The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides
The light rain had stopped for a moment and the stars were out, in patches. As Bonnie’s shoe came loose, she looked up and called attention to the sky. “It’s always the Big Dipper,” she said. “You look at those charts and they have stars all over the place, but if you look up, all you see is the Big Dipper.”
“It’s because of the lights,” Joe Hill Conley said. “From the city.”
“Duh,” Bonnie said.
The girls were smiling as they entered the gymnasium amid the glowing pumpkins and scarecrows dressed in school colors. The Dance Committee had decided on a harvest theme. Straw was scattered over the basketball court and cornucopias spewed tumorous gourds on the cider table. Mr. Lisbon had already arrived, wearing an orange tie reserved for festive occasions. He was talking with Mr. Tonover, the chemistry teacher. Mr. Lisbon didn’t acknowledge the girls’ arrival in any way, though he might not have seen them. The game lights had been covered with orange gels from the theater and the bleachers were dark. A rented disco ball hung from the scoreboard, dappling the room with light.
We had arrived with our own dates by then, and danced with them as though holding mannequins, looking over their chiffon shoulders for the Lisbon girls. We saw them come in, unsteady in their high heels. Wide-eyed, they looked around the gym, and then, conferring among themselves, left their dates while they took the first of seven trips to the bathroom. Hopie Riggs was at the sink when the girls entered. “You could tell they were embarrassed by their dresses,” she said. “They didn’t say anything, but you could tell. I was wearing a dress with a velvet bodice and taffeta skirt that night. I can still fit into it.” Only Mary and Bonnie had to use the facilities, but Lux and Therese kept them company, Lux looking in the mirror for the instant it took to reconfirm her beauty, Therese avoiding it altogether.
“There’s no paper,” Mary said from her stall. “Throw me some.”
Lux ripped a bunch of paper towels from the dispenser and lofted them over the stall.
“It’s snowing,” Mary said.
“They were really loud,” Hopie Riggs told us. “They acted like they owned the place. I had something on the back of my dress, though, and Therese got it off.” When we asked if the Lisbon girls had spoken about their dates in the confessional surroundings of the bathroom, Hopie answered, “Mary said she was happy her guy wasn’t a total geek. That was it, though. I don’t think they cared so much about their dates as just being at the dance. I felt the same way. I was there with Tim Carter, the shrimpo.”
When the girls came out of the bathroom, the dance floor was getting more crowded, circulating couples slowly around the gym. Kevin Head asked Therese to dance and soon they were lost in the tumult. “God, I was so young,” he said years later. “So scared. So was she. I took her hand and we didn’t know which way to do it. To interlace fingers or not. Finally we did. That’s what I remember most. The finger thing.”
Parkie Denton remembers Mary’s studied movements, her poise. “She led,” he said. “She had a Kleenex balled in one hand.” During the dance, she made polite conversation, the kind beautiful young women make with dukes during waltzes in old movies. She held herself very straight, like Audrey Hepburn, whom all women idolize and men never think about. She seemed to have a picture in her mind of what pattern their feet should make over the floor, of how they should look together, and she concentrated fiercely to realize it. “Her face was calm, but inside she was tense,” Parkie Denton said. “Her back muscles were like piano strings.” When a fast song came on, Mary danced less well. “Like old people at weddings trying it out.”
Lux and Trip didn’t dance until later, and instead moved about the gymnasium looking for a place to be alone. Bonnie followed. “So I followed her,” Joe Hill Conley said. “She pretended she was just walking around, but she kept track of Lux from the corner of her eye.” They went in one side of the dance mob and out the other. They hugged the far wall of the gym, passing beneath the decorated basketball net, and ended up by the bleachers. Between songs, Mr. Durid, Dean of Students, opened the voting for Homecoming King and Queen, and while everyone was looking toward the glass ballot jar on the cider table, Trip Fontaine and Lux Lisbon slipped underneath the bleachers.
Bonnie pursued them. “It was like she was afraid of being left alone,” Joe Hill Conley said. Though she hadn’t asked him to, he followed her. Underneath, in the stripes of light coming through the slats, he saw Trip Fontaine holding a bottle up to Lux’s face so she could read the label. “Did anybody see you come in?” Lux asked her sister.
“No.”
“What about you?”
“No,” Joe Hill Conley said.
Then no one spoke. Everyone’s attention returned to the bottle Trip Fontaine held in his hand. Reflections from the disco ball glittered on the bottle’s surface, illuminating the inflamed fruit on the label.
“Peach schnapps,” Trip Fontaine explained years later, in the desert, drying out from that and everything else.
“Babes love it.”
He had purchased the liqueur with a fake I.D. that afternoon, and had carried it in the lining of his jacket all evening. Now, as the other three watched, he unscrewed the bottle cap and sipped the syrup that was like nectar or honey. “You have to taste it with a kiss,” he said. He held the bottle to Lux’s lips, saying, “Don’t swallow.” Then, taking another swig, he brought his mouth to Lux’s in a peach-flavored kiss. Her throat gurgled with captive mirth. She laughed, a trickle of schnapps dripped down her chin where she caught it with one ringed hand, but then they grew solemn, faces pressed together, swallowing and kissing. When they stopped, Lux said, “That stuff’s really good.”
