The Virgin Suicides

by Jeffrey Eugenides

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.

“What are you doing here, honey? You’re not even old enough to know how bad life gets.” 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.”

“Basically, what we have here is a dreamer. Somebody out of touch with reality. When she jumped, she probably thought she’d fly.”

Instead, Cecilia writes of her sisters and herself as a single entity. It’s often difficult to identify which sister she’s talking about, and many strange sentences conjure in the reader’s mind an image of a mythical creature with ten legs and five heads, lying in bed eating junk food, or suffering visits from affectionate aunts.

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 at 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.

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,

Their recent shock was undetectable, but sitting down they left a folding seat empty as though saving it for Cecilia.

“I’ve never gotten over that girl, man. Never.”