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The men have never quite moved on—despite their now “thinning hair and soft bellies,” they remain arrested as boys, circling around the lingering mystery of what motivated the girls’ deaths.
Even the planets, millions of miles away, are more legible to the boys than the girls who live right across the street.
Suddenly, the boys become implicated in the fates of the Lisbon sisters, their own projections preventing them from ever actually knowing the girls: “We decided the girls had been trying to talk to us all along, to elicit our help, but we’d been too infatuated to listen.” What the boys have been calling love is actually something closer to estrangement.
Even when Lux breaks curfew, Mr.and Mrs. Lisbon believe the problem is located somewhere out in the world, not in Lux herself, so any threat can be alleviated by essentially jailing their five daughters in the house. According to the Lisbons’ moral logic, home should be the safest place, protected from external dangers, global and local. Then comes the more frightening realization, as in a horror film: the call is coming from inside the house. All the ballast of the suburban world, the tended lawns and neighbors and roomy, practical cars can’t keep the danger away when the source is
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The past never leaves us, Eugenides seems to say, it just doubles and exposes, always shifting out of our grasp.
Like the boys, we can try to solve the mystery of our own adolescence, bridge the gap between all the people we have been, but of course there are no answers. There are no reasons. Maybe the closest we can get are in the images that stay with us, a dying elm on a certain street in a certain town in a certain summer.
Dr. Armonson stitched up her wrist wounds. Within five minutes of the transfusion he declared her out of danger. Chucking her under her chin, he said, “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.”
Whenever we got a glimpse, their faces looked indecently revealed, as though we were used to seeing women in veils. No one could understand how Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon had produced such beautiful children.
Everyone had a theory as to why she had tried to kill herself. Mrs. Buell said the parents were to blame. “That girl didn’t want to die,” she told us. “She just wanted out of that house.” Mrs. Scheer added, “She wanted out of that decorating scheme.” On the day Cecilia returned from the hospital, those two women brought over a Bundt cake in sympathy, but Mrs. Lisbon refused to acknowledge any calamity.
“It’s sad to think about those girls,” he said. “What a waste of life.”
On our corner, in our group, Dominic Palazzolo didn’t join in conversations about baseball or busing, because he could speak only a few words of English, but every now and then he would tilt his head back so that his sunglasses reflected sky, and would say, “I love her.” Every time he said it he seemed delivered of a profundity that amazed him, as though he had coughed up a pearl.
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.
She kept her face to the floor, moving in her personal oblivion, her sunflower eyes fixed on the predicament of her life we would never understand.
Her mind no longer existed in any way that mattered.
Most of our parents attended the funeral, leaving us home to protect us from the contamination of tragedy.
After the girls passed by, Mrs. Lisbon, on her husband’s arm, took ten stricken steps to dangle her weak head over Cecilia’s face, rouged for the first and last time ever. “Look at her nails,” Mr. Burton thought he heard her say. “Couldn’t they do something about her nails?” And then Mr. Lisbon replied: “They’ll grow out. Fingernails keep growing. She can’t bite them now, dear.”
A few of us had fallen in love with her, but had kept it to ourselves, knowing that she was the weird sister.
And so we learned about their lives, came to hold collective memories of times we hadn’t experienced, harbored private images of Lux leaning over the side of a ship to stroke her first whale, and saying, “I didn’t think they would stink so much,” while Therese answered, “It’s the kelp in their baleens rotting.” We became acquainted with starry skies the girls had gazed at while camping years before, and the boredom of summers traipsing from backyard to front to back again, and even a certain indefinable smell that arose from toilets on rainy nights, which the girls called “sewery.”
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
Lobsters are classified in the phylum Arthropoda, same as insects. They’re bugs. And bugs are only lobsters that have learned to fly.
Once we got to the Lisbons’ windows, our new inexplicable feelings for the girls came to the fore.
It was only nine o’clock, but everything confirmed what people had been saying: that since Cecilia’s suicide the Lisbons could hardly wait for night to forget themselves in sleep.
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, and he reached out in order to meet her for the first time.
Mr. Lisbon knew his parental and neighborly duty entailed putting the retainer in a Ziploc bag, calling the Kriegers, and telling them their expensive orthodontal device was in safe keeping. Acts like these—simple, humane, conscientious, forgiving—held life together. Only a few days earlier he would have been able to perform them. But now he took the retainer and dropped it in the toilet. He pressed the handle.
Only as he left the bathroom, heading for the oblivion of sleep himself, did Mr. Lisbon see Cecilia’s ghost. She was standing in her old bedroom, dressed in the wedding dress again, having somehow shed the beige dress with the lace collar she’d worn in her coffin. “The window was still open,” Mr. Lisbon said. “I don’t think we’d ever remembered to shut it. It was all clear to me. I knew I had to close that window or else she’d go on jumping out of it forever.” According to his story, he didn’t cry out. He didn’t want to make contact with the shade of his daughter, to learn why she had done
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In a handwritten note displaying the penmanship perfected during his graduate school days in Zurich, Dr. Hornicker called Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon in for a second consultation, but they didn’t go. Instead, from what we observed during the remainder of the summer, Mrs. Lisbon once more took charge of the house while Mr. Lisbon receded into a mist.
