The Virgin Suicides (12 page)

It was the decay that brought Muffie Perry back. Her grandmother’s cycnoches had nearly died of blight; parasites overran her three extraordinary dendrobiums; and the bank of miniature masdevallias, whose purple velvet petals tipped in blood Mrs. Huntington Perry had herself bred through elaborate hybridization, looked for all the world like a rack of cheap nursery pansies. Her granddaughter had been volunteering her time in the hope of restoring the flowers to former glory, but she told us it was hopeless, hopeless. The plants were expected to grow in the light of a dungeon. Hoodlums jumped the back fence and ran through the greenhouse, uprooting plants for the fun of it. Muffie Perry had wounded one vandal by wielding a garden trowel. We had a hard time directing her attention back from the world of cracked windows, heaped dirt, unpaid admissions, and rats nesting in Egyptian bulrushes. Gradually, however, feeding the tiny faces of the orchids with an eyedropper filled with what looked like milk, she told us how the girls had appeared during their sessions with Miss Kilsem. “At first they were still pretty depressed-looking. Mary had these huge circles under her eyes. Like a mask.” Muffie Perry could still remember the office’s superstitious smell of antiseptic, which she always thought was the odor of the girls’ grief. They would be just leaving when she came in, their eyes downcast, their shoes untied, but they always remembered to take a chocolate mint from the dish the nurse kept on a table by the door. They left Miss Kilsem bobbing in the wake of whatever they’d told her. Often she sat at her desk, eyes closed, thumbs to acupressure points, and didn’t speak for a full minute. “I’ve always had a hunch that Miss Kilsem was the one they confided in,” Muffie Perry said. “For whatever reason. Maybe that’s why she took off.”

Whether the girls confided in Miss Kilsem or not, the therapy seemed to help. Almost immediately their moods brightened. Coming in for her appointment, Muffie Perry heard them laughing or talking excitedly. The window would sometimes be open, and both Lux and Miss Kilsem would be smoking against the rules, or the girls would have raided the candy dish, strewing Miss Kilsem’s desk with wadded wrappers.

We noticed the change, too. The girls seemed less tired. In class they stared out the window less, raised their hands more, spoke up. They momentarily forgot the stigma attached to them and took part again in school activities. Therese attended Science Club meetings in Mr. Tonover’s bleak classroom with its fire-retardant tables and deep black sinks. Mary helped the divorced lady sew costumes for the school play two afternoons a week. Bonnie even showed up at a Christian fellowship meeting at the house of Mike Firkin, who later became a missionary and died of malaria in Thailand. Lux tried out for the school musical, and because Eugie Kent had a crush on her, and Mr. Oliphant the theater director had a crush on Eugie Kent, she got a small part in the chorus, singing and dancing as though she were happy. Eugie said later that Mr. Oliphant’s blocking always kept Lux onstage while Eugie was off, so that he could never find her in the darkness backstage to wrap himself up in the curtains with her. Four weeks later, of course, after the girls’ final incarceration, Lux dropped out of the play, but those who saw it performed said that Eugie Kent sang his numbers in his usual strident unremarkable voice, more in love with himself than with the chorus girl whose absence no one noticed.

By this time autumn had turned grim, locking the sky in steel. In Mr. Lisbon’s classroom, the planets shifted a few inches each day, and it was clear, if you looked up, that the earth had turned its blue face away from the sun, that it was sweeping down its own dark alley in space, over where cobwebs collected in the ceiling corner, out of reach of the janitor’s broom. 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. Other people filed Cecilia’s memory away even more easily. When they spoke of her, it was to say that they had always expected Cecilia to meet a bad end, and that far from viewing the Lisbon girls as a single species, they had always seen Cecilia as apart, a freak of nature. Mr. Hillyer summed up the majority sentiment at the time: “Those girls have a bright future ahead of them. That other one was just going to end up a kook.” Little by little, people ceased to discuss the mystery of Cecilia’s suicide, preferring to see it as inevitable, or as something best left behind. Though Mrs. Lisbon continued her shadowy existence, rarely leaving the house and getting her groceries delivered, no one objected, and some even sympathized. “I feel sorriest for the mother,” Mrs. Eugene said. “You would always wonder if there was something you could have done.” As for the suffering, surviving girls, they grew in stature like the Kennedys. Kids once again sat next to them on the bus. Leslie Tompkins borrowed Mary’s brush to tame her long red hair. Julie Winthrop smoked with Lux atop the lockers, and said the shaking episode was not repeated. Day by day, the girls appeared to be getting over their loss.

