefs, Mr. Buell often went the extra mile, raking ten feet into the Hessens’ yard, or shoveling their walk and even throwing down rock salt. It wasn’t odd for him to tell Chase to start sweeping the Lisbons’ house, even though they lived across the street and not next door. Because Mr. Lisbon only had daughters, boys and men had gone over in the past to help him drag away lightning-struck limbs, and as Chase approached, holding his broom over his head like a regimental banner, nobody said a word. Then, however, Mr. Krieger told Kyle to go over and sweep some, and Mr. Hutch sent Ralph, and soon we were all over at the Lisbon house, brushing walls and scraping away bug husks. They had even more than we did, the walls an inch thick, and Paul Baldino asked us the riddle, “What smells like fish, is fun to eat, but isn’t fish?”