Who knew what they were thinking or feeling? Lux still giggled stupidly, Bonnie fingered the rosary deep in the pocket of her corduroy skirt, Mary wore her suits that made her resemble the First Lady, Therese kept her protective goggles on in the halls—but they receded from us, from the other girls, from their father, and we caught sight of them standing in the courtyard, under drizzle, taking bites from the same doughnut, looking up at the sky, letting themselves get slowly drenched.
We spoke to them in snatches, each of us adding a sentence to a communal conversation.
By nature Trip Fontaine possessed the discretion of the world’s great lovers, seducers greater than Casanova because they didn’t leave behind twelve volumes of memoirs and we don’t even know who they were.
He would only tell us, “I’ve never gotten over that girl, man. Never.”
Time slowed down, and in his left ear the ringing of the cosmic Om started up clear as a telephone. When we suggested these details had been laced with the same THC in his blood, Trip Fontaine thrust a finger into the air, the only time his hands stopped shaking during the entire interview. “I know what it’s like to be high,” he said. “This was different.” In the orange light the students’ heads looked like sea anemones, undulating quietly, and the silence of the room was that of the ocean floor. “Every second is eternal,” Trip told us, describing how as he sat in his desk the girl in front of
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But in the weeks that followed, Trip spent his days wandering the halls, hoping for Lux to appear, the most naked person with clothes on he had ever seen.
He didn’t understand how she had bewitched him, nor why having done so she promptly forgot his existence, and in desperate moods he asked his mirror why the only girl he was crazy about was the only girl not crazy about him.
Trip Fontaine saw her with a concentration so focused he ceased to exist. The world at that moment contained only Lux.
He sat next to her in the last row, and though he avoided looking at her, it was no use: with organs of sense he hadn’t realized he possessed, Trip Fontaine felt Lux beside him, registered her body temperature, heartbeat, respiration rate, all the pumping and flow of her body.
He thought about Lux getting ready for bed, and just the idea of her holding a toothbrush excited him more than the full-fledged nudity he saw in his own bedroom nearly every night. He laid his head back on the headrest and opened his mouth to ease the constriction in his chest, when suddenly the air inside the car churned. He felt himself grasped by his long lapels, pulled forward and pushed back, as a creature with a hundred mouths started sucking the marrow from his bones. She said nothing as she came on like a starved animal, and he wouldn’t have known who it was if it hadn’t been for the
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Two beasts lived in the car, one above, snuffling and biting him, and one below, struggling to get out of its damp cage. Valiantly he did what he could to feed them, placate them, but the sense of his insufficiency grew, and after a few minutes, with only the words “Gotta get back before bed check,” Lux left him, more dead than alive. Even though that lightning attack lasted only three minutes, it left its mark on him. He spoke of it as one might of a religious experience, a visitation or vision, any rupture into this life from beyond that cannot be described in words. “Sometimes I think I
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“Most people never taste that kind of love,” he said, taking courage amid the disaster of his life. “At least I tasted it once, man.”
At school, Trip Fontaine was cagey about what had passed between them, and though stories circulated about their sneaking off into various enclosures, he insisted the only time they ever touched was in the car. “At school, we could never find a place to go. Her old man kept a close eye on her. It was agony, man. Fucking agony.”
I ask you: is dullness a gift? intelligence a curse?
As summer’s humidity became a memory, the summer itself began to seem unreal, until we lost sight of it. Poor Cecilia appeared in our consciousness at odd moments, most often as we were just waking up, or staring out a car-pool window streaked with rain—she rose up in her wedding dress, muddy with the afterlife, but then a horn would honk, or our radio alarms would unleash a popular song, and we snapped back to reality.
An air of expectancy glows in the girls’ faces. Gripping one another, pulling each other into the frame, they seem braced for some discovery or change of life. Of life. That, at least, is how we see it.
It was church music, a selection from among the three albums Mrs. Lisbon liked to play over and over again on Sundays. We knew about the music from Cecilia’s diary (“Sunday morning. Mom’s playing that crap again”), and months later, when they were moving out, we found the albums in the trash they put at the curb.
Her tragedy hadn’t made her more approachable, and in fact lent her the unknowable quality of a person who had suffered more than could be expressed.
“You never get over it,” she said. “But you get to where it doesn’t bother you so much.”
The girls felt sluggish. At the window the world’s light seemed dimmed. They rubbed their eyes to no avail. They felt heavy, slow-witted. Household objects lost meaning. A bedside clock became a hunk of molded plastic, telling something called time, in a world marking its passage for some reason. When we thought of the girls along these lines, it was as feverish creatures, exhaling soupy breath, succumbing day by day in their isolated ward. We went outside with our hair wet in the hopes of catching flu ourselves so that we might share their delirium.