It was during this convalescent period that Trip Fontaine made his move. Without consulting anyone or confessing his feelings for Lux, Trip Fontaine walked into Mr. Lisbon’s classroom and stood at attention before his desk. He found Mr. Lisbon alone, in his swivel chair, staring vacantly at the planets hanging above his head. A youthful cowlick sprang from his gray hair. “It’s fourth period, Trip,” he said wearily. “I don’t have you until fifth.”

“I’m not here for math today, sir.”

“You’re not?”

“I’m here to tell you that my intentions toward your daughter are entirely honorable.”

Mr. Lisbon’s eyebrows rose, but his expression was used up, as though six or seven boys had made the same declaration that very morning.

“And what might those intentions be?”

Trip brought his boots together. “I want to ask Lux to Homecoming.”

At that point, Mr. Lisbon told Trip to sit down, and for the next few minutes, in a patient voice, he explained that he and his wife had certain rules, they had been the same rules for the older girls and he couldn’t very well change them now for the younger ones, even if he wanted to his wife wouldn’t let him, ha ha, and while it was fine if Trip wanted to come over to watch television again, he could not, repeat not, take Lux out, especially in a car. Mr. Lisbon spoke, Trip told us, with surprising sympathy, as though he, too, recalled the below-the-belt pain of adolescence. He could also tell how starved Mr. Lisbon was for a son, because as he spoke he got up and gave Trip’s shoulders three sporting shakes. “I’m afraid it’s just our policy,” he said, finally.

Trip Fontaine saw the doors closing. Then he saw the family photograph on Mr. Lisbon’s desk. Before a Ferris wheel, Lux held in one red fist a candy apple whose polished surface reflected the baby fat under her chin. One side of her sugar-coated lips had come unstuck, showing a tooth.

“What if it was a bunch of us guys?” Trip Fontaine said. “And we took out your other daughters, too, like in a group? And we had them back by whatever time you say?”

Trip Fontaine made this new offer in a controlled voice, but his hands shook and his eyes grew moist. Mr. Lisbon looked at him a long time.

“You on the football squad, son?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What position?”

“Offensive tackle.”

“I played safety in my day.”

“Crucial position, sir. Nothing between you and the goal line.”

“Exactly.”

“Thing is, sir, we’ve got the big Homecoming game against Country Day, and then the dance and everything, and all the guys on the team are going with dates.”

“You’re a good-looking young fella. Lots of girls would go with you, I bet.”

“I’m not interested in lots of girls, sir,” Trip Fontaine said. Mr. Lisbon sat back down in his chair. He drew a long breath. He looked at the photograph of his family, one face of which, smiling dreamily, no longer existed. “I’ll take it up with their mother,” he said, finally. “I’ll do what I can.”

That was how a few of us came to take the girls on the only unchaperoned date they ever had. As soon as he left Mr. Lisbon’s classroom, Trip Fontaine began assembling his team. At football practice that afternoon, during wind sprints, he said, “I’m taking Lux Lisbon to Homecoming. All I need is three guys for the other chicks. Who’s it going to be?” Running twenty-yard intervals, gasping for breath, in clumsy pads and unclean athletic socks, we each tried to convince Trip Fontaine to pick us. Jerry Burden offered three free joints. Parkie Denton said they could take his father’s Cadillac. We all said something. Buzz Romano, nicknamed “Rope” because of the astonishing trained pet he showed us in the showers, covered his protective cup with his hands and lay moaning in the end zone: “I’m dying! I’m dying! You got to pick me, Tripster!”

In the end, Parkie Denton won because of the Cadillac, Kevin Head because he’d helped Trip Fontaine tune up his car, and Joe Hill Conley because he won all the school prizes, which Trip thought would impress Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon. The next day Trip presented the slate to Mr. Lisbon, and by the end of the week Mr. Lisbon announced his and his wife’s decision. The girls could go under the following conditions: (1) they would go in a group; (2) they would go to the dance and nowhere else; (3) they would be home by eleven. Mr. Lisbon told Trip it would be impossible to get around these conditions. “I’m going to be one of the chaperons,” he said.

