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She didn’t say a word, but when they parted her hands they found the laminated picture of the Virgin Mary she held against her budding chest.
they registered the same shock as their parents at the sight of Cecilia with her spattered forearms and pagan nudity.
And it was then Cecilia gave orally what was to be her only form of suicide note, and a useless one at that, because she was going to live: “Obviously, Doctor,” she said, “you’ve never been a thirteen-year-old girl.”
Mr. Lisbon persuaded his wife to allow the girls to throw the first and only party of their short lives.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“It was a mix between a funeral parlor and broom closet. All those flowers. All that dust.”
In the first few days after the funeral, our interest in the Lisbon girls only increased.
In the Kriegers’ basement, we lay on a strip of leftover carpeting and dreamed of all the ways we could soothe the Lisbon girls.
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.
At that moment Mr. Lisbon had the feeling that he didn’t know who she was, that children were only strangers you agreed to live with,
He merely rushed forward, brushing past, to close the window. As he did, however, the ghost turned, and he saw that it was only Bonnie, wrapped in a bedsheet. “Don’t worry,” she said, quietly. “They took the fence out.”
In Dr. Hornicker’s opinion, Lux’s promiscuity was a commonplace reaction to emotional need.
The year of the suicides the Lisbons’ leaves went unraked.
When we lit bonfires that night, every house leaped forward, blazing orange. Only the Lisbon house remained dark, a tunnel, an emptiness, past our smoke and flames.
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.
The Lisbon porch, where we’d first stood to see Cecilia on the fence, had become like a sidewalk crack: stepping on it was bad luck.
(you may read it for yourself if you like; we’ve included it as Exhibit #9),
Television crews came by to film the increasingly dreary exterior of the Lisbon house, first Channel 2, then Channel 4, then finally Channel 7.
We couldn’t help but wonder if certain “improvements” in The Village hadn’t been made to scare black people off.
Willie Kuntz,
their skirts growing transparent in the light coming from the hall’s far end, revealing the wishbones of their legs.
And the more the Lisbon girls were left alone, the more they retreated.
remember it because I used it later for a diet product: ‘Eating is natural. Gaining weight is your choice.’
We noticed the change, too. The girls seemed less tired. In class they stared out the window less, raised their hands more, spoke up. They momentarily forgot the stigma attached to them and took part again in school activities.
Please don’t touch. We’re going to put the picture back in its envelope now.
In the car, however, beside the actual living girls, the boys realized the paltriness of these images. Inverse properties were also discarded: notions of the girls as damaged or demented.
which meant that they had been looking out at us as intensely as we had been looking in.
Only the strip of Bonnie’s eyes was visible, and in the silver light they filled with tears.
She was telling the truth. Never before had the Lisbon girls looked so cheerful, mixed so much, or talked so freely.
“Cecilia was weird, but we’re not.” And then: “We just want to live. If anyone would let us.”
Lux said, in the middle, “I always screw things up. I always do,” and began to sob. Trip Fontaine told us little more. We asked him if he put her in the cab, but he said no. “I walked home that night. I didn’t care how she got home. I just took off.” Then: “It’s weird. I mean, I liked her. I really liked her. I just got sick of her right then.”
“It hit me in the pit of my stomach that those girls weren’t going on any more dates,” Kevin Head told us years later. “The old bitch had locked them up again. Don’t ask me how I knew. I just did.”
A few weeks after Mrs. Lisbon shut the house in maximum-security isolation, the sightings of Lux making love on the roof began.
Without explanation, the girls were taken out of school.
Given Lux’s failure to make curfew, everyone expected a crackdown, but few anticipated it would be so drastic.
we asked her why she had never pursued the psychological counseling Dr. Hornicker offered, Mrs. Lisbon became angry. “That doctor wanted to blame it on us. He thought Ronnie and I were to blame.”
The next Sunday, arriving home after a spirited church sermon, she had commanded Lux to destroy her rock records.
And we’d have to admit, too, that in our most intimate moments, alone at night with our beating hearts, asking God to save us, what comes most often is Lux, succubus of those binocular nights.
Other kids found congealed bowls of spaghetti, empty tin cans, as though Mrs. Lisbon had stopped cooking for the girls and they lived by foraging.
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 excess of any pleasure snatched beneath the dripping trees.
They were carrying the stretcher, just as we expected, but when the porch light came on we were not prepared for what we saw: Lux Lisbon, sitting up, very much alive.
Woody Clabault’s sister had the same brand, and once, after we got into his parents’ liquor cabinet, we made him put on the lipstick and kiss each one of us so that we, too, would know what it tasted like.
Rock music blared from the tape player; we threw ourselves about in chairs, bodilessly floating to the couch from time to time to dip our heads into the strawberry vat,
Lux had suffered a burst appendix. We were surprised to hear the damage was not self-inflicted,
Some people said that to an experienced medical eye the signs were obvious: a look of anxiety, a frequent touching of the belly. Whatever it was, the doctor knew right away. “How long since your last period?” he asked.
we later received the documents that we hold among our most prized possessions
“The pregnancy test was negative, but it was clear she was sexually active,”
