The Virgin Suicides

by Jeffrey Eugenides

“Obviously, Doctor,” she said, “you’ve never been a thirteen-year-old girl.”

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.

Here you have them, as we knew them, as we’re still coming to know them: skittish Bonnie, shrinking from the flash; Therese, with her braincase squeezing shut the suspicious slits of her eyes; Mary, proper and posed; and Lux, looking not at the camera but up in the air.

At first the boys said nothing, too overwhelmed by the Lisbon girls’ volubility. Who had known they talked so much, held so many opinions, jabbed at the world’s sights with so many fingers?

She held herself very straight, like Audrey Hepburn, whom all women idolize and men never think about.

“We just want to live. If anyone would let us.”

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.”

After that night, people spoke of the Lisbon girls in the past tense, and if they mentioned Mary at all it was with the veiled wish that she would hurry up and get it over with. In fact, the final suicides surprised few people.

In the end, the tortures tearing the Lisbon girls pointed to a simple reasoned refusal to accept the world as it was handed down to them, so full of flaws.

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.