More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
“She was in deep denial,” Dr. Hornicker told us later. “She was obviously not sleeping—a textbook symptom of depression—and was pretending that her problem, and by association her sister Cecilia’s problem, was of no real consequence.
“But even her delight had a manic quality to it. She bounced off the walls.”
The girls felt sluggish. At the window the world’s light seemed dimmed.
and his lost look of a man who realized that all this dying was going to be the only life he ever had.
Then, abruptly, less than six weeks after the girls left school, Mr. Lisbon resigned.
remove the planets from their ceiling orbit. The fallen globes sat in the corner like the final trash heap of the universe,
nothing made less sense by that time than a survival room buried in a house itself becoming one big coffin.
“How get over?” “Never will.”
which have scarred us forever, making us happier with dreams than wives.
Every night we scanned the girls’ bedroom windows.
Old Mrs. Karafilis had decorated to resemble Asia Minor.
Taped-up postcards served as windows into another time and place where Old Mrs. Karafilis still lived.
“Close the light, dolly mou,”
As a young woman, she had hidden in a cave to escape being killed by the Turks.
It occurred to us that she and the girls read secret signs of misery in cloud formations, that despite the discrepancy in their ages something timeless communicated itself between them, as though she were advising the girls in her mumbling Greek, “Don’t waste your time on life.”
“We Greeks are a moody people. Suicide makes sense to us. Putting up Christmas lights after your own daughter does it—that makes no sense. What my yia yia could never understand about America was why everyone pretended to be happy all the time.”
the girls had been trying to talk to us all along, to elicit our help, but we’d been too infatuated to listen.
The last note, written on the back of a laminated picture of the Virgin, arrived in Chase Buell’s mailbox on June 14. It said simply: “Tomorrow. Midnight. Wait for our signal.”
She lifted her chin so that we thought she’d seen us, but then she ran her hand through her hair. She was only examining her reflection. The light inside the house made us invisible outside,
For despite the inch of floodwater covering the floor, the room was just as we had left it: Cecilia’s party had never been cleaned up.
We had never known her. They had brought us here to find that out.
She had escaped in the car just as we expected. But she had unbuckled us, it turned out, only to stall us, so that she and her sisters could die in peace.
Technically, Mary survived for more than a month, though everyone felt otherwise.
if they mentioned Mary at all it was with the veiled wish that she would hurry up and get it over with.
The Lisbon girls, on the other hand, were “like something behind glass. Like an exhibit.”
Ms. Perl, whose story came out in the evening paper, was the first to point out the significance of the date. The girls, it turned out, had killed themselves on June 16, the anniversary of Cecilia’s wristslitting.
Wanda Brown, on Channel 7, unearthed a photo of a bikinied Lux at the community swimming pool, allowing a lifeguard to reach down from his chair and apply zinc oxide to her bunnyish nose.
Girl can't get a break even in death
He never spoke to us anymore in obscure Greek phrases, or took interest in our sandlot baseball games, but arrived every morning with the hopeless expression of a man draining a swamp with a kitchen sponge.
many people thought he wore the surgical mask to protect himself not from dust but from the exhalations of the Lisbon girls that still lived in bedding and drapes, in peeling wallpaper,
A bearded Greek Orthodox priest showed up with a group of rotund widows.
In memory of the Lisbon girls, daughters of this community. Mary was still alive at this point, of course, but the plaque did not acknowledge that fact.
Someone fell in, was rescued, and laid on the pier. “I’ve had it,” he said, laughing. “Goodbye, cruel world!”
No one attended the final mass burial of the Lisbon girls other than Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon; Mr. Calvin Honnicutt, a cemetery worker just back on the job; and Father Moody.
Every one of them had read the signs of misery Old Mrs. Karafilis had written, in Greek, in the clouds.
few of us at least, to reminisce about the Lisbon house and the girls whose hair, clotted on brushes we still faithfully keep,
It didn’t matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them,