It’s difficult to know what the date meant to the girls. When Mr. Lisbon gave them permission, Lux ran and hugged him, kissing him with the unself-conscious affection of a little girl. “She hadn’t kissed me like that in years,” he said. The other girls reacted with less enthusiasm. At the time, Therese and Mary were playing Chinese checkers while Bonnie looked on. They broke their concentration from the dimpled metal board for only a moment, asking their father the identities of the other boys in the group. He told them. “Who’s taking who?” Mary asked.

“They’re just going to raffle us off,” Therese said, and then made six ringing jumps into her safety zone.

Their lukewarm reaction made sense in terms of family history. In concert with other church mothers, Mrs. Lisbon had arranged group dates before. The Perkins boys had paddled the Lisbon girls in five aluminum canoes along a murky canal at Belle Isle, while Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon and Mr. and Mrs. Perkins kept a watchful distance in paddle boats. Mrs. Lisbon thought the darker urges of dating could be satisfied by frolic in the open air—love sublimated by lawn darts. On a road trip recently (no reason for going other than boredom and gray skies) we stopped in Pennsylvania and, while buying candles in a rough-hewn store, learned of the Amish courting custom wherein a boy takes his homespun date for a ride in a black buggy, followed by her parents in another. Mrs. Lisbon, too, believed in keeping romance under surveillance. But whereas the Amish boy later returns in the dead of night to throw pebbles against the girl’s window (pebbles everyone agrees not to hear), no nocturnal amnesty existed in Mrs. Lisbon’s doctrine. Her canoes never led to campfires.

The girls could expect only more of the same. And with Mr. Lisbon chaperoning, they would be kept on the usual short leash. It was difficult enough having a teacher for a parent, on view day after day in his three suits, making a living. The Lisbon girls received free tuition because of their father’s position, but Mary had once told Julie Ford this made her feel “like a charity case.” Now he would be patrolling the dance along with other teachers who had volunteered or been forced to chaperon, usually the most uncoordinated teachers who didn’t coach a sport, or the most socially inept for whom the dance was a way of filling another lonely night. Lux didn’t seem to mind because her thoughts were filled with Trip Fontaine. She had gone back to writing names on her underthings, using water-soluble ink so that she could wash the “Trips” off before her mother saw them. (All day, however, his name had been continuously announcing itself against her skin.) Presumably she confessed her feelings about Trip to her sisters, but no girl at school ever heard her mention his name. Trip and Lux sat together at lunch, and sometimes we saw them walking the halls, searching for a closet or bin or heating duct to lie down inside, but even at school Mr. Lisbon was on hand, and after a few suppressed circuits, they came past the cafeteria and up the rubber-matted ramp leading to Mr. Lisbon’s classroom and, briefly touching hands, went their separate ways.

The other girls barely knew their dates. “They hadn’t even been
asked,”
Mary Peters said. “It was like an arranged marriage or something. Creepy.” Nevertheless, they allowed the date to go forward, to please Lux, to please themselves, or just to break the monotony of another Friday night. When we talked to Mrs. Lisbon years later, she told us she had had no qualms about the date, mentioning in support of this claim the dresses she had sewn especially for the evening. The week before Homecoming, in fact, she had taken the girls to a fabric store. The girls wandered amid the racks of patterns, each containing the tissue-paper outline of a dream dress, but in the end it made no difference which pattern they chose. Mrs. Lisbon added an inch to the bustlines and two inches to the waists and hems, and the dresses came out as four identical shapeless sacks.

A photo survives of that night (Exhibit #10). The girls are lined up in their party dresses, shoulder to square shoulder, like pioneer women. Their stiff hairdos (“hairdon’ts,” Tessie Nepi, the beautician, said) have the stoic, presumptuous quality of European fashions enduring the wilderness. The dresses, too, look frontierish, with lace-trimmed bibs and high necklines. 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. It was raining that night, and a leak had developed just over her head, hitting her cheek a second before Mr. Lisbon said, “Cheese.” Though hardly ideal (a distracting light source invades from the left), the photograph still conveys the pride of attractive offspring and liminal rites. 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. Please don’t touch. We’re going to put the picture back in its envelope now.