The Virgin Suicides (16 page)

Mr. Lisbon alone left the house, and our only contact with the girls was through the signs they left on him. His hair looked excessively combed, as though the girls, unable to preen for anybody else, preened him. His cheeks no longer sported banners of tissue paper, blood-spotted like tiny Japanese flags, suggesting to many people that his daughters had begun to shave him with considerably more care than Joe the Retard's brothers lavished on him. (Mrs. Loomis, however, maintained he'd gotten an electric razor after what had happened with Cecilia.) Whatever the details, Mr. Lisbon became the medium through which we glimpsed the girls' spirits. We saw them through the toll they exacted on him: his puffy red eyes that hardly opened anymore to see his daughters wasting away; his shoes scuffed from climbing stairs forever threatening to lead to another inert body; his sallow complexion dying in sympathy with them; and his lost look of a man who realized that all this dying was going to be the only life he ever had. As he set off for work, Mrs.

Lisbon no longer fortified him with a mug of coffee. Nevertheless, at the wheel, he automatically reached for the mug in its dashboard holder

.. . and brought last week's cold coffee to his lips. At school, he walked the halls with a fake smile and welling eyes, or in shows of boyish spirits shouted, "Hip check!" and pinned students against the wall. He held on too long, though, freezing until the kids said,

"Face-off," or, "You're in the penalty box now, Mr. Lisbon," anything to snap him out of it. Kenny Jenkins got in a headlock with Mr. Lisbon and spoke only of the serenity that came over the two of them. "It was weird. I could smell his breath and everything, but I didn't try to get away. It was like being on the bottom of a nigger pile, when you're getting squashed but it's all peaceful and everything." Some people admired his continuing to work; others condemned it as hardness of heart. He began to look skeletal beneath his green suit, as though Cecilia, in dying, had tugged him briefly to the other side. He reminded us of Abraham Lincoln, loose-limbed, silent, carrying around the world's pain. He never passed a drinking fountain without sampling its small relief.

Then, abruptly, less than six weeks after the girls left school, Mr.

Lisbon resigned. From Dini Fleisher, the headmaster's secretary, we learned that Mr. Woodhouse had called Mr. Lisbon in for a meeting over Christmas vacation. Dick Jensen, chairman of the Board of Trustees, also attended. Mr. Woodhouse asked Dini to serve eggnog from the carton in the small office refrigerator. Before accepting, Mr. Lisbon asked, "This isn't spiked, is it?"

"It's Christmas," Mr. Woodhouse said.

Mr. Jensen spoke about the Rose Bowl. He said to Mr. Lisbon, "You're a U. of M. man yourself, right?" At this point Mr. Woodhouse indicated that Dini should leave, but before she was out the door, she heard Mr.

Lisbon say, "I am. But I don't think I've ever told you that, Dick.

Sounds like you've been looking into my file."

The men laughed, without mirth. Dini shut the door.

On January 7, when school resumed, Mr. Lisbon was no longer on staff.

Technically, he had taken a leave of absence, but the new math teacher, Miss Kolinski, evidently felt secure enough about her position to remove the planets from their ceiling orbit. The fallen globes sat in the corner like the final trash heap of the universe, Mars embedded in Earth, Jupiter cracked in half, Saturn's rings slicing poor Neptune. We never learned exactly what was said in the meeting, but the gist was clear: Dini Fleisher told us that parents had begun making complaints shortly after Cecilia killed herself. They maintained that a person who couldn't run his own family had no business teaching their children, and the chorus of disapproval had grown steadily louder as the Lisbon house deteriorated. Mr. Lisbon's behavior hadn't helped, his eternal green suit, his avoidance of the faculty lunch room, his piercing tenor cutting through the male singing group like the keening of a bereaved old woman. He was dismissed. And returned to a house where, some nights, lights never went on, not even in the evening, nor did the front door open.

Now the house truly died. For as long as Mr. Lisbon had gone back and forth to school, he circulated a thin current of life through the house, bringing the girls treats-Mounds bars, orange push-ups, rainbow-colored Kool-Pops. We could imagine what the girls felt inside because we knew what they were eating. We could share their headaches from wolfing ice cream. We could make ourselves sick on chocolate. When Mr. Lisbon stopped going out, however, he stopped bringing home sweets. We couldn't be sure the girls were eating at all. Offended by Mrs. Lisbon's note, the milkman had stopped delivering milk, good or bad. Kroger's stopped bringing groceries. Mrs. Lisbon's mother, Lema Crawford, mentioned during that same crackling phone call to New Mexico that she had given Mrs. Lisbon most of her summer pickles and preserves (she had hesitated saying "summer" because that had been the summer Cecilia had died, and all the while the cucumbers, strawberries, and even she herself, seventy-one years old, had gone on growing and living). She also told us that Mrs. Lisbon kept an abundant supply of canned goods downstairs, as well as fresh water and other preparations against nuclear attack. They had a kind of bomb shelter downstairs, apparently, just off the rec room from which we had watched Cecilia climb to her death. Mr. Lisbon had even installed a propane camping toilet. But that was in the days when they expected perils to come from without, and nothing made less sense by that time than a survival room buried in a house itself becoming one big coffin.

Our concern increased when we saw Bonnie visibly wasting away. Just after dawn, as Uncle Tucker was going to bed, he used to see her come onto the front porch, under the mistaken notion that everyone on the street was asleep. She always wore the feathered smock and sometimes carried the pillow Uncle Tucker referred to as a "Dutch wife" because of the way she hugged it. One ripped corner spewed feathers, fleecing the air around her head. She sneezed. Her long neck was thin and white and she had the rickety painful walk of a Biafran, as though her hip joints lacked lubrication. Because he was so skinny himself from his liquid beer diet, we believed Uncle Tucker's statements about Bonnie's weight.

