They had killed themselves over our dying forests, over manatees maimed by propellers as they surfaced to drink from garden hoses; they had killed themselves at the sight of used tires stacked higher than the pyramids; they had killed themselves over the failure to find a love none of us could ever be. 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.
We knew the pain of winter wind rushing up your skirt, and the ache of keeping your knees together in class, and how drab and infuriating it was to jump rope while the boys played baseball. We could never understand why the girls cared so much about being mature, or why they felt compelled to compliment each other, but sometimes, after one of us had read a long portion of the diary out loud, we had to fight back the urge to hug one another or to tell each other how pretty we were.
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.
We knew that Cecilia had killed herself because she was a misfit, because the beyond called to her, and we knew that her sisters, once abandoned, felt her calling from that place, too.
Dr. Armonson stitched up her wrist wounds. Withen 5 minutes of the transfusion he declared her out of danger. Chucking her under the chin, he said,
"What are you doing here, honey? Your not even old enough to know how bad life gets."
And it was then Cecelia gave orally what was to be her only form of suicide note, and a useless one at that, because she was going to live:
"Obviously, Doctor," she said, "you've never been a 13 year old girl."
We couldn't imagine the emptiness of a creature who put a razor to her wrists and opened her veins, the emptiness and the calm.
Basically what we have here is a dreamer. Somebody out of touch with reality. When she jumped, she probably thought she'd fly. After denuding the trunk, the men left to denude others, and for a time the tree stood blighted, trying to raise its stunted arms, a creature clubbed mute, only its sudden voicelessness making us realize it had been speaking all along.
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.
Cecilia wrote on her diary," Lux lost it over Kevin Haynes, the garbageman. She'd wake up at 5 in the morning and lay about on the front porch like it wasn't completely obvious! She wrote his name in marker in all her bras and underwear and mum found them and bleached out all the Kevins. Lux has been crying on her bed all day."
None of these signs of malnourishment or illness or grief … detracted from Lux's overwhelming impression of being a carnal angel. They spoke of being pinned to the chimney as if by two great beating wings, and of the slight blond fuzz above her upper lip that felt like plumage. Her eyes shone, burned, intent on her mission as only a creature with no doubts as to either Creation's glory or its meaninglessness could be. The words the boys used, their shifty eyebrows, fright, bafflement, made it clear they had served as only the most insignificant footholds in Lux's ascent, and, in the end, even though they had been carried to the peak, they couldn't tell us what lay beyond.
The essence of the suicides consisted not of sadness or mystery but simple selfishness. The girls took into their own hands decisions better left to God. They became too powerful to live among us, too self-concerned, too visionary, too blind.
Collecting everything we could of theirs, the Lisbon girls wouldn't leave our minds but they were slipping away. The color of their eyes was fading along with the exact locations... of moles and dimples. From five, they had become four, and they were all the living and the dead, becoming shadows. We would have lost them completely if the girls hadn't contacted us.
In the end we had pieces of the puzzle, but no matter how we put them together, gaps remained. Oddly shaped emptiness mapped by what surrounded them, like countries we couldn't name. What lingered after them was not life, but the most trivial list of mundane facts. A clock ticking on the wall, a room dim at noon, the *outrageousness* of a human being thinking only of herself.
ps
"On the Horizon" by Sloan (album Navy Blues, 1998)
"Can' t Face Up" (credited "How many times") by Sloan (One Chord to Another, 1996)
"The Air That I Breathe" by The Hollies (Hollies, 1974)
"Magic Man" by Heart (Dreamboat Annie, 1976)
" Crazy on You" by Heart (Dreamboat Annie, 1976)
"Strange Magic"by Electric Light Orchestra (Face the Music, 1975)
"Come Sail Away" by Styx (The Grand Illusion, 1977)
"Alone Again (Naturally)" by Gilbert O'Sullivan (Himself, 1971)
"So Far Away" by Carole King (Tapestry, 1971)
"The Lines You Amend" (credited "End It Peacefully") by Sloan (One Chord to Another, 1996)
"A Dream Goes on Forever" by Todd Rundgren (Todd, 1974)
"Ce Matin-là" by Air (Moon Safari, 1998)
"How Can You Mend a Broken Heart?" by Al Green (Let's Stay Together, 1972)
"Everything You've Done Wrong" by Sloan (One Chord to Another, 1996)
"The Good in Everyone" by Sloan (One Chord to Another, 1996 )
"I'm Not in Love" by 10CC (The Original Soundtrack,1975)
"Hello, It's Me" by Todd Rundgren (Something/Anything?, 1972)
"Run to Me" by the Bee Gees (To Whom It May Concern, 1972)
View more about The Virgin Suicides reviews
