The Jeffrey Eugenides Three-Book Collection: The Virgin Suicides, Middlesex, The Marriage Plot

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Our teachers remembered the girls during this period in various ways, depending on the subject they taught. Mr. Nillis said of Bonnie, “It was pre-cal. We didn’t exactly get touchy-feely”; while Señor Lorca said of Therese, “A big girl! I think smaller, maybe happier. That is the way of the world and men’s hearts.” Apparently, though not a natural at languages, Therese spoke in a credible Castilian accent and had a great capacity for memorizing vocabulary. “She could speak Spanish,” Señor Lorca said, “but not feel it.”

In her written response to our questions (she wanted time to “ponder and deliberate”), Miss Arndt, the art teacher, said, “Mary’s watercolors did possess what, for lack of a better word, I will call a ‘mournfulness.’ But in my experience, there are really only two kinds of children: the empty-headed ones (Fauvist flowers, dogs, and sailboats) and the intelligent ones (gouaches of urban decay, gloomy abstractions)—much like my own painting in college, and during those three heady years in ‘the Village.’ Could I foresee she would commit suicide? I regret to say, no. At least ten percent of my students were born with modernist tendencies. I ask you: is dullness a gift? intelligence a curse? I’m forty-seven years old and live alone.”

Day by day, the girls ostracized themselves. Because they stayed in a group, other girls found it difficult to talk or walk with them, and many assumed they wanted to be left alone. And the more the Lisbon girls were left alone, the more they retreated. Sheila Davis told of being in an English study group with Bonnie Lisbon. “We were discussing this book Portrait of a Lady. We had to do a character sketch on Ralph. Bonnie didn’t say much at first. But then she reminded us how Ralph always keeps his hands in his pockets. Then, like a jerk, I go, ‘It’s really sad when he dies.’ I wasn’t even thinking. Grace Hilton elbowed me and I turned purple. It got totally quiet.”

It was Mrs. Woodhouse, the headmaster’s wife, who came up with the idea for the “Day of Grieving.” She had majored in psychology in college and now, twice a week, volunteered at a Head Start program in the inner city. “They kept writing about the suicide in the paper, but do you know we hadn’t mentioned it once in school all that year?” she told us nearly twenty years later. “I’d wanted Dick to address the matter at Convocation, but he felt otherwise and I had to defer. But little by little, as the volume rose, he came around to my view.” (In fact, Mr. Woodhouse had addressed the subject, if obliquely, during his speech of welcome at Convocation. After introducing the new teachers, he had said, “It has been a long, hard summer for some of us here today. But today begins a new year of hopes and goals.”) Mrs. Woodhouse broached her idea to a few departmental heads during dinner at the modest ranch-style house that came with her husband’s position, and the following week proposed it at a full teachers’ meeting. Mr. Pulff, who left shortly thereafter to pursue a job in advertising, recalled a few of Mrs. Woodhouse’s words that day. “ ‘Grief is natural,’ she said. ‘Overcoming it is a matter of choice.’ I remember it because I used it later for a diet product: ‘Eating is natural. Gaining weight is your choice.’ Maybe you saw it.” Mr. Pulff voted against the Day of Grieving but was in the minority. The date was set.

Most people remember the Day of Grieving as an obscure holiday. The first three hours of school were canceled and we remained in our home rooms. Teachers passed out mimeographs related to the day’s theme, which was never officially announced, as Mrs. Woodhouse felt it inappropriate to single out the girls’ tragedy. The result was that the tragedy was diffused and universalized. As Kevin Tiggs put it, “It seemed like we were supposed to feel sorry for everything that ever happened, ever.” Teachers had latitude to present material of their own choosing. Mr. Hedlie, the English teacher who rode his bicycle to school with his trouser cuffs secured in metal clips, handed out a collection of poems by the Victorian poet Christina Rossetti. Deborah Ferentell remembered a few lines from one poem entitled “Rest”:

O Earth, lie heavily upon her eyes; Seal her sweet eyes weary of watching, Earth; Lie close around her; leave no room for mirth With its harsh laughter, nor for sound of sighs. She hath no questions, she hath no replies.