Trip handed the bottle to Joe Hill Conley. He held it to Bonnie’s mouth, but she turned away. “I don’t want any,” she said.
“Come on,” Trip said. “Just a taste.”
“Don’t be a goody-goody,” said Lux.
Only the strip of Bonnie’s eyes was visible, and in the silver light they filled with tears. Below, in the dark where her mouth was, Joe Hill Conley thrust the bottle. Her moist eyes widened. Her cheeks filled. “Don’t swallow it,” Lux commanded. And then Joe Hill Conley spilled the contents of his own mouth into Bonnie’s. He said she kept her teeth together throughout the kiss, grinning like a skull. The peach schnapps passed back and forth between his mouth and hers, but then he felt her swallowing, relaxing. Years later, Joe Hill Conley boasted that he could analyze a woman’s emotional makeup by the taste of her mouth, and insisted he’d stumbled on this insight that night under the bleachers with Bonnie. He could sense her whole being through the kiss, he said, as though her soul escaped through her lips, as the Renaissance believed. He tasted first the grease of her ChapStick, then the sad Brussels-sprout flavor of her last meal, and past that the dust of lost afternoons and the salt of tear ducts. The peach schnapps faded away as he sampled the juices of her inner organs, all slightly acidic with woe. Sometimes her lips grew strangely cold, and, peeking, he saw she kissed with her frightened eyes wide open. After that, the schnapps went back and forth. We asked the boys if they had talked intimately with the girls, or asked them about Cecilia, but they said no. “I didn’t want to ruin a good thing,” Trip Fontaine said. And Joe Hill Conley: “There’s a time for talk and a time for silence.” Even though he tasted mysterious depths in Bonnie’s mouth, he didn’t search them out because he didn’t want her to stop kissing him.
We saw the girls come out from underneath the bleachers, dragging their dresses and wiping their mouths. Lux moved sassily to the music. It was then Trip Fontaine finally got to dance with her, and years later he told us the baggy dress had only increased his desire. “You could feel how slim she was under all those drapes. It killed me.” As the night wore on, the girls became accustomed to their dresses and learned to move in them. Lux found a way of arching her back that made her dress tight in front. We walked past them whenever we could, going to the bathroom twenty times and drinking twenty glasses of cider.
“I’m having the best time of my life,” she said.
She was telling the truth. Never before had the Lisbon girls looked so cheerful, mixed so much, or talked so freely. After one dance, while Therese and Kevin Head got some cool air in the doorway, Therese asked, “What made you guys ask us out?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, do you feel sorry for us?”
“No way.” “Liar.”
“I think you’re pretty. That’s why.”
“Do we seem as crazy as everyone thinks?”
“Who thinks that?”
She didn’t reply, only stuck her hand out the door to test for rain. “Cecilia was weird, but we’re not.” And then: “We just want to live. If anyone would let us.”
Later, going to the car, Bonnie stopped Joe Hill Conley to look for the stars again. Everything was clouded over. As they gazed up at the dull sky, she asked, “Do you think there’s a God?”
“Yeah.” “Me too.”
By that time it was ten-thirty and the girls had only a half hour to get back home. The dance was breaking up, and Mr. Lisbon’s car emerged from the faculty parking lot, heading home. Kevin Head and Therese, Joe Hill Conley and Bonnie, Parkie Denton and Mary all converged at the Cadillac, but Lux and Trip didn’t follow. Bonnie ran back into the gymnasium to check, but they couldn’t be found.
“Maybe they went home with your dad,” Parkie Denton said.
“I doubt it,” said Mary, looking off into the dark and fingering her crushed corsage. The girls took off their high heels so they could walk better, and searched in among the parked cars and by the flagpole that had flown at half-mast the day Cecilia died, though it had been summer and no one but the lawn crew had noticed. The girls, so happy moments before, grew quiet, and forgot about their dates. They moved in a pack, separating and coming back together. They searched over near the theater, behind the Science Wing, and even in the courtyard where the small statue of a girl stood, donated in memory of Laura White, her bronze skirt just beginning to oxidize. Scars crossed her welded wrists, symbolically, but the Lisbon girls didn’t notice, or say anything when they returned to the car at 10:50 P.M. They got in to be taken home.
The ride back happened mostly in silence. Joe Hill Conley and Bonnie sat in back beside Kevin Head and Therese. Parkie Denton drove, later complaining that this afforded him no chance to make his move on Mary. Mary, however, spent the ride fixing her hair in the sun-visor mirror. Therese said to her, “Forget it. We’re cooked.”
“Luxie is. Not us.”
“Anyone have some mints or some gum?” Bonnie asked. No one did, and she turned to Joe Hill Conley. She scrutinized him a moment, then, using her fingers, combed his part over to the left side. “That looks better,” she said. Nearly two decades later, the little hair he has left remains parted by Bonnie’s invisible hand.
Outside the Lisbon house, Joe Hill Conley kissed Bonnie for the last time and she let him. Therese gave Kevin Head her cheek. Through steamed windows the boys looked up at the house. Mr. Lisbon had already returned and a light was on in the master bedroom.
