Jeffrey Eugenides - The Virgin Suicides

Cecilia’s diary begins a year and a half before her suicide. Many people felt the illuminated pages constituted a hieroglyphics of unreadable despair, though the pictures looked cheerful for the most part. The diary had a lock, but David Barker, who got it from Skip Ortega, the plumber’s assistant, told us that Skip had found the diary next to the toilet in the master bathroom, its lock already jimmied as though Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon had been reading it themselves. Tim Winer, the brain, insisted on examining the diary. We carried it to the study his parents had built for him, with its green desk lamps, contour globe, and gilt-edged encyclopedias. “Emotional instability,” he said, analyzing the handwriting. “Look at the dots on these i’s. All over the place.” And then, leaning forward, showing the blue veins beneath his weakling’s skin, he added: “Basically, what we have here is a dreamer. Somebody out of touch with reality. When she jumped, she probably thought she’d fly.”

We know portions of the diary by heart now. After we got it up to Chase Buell’s attic, we read portions out loud. We passed the diary around, fingering pages and looking anxiously for our names. Gradually, however, we learned that although Cecilia had stared at everybody all the time, she hadn’t thought about any of us. Nor did she think about herself. The diary is an unusual document of adolescence in that it rarely depicts the emergence of an unformed ego. The standard insecurities, laments, crushes, and daydreams are nowhere in evidence. Instead, Cecilia writes of her sisters and herself as a single entity. It’s often difficult to identify which sister she’s talking about, and many strange sentences conjure in the reader’s mind an image of a mythical creature with ten legs and five heads, lying in bed eating junk food, or suffering visits from affectionate aunts. Most of the diary told us more about how the girls came to be than why they killed themselves. We got tired of hearing about what they ate (“Monday, February 13. Today we had frozen pizza …”), or what they wore, or which colors they favored. They all detested creamed corn. Mary had chipped her tooth on the monkey bars and had a cap. (“I told you,” Kevin Head said, reading that.) And so we learned about their lives, came to hold collective memories of times we hadn’t experienced, harbored private images of Lux leaning over the side of a ship to stroke her first whale, and saying, “I didn’t think they would stink so much,” while Therese answered, “It’s the kelp in their baleens rotting.” We became acquainted with starry skies the girls had gazed at while camping years before, and the boredom of summers traipsing from back yard to front to back again, and even a certain indefinable smell that arose from toilets on rainy nights, which the girls called “sewery.” We knew what it felt like to see a boy with his shirt off, and why it made Lux write the name Kevin in purple Magic Marker all over her three-ring binder and even on her bras and panties, and we understood her rage coming home one day to find that Mrs. Lisbon had soaked her things in Clorox, bleaching all the “Kevins” out. 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.

As the diary progresses, Cecilia begins to recede from her sisters and, in fact, from personal narrative of any kind. The first person singular ceases almost entirely, the effect akin to a camera’s pulling away from the characters at the end of a movie, to show, in a series of dissolves, their house, street, city, country, and finally planet, which not only dwarfs but obliterates them. Her precocious prose turns to impersonal subjects, the commercial of the weeping Indian paddling his canoe along a polluted stream, or the body counts from the evening war. In its last third the diary shows two rotating moods. In romantic passages Cecilia despairs over the demise of our elm trees. In cynical entries she suggests the trees aren’t sick at all, and that the deforesting is a plot “to make everything flat.” Occasional references to this or that conspiracy theory crop up—the Illuminati, the Military-Industrial complex—but she only feints in that direction, as though the names are so many vague chemical pollutants. From invective she shifts without pause into her poetic reveries again. A couplet about summer from a poem she never finished, is quite nice, we think:

The trees like lungs filling with air My sister, the mean one, pulling my hair

The fragment is dated June 26, three days after she returned from the hospital, when we used to see her lying in the front-yard grass.

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Little is known of Cecilia’s state of mind on the last day of her life. According to Mr. Lisbon, she seemed pleased about her party. When he went downstairs to check on the preparations, he found Cecilia standing on a chair, tying balloons to the ceiling with red and blue ribbons. “I told her to get down. The doctor said she shouldn’t hold her hands over her head. Because of the stitches.” She did as commanded, and spent the rest of the day lying on the rug in her bedroom, staring up at her zodiac mobile and listening to the odd Celtic records she’d gotten through a mail-order house. “It was always some soprano singing about marshes and dead roses.” The melancholic music alarmed Mr. Lisbon, comparing it as he did to the optimistic tunes of his own youth, but, passing down the hall, he realized that it was certainly no worse than Lux’s howling rock music or even the inhuman screech of Therese’s ham radio.

From two in the afternoon on, Cecilia soaked in the bathtub. It wasn’t unusual for her to take marathon baths, but after what had happened the last time, Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon took no chances. “We made her leave the door open a crack,” Mrs. Lisbon said. “She didn’t like it, of course. And now she had new ammunition. That psychiatrist had said Ceel was at the age where she needed a lot of privacy.” Throughout the afternoon, Mr. Lisbon kept coming up with excuses to pass by the bathroom. “I’d wait to hear a splash, then I’d go on past. We’d taken everything sharp out of there, of course.”

At four-thirty, Mrs. Lisbon sent Lux up to check on Cecilia. When she came back downstairs, she seemed unconcerned, and nothing about her demeanor suggested she had an inkling about what her sister would do later that day. “She’s fine,” Lux said. “She’s stinking up the place with those bath salts.”

At five-thirty, Cecilia got out of the bath and dressed for the party. Mrs. Lisbon heard her going back and forth between her sisters’ two bedrooms (Bonnie shared with Mary, Therese with Lux). The rattling of her bracelets comforted her parents because it allowed them to keep track of her movements like an animal with a bell on its collar. From time to time during the hours before we arrived, Mr. Lisbon heard the tinkling of Cecilia’s bracelets as she went up and down the stairs, trying on different shoes.