The Virgin Suicides

by Jeffrey Eugenides

Dim dormant months followed: ice-bound January; unrelenting February; soiled, slushy March. We still had winters in those days, vast snowdrifts, days of canceled school. At home on snowy mornings, listening to school closings on the radio (a parade of Indian county names, Washtenaw, Shiawassee, until our own Anglo-Saxon Wayne), we still knew the vivifying feeling of staying warm inside a shelter like pioneers. Nowadays, because of shifting winds from the factories and the rising temperature of the earth, snow never comes in an onslaught anymore but by a slow accretion in the night, momentary suds. The world, a tired performer, offers us another half-assed season.

At night, Therese continued to use her ham radio, tapping out messages that took her away from her house, to warm southern states and even to the tip of South America. Tim Winer searched the radio waves for Therese’s frequency and a few times claimed to have found it.

The girls also ordered catalogues for items they could never buy, and the Lisbons’ mailbox filled up once again: furniture catalogues from Scott-Shruptine, high-end clothing, exotic vacations. Unable to go anywhere, the girls traveled in their imaginations to goldtipped Siamese temples, or past an old man with bucket and leaf broom tidying a moss-carpeted speck of Japan. As soon as we learned the names of these brochures we sent for them ourselves to see where the girls wanted to go. Far East Adventures. Footloose Tours. Tunnel to China Tours. Orient Express. We got them all. And, flipping pages, hiked through dusty passes with the girls, stopping every now and then to help them take off their backpacks, placing our hands on their warm, moist shoulders and gazing off at papaya sunsets. We drank tea with them in a water pavilion, above blazing goldfish. We did whatever we wanted to, and Cecilia hadn’t killed herself: she was a bride in Calcutta, with a red veil and the soles of her feet dyed with henna. The only way we could feel close to the girls was through these impossible excursions, which have scarred us forever, making us happier with dreams than wives.

We’d like to tell you with authority what it was like inside the Lisbon house, or what the girls felt being imprisoned in it. Sometimes, drained by this investigation, we long for some shred of evidence, some Rosetta stone that would explain the girls at last. But even though that winter was certainly not a happy one, little more can be averred.

Winter is the season of alcoholism and despair.

Though we felt for the Lisbon girls, and continued to think about them, they were slipping away from us. The images we treasured of them—in bathing suits, jumping through a sprinkler, or running from a garden hose charmed by water pressure into a giant snake—began to fade, no matter how religiously we meditated on them in our most private moments, lying in bed beside two pillows belted together to simulate a human shape. We could no longer evoke with our inner ears the precise pitches and lilts of the Lisbon girls’ voices.

The girls’ signals reached us and no one else, like a radio station picked up by our braces. At night, afterimages flashed on our inner eyelids, or hovered over our beds like a swarm of fireflies. Our inability to respond only made the signals more important. We watched the show nightly, always on the verge of discovering the key, and Joe Larson even tried flashing his own bedroom light in answer, but this made the Lisbon house go dark, and we felt reprimanded.

In the next few weeks, other letters arrived, expressing various moods, each envelope delivered to our houses by the girls themselves in the dead of night. The idea of their sneaking out and moving about our street excited us, and a few nights we tried to stay up long enough to see them. We always awoke in the morning realizing that we’d fallen asleep at our posts. In the mailbox, like a quarter deposited under our pillows by the Tooth Fairy, a letter would be waiting. There were eight letters in all. Not all of them were written by Lux. All were unsigned. All were brief. One letter said: “Remember us?” Another said: “Down with unsavory boys.” Another: “Watch for our lights.” The longest said: “In this dark, there will be light. Will you help us?”

At night, when the lights signaled, we racked our brains for a way of contacting the girls. Tom Faheem suggested flying a kite with a message alongside the house, but this was voted down on logistical grounds. Little Johnny Buell offered the recourse of tossing the same message on a rock through the girls’ windows, but we were afraid the breaking glass would alert Mrs. Lisbon. In the end, the answer was so simple it took a week to come up with. We called them on the telephone.

The song never meant much to us, speaking as it did of an age we hadn’t reached, but once we heard it playing tinily through the receiver, coming from the Lisbon girls, the song made an impact. Gilbert O’Sullivan’s elfin voice sounded high enough to be a girl’s. The lyrics might have been diary entries the girls whispered into our ears. Though it wasn’t their voices we heard, the song conjured their images more vividly than ever. We could feel them, on the other end, blowing dust off the needle, holding the telephone over the spinning black disk, playing the volume low so as not to be overheard.

Song after song throbbed with secret pain. We passed the sticky receiver from ear to ear, the drumbeats so regular we might have been pressing our ears to the girls’ chests. Occasionally, we thought we heard them singing along, and it was almost like being at a concert with them. Our songs, for the most part, were love songs. Each selection tried to turn the conversation in a more intimate direction.

We had never dreamed the girls might love us back.

None of this—the record-playing, the flashing lights, the Virgin cards—ever got into the papers, of course. We thought of our communication with the Lisbon girls as a sacred confidence, even after such fidelity ceased to make sense.

A breeze arose. In the blackness, the leaves of our tree began to flutter, and the air filled with the crepuscular scent of the Lisbon house. None of us remembers thinking anything, or deciding anything, because at that moment our minds had ceased to work, filling us with the only peace we’ve ever known. We were above the street, aloft, at the same height as the Lisbon girls in their crumbling bedrooms, and they were calling to us. We heard wood scrape. Then, for an instant, we saw them—Lux, Bonnie, Mary, and Therese—framed in a single window. They looked our way, looked across the void at us. Mary blew us a kiss, or wiped her mouth. The flashlight went off. The window closed. And they were gone.

Tom Faheem searched the overgrown flower beds for pebbles to ping against the girls’ windows. Any second an upstairs window might open, breaking its seal of fish flies, and a face would look down at us for the rest of our lives.

Lux looked up, but didn’t rise from the chair. Her sleepy eyes showed no surprise that we were there, but at the base of her white neck a lobstery blush spread. “About time,” she said. “We’ve been waiting for you guys.” She took another drag. “We’ve got a car,” Tom Faheem continued. “Full tank. We’ll take you wherever you want to go.”

We understood that we were only pawns in this strategy, useful for a time, but this didn’t lessen our exhilaration.

Knowing the rest of the city accepted the news as gospel only demoralized us further. Outsiders, in our opinion, had no right to refer to Cecilia as “the crazy one,” because they hadn’t earned their shorthand by a long distillation of firsthand knowledge. For the first time ever we sympathized with the President because we saw how wildly our sphere of influence was misrepresented by those in no position to know what was going on. Even our parents seemed to agree more and more with the television version of things, listening to the reporters’ inanities as though they could tell us the truth about our own lives.

Many of us continued to have dreams in which the Lisbon girls appeared to us more real than they had been in life, and we awoke certain that their scent of the next world remained on our pillows.

We haven’t kept our tomb sufficiently airtight, and our sacred objects are perishing. In the end we had pieces of the puzzle, but no matter how we put them together, gaps remained, oddly shaped emptinesses mapped by what surrounded them, like countries we couldn’t name.

“All wisdom ends in paradox,” said Mr. Buell, just before we left him on our last interview,

But this is all a chasing after the wind.

It didn’t matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn’t heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house, with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together.