It wasn't as if Mrs. Amberson had said Bonnie was wasting away. Compared to her, everyone was. But Uncle Tucker's turquoise-and-silver belt buckle looked as big on him as the jeweled belt of a heavyweight champ.

He knew what he was talking about. And, peering from his garage, one hand on the refrigerator, he watched as with uncoordinated movements Bonnie Lisbon came down the two front steps, proceeded across the lawn to the small dirt mound left from the digging months ago, and, at the site of her sister's death, began to say the rosary. Holding the pillow in one hand, she told her beads with the other, making sure to finish before the first house light came on down the block and the neighborhood awoke.

We didn't know whether it was asceticism or starvation. She looked peaceful, Uncle Tucker said, without the feverish appetite of Lux, or the tight-lipped, tight-assed expression of Mary. We asked if she had carried a laminated picture of the Virgin, but he didn't think so. She came out every morning, though sometimes, if a Charlie Chan movie was on, Uncle Tucker would forget to check.

It was Uncle Tucker, too, who first detected the smell we could never identify. One morning, as Bonnie came out to the dirt mound, she left the front door open, and Uncle Tucker became aware of an odor unlike any other he had ever encountered. At first he thought it was merely an intensification of Bonnie's wet-bird aroma, but it persisted even after she returned inside, and when we woke up, we smelled it, too. For even as the house began to fall apart, casting out whiffs of rotten wood and soggy carpet, this other smell began wafting from the Lisbons', invading our dreams and making us wash our hands over and over again. The smell was so thick it seemed liquid, and stepping into its current felt like being sprayed. We tried to locate its source, looking for dead squirrels in the yard or a bag of fertilizer, but the smell contained too much syrup to be death itself. The smell was definitely on the side of life, and reminded David Black of a fancy mushroom salad he'd eaten on a trip with his parents to New York. "It's the smell of trapped beaver," Paul Baldino said, sagely, and we didn't know enough to disagree, but we found it hard to imagine such an aroma issuing from the ventricles of love. The smell was partly bad breath, cheese, milk, tongue film, but also the singed smell of drilled teeth. It was the kind of bad breath you get used to the closer you go in, until you can't really notice because it's your own breath, too. Over the years, of course, the open mouths of women have blown into our faces ingredients of that original smell, and occasionally, poised over unfamiliar bedsheets, in the dark of that night's betrayal or blind date, we've greedily welcomed any new particular reek because of its partial connection to the fumes that began blowing from the Lisbon house shortly after it was closed up, and never really stopped. Right now, if we concentrate, we can smell it still. It found us in our beds, and on the playground as we played Kill the Man with the Ball; it came down the stairs of the Karafilises' so that Old Mrs. Karafilis dreamed she was back in Bursa cooking grape leaves. It reached us even over the stink of Joe Barton's grandfather's cigar, as he showed us the photo album of his Navy days, explaining that the plump women in petticoats were only his cousins. Strangely enough, even though the smell was overpowering, we didn't once think of holding our breaths, or, as a last resort, breathing through our mouths, and after the first few days we sucked in the aroma like mother's milk.

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. Back in the days of the Lisbon girls, snow fell every week and we shoveled our driveways into heaps higher than our cars. Trucks dumped salt. Christmas lights went up, and old man Wilson sprang for his annual extravagant display: a twenty-foot snowman, with three mechanized reindeer pulling a fat Santa in his sleigh. The display always brought a line of cars up our street, but that year the traffic slowed down twice. We could see families pointing and smiling at Santa, then growing still and avid before the Lisbons' house like rubberneckers at a crash site. The fact that the Lisbons put up no lights until after Christmas made their house look even bleaker. On the Pitzenbergers' lawn next door, three snowbound angels blew red trumpets. At the Bateses' on the other side, multicolored gumdrops glowed within the frosted bushes. It was only in January, after Mr. Lisbon had been out of work a week, that he came out to string lights. He covered the front bushes, but when he plugged in the lights he wasn't pleased with the result. "One of these is a blinker," he said to Mr. Bates as the latter walked to his car. "The box says it's got a red tip, but I've checked them all and can't find the culprit. I hate blinking lights." Perhaps he did, but they stayed blinking, whenever he remembered to plug them in at night.

All winter, the girls remained elusive. Sometimes one or another would come outside, hugging herself in the cold, her breath clouding her face, and after a minute would go back in. 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. Once she was talking to a man in Georgia about his dog (arthritic hips, operate or not?), and another time she spoke, in that genderless, nationless medium, to a human being whose few responses Winer managed to record. It was all dots and dashes, but we made him put it into English. The exchange went something like this: "You too?"

"My brother. "How old?"

"Twenty-one. Handsome. Beautiful on violin."

"How?"

"Bridge nearby. Swift current."

"How get over?"

"Never will."

"What is Colombia like?"

"Warm. Peaceful. Come."

"Like to. "

"You are wrong about bandidos. "Have to go. Mom calling."

"Painted roof blue like you said."

"Bye.

"Bye." That was it. The interpretation is, we think, quite obvious, and shows that as late as March, Therese was reaching out toward a freer world. About this time she sent away for application materials from a list of colleges (the reporters would make much of this later). The girls also ordered catalogues for items they could never buy, and the Lisbons' mailbox filled up once again: furniture catalogues from Scottshruptine, 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. Some of us abused the catalogues, taking them off into rooms alone, or sneaking them out under our shirts. But we had little else to do, and the snow came down, and the sky was unremittingly gray.