The Reverend Pike spoke of the Christian message of death and rebirth, working in a story of his own heartrending loss when his college football team failed to clinch the division title. Mr. Tonover, who taught chemistry and still lived with his mother, was at a loss for words on the occasion, and let his students cook peanut brittle over a Bunsen burner. Other classes, dividing into groups, played games where they envisioned themselves as architectural structures. “If you were a building,” the leader would ask, “what kind of building would you be?” They had to describe these structures in great detail and then make improvements. The Lisbon girls, stranded in separate home rooms, declined to play, or kept asking to be excused to go to the bathroom. None of the teachers insisted on their participating, with the result that all the healing was done by those of us without wounds. At midday, Becky Talbridge saw the Lisbon girls together in the girls’ bathroom in the Science Wing. “They’d brought chairs in from the hall and they were just sitting there, waiting it out. Mary had a run in her nylon—can you believe she wore nylons?—and she was fixing it with fingernail polish. Her sisters were sort of watching her but they seemed pretty bored. I went into the stall, but I could feel them out there and I couldn’t, you know, go.”

Mrs. Lisbon never learned about the Day of Grieving. Neither her husband nor her daughters mentioned it when they returned home that day. Mr. Lisbon had of course been present at the teachers’ meeting when Mrs. Woodhouse made her proposal, but accounts differ as to his reaction. Mr. Rodriguez remembered him as “nodding his head, but not saying anything,” while Miss Shuttleworth recalled that he left the meeting shortly after it began and never returned. “He never heard about the Day of Grieving. He left in a state of distraction and a winter coat,” she said, still quizzing us on rhetorical constructions (in this case, zeugma) which we had to identify before being excused from her presence. When Miss Shuttleworth came into the room for her interview, we stood in respect as we always had, and even though we were approaching middle age, a few of us balding, she still referred to us as “infants,” as she had in her classroom so long ago. She still had the plaster bust of Cicero on her desk and the imitation Grecian urn we had given her upon graduation, and still exuded the air of a powdered celibate polymath. “I don’t think Mr. Lisbon knew about the Dies Lacrimarum until it was well under way. I passed by his classroom during second period and he was at the blackboard, in his chair, instructing. I don’t think anyone had had the fortitude to acquaint him with the day’s activities.” Indeed, when we spoke to him years later, Mr. Lisbon possessed only a vague memory of the Day of Grieving. “Try decade,” he told us.

For a long time no one agreed on the success of the various attempts to address Cecilia’s suicide. Mrs. Woodhouse thought the Day of Grieving had served a vital purpose, and many teachers were pleased that the silence around the subject had been broken. A psychological counselor came on staff once a week, sharing the small office of the school nurse. Any student feeling the need to talk was encouraged to go. We never did, but every Friday peeked in to see if any of the Lisbon girls met with the counselor. Her name was Miss Lynn Kilsem, but a year later, after the rest of the suicides, she disappeared without a word. Her degree in social work turned out to be fake, and no one is sure if her name was really Lynn Kilsem, or who she was, or where she went off to. In any case, she is one of the few people we haven’t been able to track down, and in the characteristic irony of fate, one of the few people who might have been able to tell us something. For apparently the girls went to see Miss Kilsem regularly on Fridays, though we never saw them amid the paltry medical supplies of that poor excuse for a nurse’s office. Miss Kilsem’s patient records were lost in an office fire five years later (a coffee maker, an old extension cord) and we have no exact information regarding the sessions. Muffie Perry, however, who had been using Miss Kilsem as a sports psychologist, often recalled seeing Lux or Mary in the office, and sometimes Therese and Bonnie as well. We had a great deal of trouble locating Muffie Perry herself, owing to the many rumors involving her married name. Some said she was now Muffie Friewald, others Muffie von Rechewicz, but when we finally dug her up, tending the rare orchids her grandmother had bequeathed to the Belle Isle Botanical Garden, she told us her name was still Muffie Perry, period, as it had been in the days of her field hockey triumphs. We didn’t recognize her at first, what with the sucking vines and thick creepers, the misty hothouse air, and even when we cajoled her to stand under the artificial grow lamp, we saw that she had swelled and puckered, that her great goal-scoring back was hunched, but that her tiny teeth in their bright gums were unchanged. The decadence of Belle Isle contributed to our gloomy reappraisal. We remembered the delicate fig-shaped island, stranded between the American Empire and peaceful Canada, as it had been years ago, with its welcoming red-white-and-blue flag-shaped flower bed, splashing fountains, European casino, and horse paths leading through woods where Indians had bent trees into giant bows. Now grass grew in patches down to the littered beach where children fished with pop tops tied to string. Paint flaked from once-bright gazebos. Drinking fountains rose from mud puddles laid with broken-brick stepping stones. Along the road the granite face of the Civil War Hero had been spray-painted black. Mrs. Huntington Perry had donated her prize orchids to the Botanical Garden in the time before the riots, when civic moneys still ran high, but since her death the eroding tax base had forced cutbacks that had laid off one skilled gardener a year, so that plants that had survived transplantation from equatorial regions to bloom again in that false paradise now withered, weeds sprang up amid scrupulous identification tags, and fake sunlight flowed for only a few hours per day. The only thing that remained was the steam vapor, beading the sloping greenhouse windows and filling our nostrils with the moisture and aroma of a rotting world.