“We’ll walk you to the door,” Parkie Denton said.
“No, don’t,” said Mary.
“Why not?”
“Just don’t.” She got out without so much as a handshake.
“We had a really good time,” Therese said in back. Bonnie whispered into Joe Hill Conley’s ear, “Will you call me?”
“Absolutely.”
The car doors creaked open. The girls climbed out, adjusted themselves, and went into the house.
Uncle Tucker had just gone out to the garage refrigerator to get another six-pack when the taxi drove up two hours later. He saw Lux get out and reach into her purse for the five-dollar bill Mrs. Lisbon had given each daughter before leaving that evening. “Always have cab fare” was her dictum, even though that night was the first time she had allowed the girls to go out, and, hence, to need any. Lux didn’t wait for her change. She started up the driveway, lifting her dress to walk and staring at the ground. The back of her coat was smudged white. The front door opened and Mr. Lisbon stepped onto the porch. His jacket was off but he was still wearing the orange necktie. He came down the steps and met Lux halfway. Lux began making excuses with her hands. When Mr. Lisbon cut her off, she hung her head and then, grudgingly, nodded. Uncle Tucker couldn’t recall the exact moment Mrs. Lisbon joined the scene. At some point, however, he became conscious of music playing in the background and, looking up at the house, saw Mrs. Lisbon in the open doorway. She was dressed in a plaid robe and held a drink in her hand. Behind her, music filtered out, full of reverberating organs and seraphic harps. Having started drinking at noon, Uncle Tucker had almost finished the case of beer he consumed each day. He began to weep, looking out from the garage, as music filled the street like air. “It was the kind of music they play when you die,” he said.
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. The albums are—as we’ve listed in the Record of Physical Evidence—Songs of Faith, by Tyrone Little and the Believers, Eternal Rapture, by the Toledo Baptist Choir, and Singing Thy Praises, by the Grand Rapids Gospelers. Beams of light pierce clouds on each cover. We haven’t even played the records through once. It’s the same music we pass by on the radio, in between the Motown and rock and roll, a beacon of light in a world of darkness, and totally shitty. Choirs sing in blond voices, scales ascend toward harmonic crescendos, like marshmallow foaming into the ears. We’d always wondered who listened to such music, picturing lonely widows in rest homes, or pastors’ families passing plates of ham. Never once did we imagine those pious voices drifting up through floorboards to churchify niches where the Lisbon girls knelt to pumice calluses on their big toes. Father Moody heard the music the few times he visited for coffee on Sunday afternoons. “It wasn’t my cup of tea,” he said to us later. “I go in for the more august stuff. Handel’s Messiah. Mozart’s Requiem. This was basically, if I may say so, what you might expect to hear in a Protestant household.”
As the music played, Mrs. Lisbon stood in the doorway, unmoving. Mr. Lisbon herded Lux inside. Lux came up the steps and crossed the porch, but her mother did not let her enter. Mrs. Lisbon said something Uncle Tucker couldn’t hear. Lux opened her mouth. Mrs. Lisbon bent forward and held her face motionless near Lux’s. “Breathalizer,” Uncle Tucker explained to us. The test lasted no more than five seconds before Mrs. Lisbon reared back to strike Lux across the face. Lux flinched, but the blow never came. Arm raised, Mrs. Lisbon froze. She turned toward the dark street, as though a hundred eyes and not only Uncle Tucker’s two were watching. Mr. Lisbon also turned. As did Lux. The three o
We learned only years later what had happened to Lux and Trip Fontaine. Even then Trip Fontaine told us with extreme reluctance, insisting, as the Twelve Steps mandated, that he was a changed man. After their dance as Homecoming King and Queen, Trip had ushered Lux through the knot of applauding subjects to the very door where Therese and Kevin Head had gone to get some air. “We were hot from dancing,” he said. Lux was still wearing the Miss America tiara Mr. Durid had placed on her head. They both bore royal ribbons across their chests. “What do we do now?” Lux had asked.
“Whatever we want.”
“I mean as King and Queen. Do we have to do something?”
“This is it. We danced. We got ribbons. It only lasts for tonight.”
“I thought it was for all year long.”
“Well, it is. But we don’t do anything.”
Lux took this in. “I think it stopped raining,” she said.
“Let’s go outside.”
“I better not. We’ve got to go in a minute.”
“We can keep an eye on the car. They won’t leave without us.”
“My dad,” Lux said.
“Just say you had to put your crown in your locker.”
It had indeed stopped raining, but the air was misty when they crossed the street and walked hand in hand over the soggy football field. “See that divot,” Trip Fontaine said. “That’s where I reamed this guy today. Cross-body block.”
They walked past the fifty, the forty, and into the end zone, where no one saw them. The white stripe Uncle Tucker later saw on Lux’s coat came from the goal line she lay down upon. Throughout the act, headlights came on across the field, sweeping over them, lighting up the goalpost. Lux said, in the middle, “I always screw things up. I always do,” and began to sob. Trip Fontaine told us little more.