 

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 eye-dropper 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 unselfconscious 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 only for 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 bust lines 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.

After that portrait was taken, the girls waited for the boys in individual ways. Bonnie and Therese sat down to play a game of cards, while Mary stood very still in the middle of the living room, trying not to wrinkle her dress. Lux opened the front door and wobbled onto the porch. At first we thought she had sprained her ankle, but then we saw she was wearing high heels. She walked up and down, practicing, until Parkie Denton’s car appeared at the end of the block. Then she turned, rang her own doorbell to warn her sisters, and disappeared inside again.

Left out, we watched the boys drive up. Parkie Denton’s yellow Cadillac floated down the street, the boys suspended in the car’s inner atmosphere. Though it was raining, and the windshield wipers were going, the car’s interior had a warm glow. As they passed Joe Larson’s house, the boys gave us a thumbs-up.

Trip Fontaine got out first. He’d pushed up his jacket sleeves as male models did in his father’s fashion magazines. He was wearing a thin tie. Parkie Denton had on a blue blazer, as did Kevin Head, and then Joe Hill Conley vaulted from the back seat, wearing an oversize tweed blazer belonging to his father the schoolteacher and Communist. At that point, the boys hesitated, standing around the car, oblivious to the drizzle, until Trip Fontaine finally headed up the front path. We lost sight of them at the door, but they told us the beginning of the date was like any other. The girls had gone upstairs, pretending not to be ready, and Mr. Lisbon took the boys into the living room.

“The girls’ll be down in just a minute,” he said, looking at his watch. “Jeez. I better get going myself.” Mrs. Lisbon came to the archway. She was holding her temple as though she had a headache, but her smile was polite.

“Hello, boys.”

“Hello, Mrs. Lisbon” (in unison).

She had the rectitude, Joe Hill Conley later said, of someone who had just come from weeping in the next room. He had sensed (this said many years later, of course, when Joe Hill Conley claimed to tap at will the energy of his chakras) an ancient pain arising from Mrs. Lisbon, the sum of her people’s griefs. “She came from a sad race,” he said. “It wasn’t only Cecilia. The sadness had started long before. Before America. The girls had it, too.” He had never noticed her bifocals before. “They cut her eyes in half.”

“Which one of you is driving?” Mrs. Lisbon asked.

“I am,” said Parkie Denton.

“How long have you had your license?”

“Two months. But I had my permit for a year before that.”

“We don’t usually like the girls to go out in cars. So many accidents nowadays. It’s raining and the roads will be slick. So I hope you’ll be very careful.”

“We will.”

“OK,” Mr. Lisbon said, “third degree’s over. Girls!”—delivered to the ceiling—“I’ve got to get going. I’ll see you at the dance, boys.”

“See you there, Mr. Lisbon.”

He went out, leaving the boys alone with his wife. She didn’t meet their eyes but scanned them generally, like a head nurse reading charts. Then she went to the bottom of the stairs and stared up. Not even Joe Hill Conley could imagine what she was thinking. Of Cecilia perhaps, climbing those same stairs four months ago. Of the stairs she had descended on her own first date. Of sounds only a mother can hear. None of the boys ever remembered seeing Mrs. Lisbon so distracted. It was as though she had suddenly forgotten they were there. She touched her temple (it was a headache).

At last the girls came to the top of the stairs. It was dim up there (three of twelve chandelier bulbs had burned out), and they held the banister lightly as they descended. Their loose dresses reminded Kevin Head of choir robes. “They didn’t seem to notice, though. Personally, I think they liked the dresses. Or else they were just so happy to be going out they didn’t care what they wore. I didn’t care, either. They looked great.”