The boys’ voyeuristic impulses leave not so much an impression as a wound. “Years later, when we lost our own virginities, we resorted in our panic to pantomiming Lux’s gyrations on the roof so long ago; and even now, if we were to be honest with ourselves, we would have to admit that it is always that pale wraith we make love to,” they write, apparently unashamed that they fantasize about fucking a fourteen-year-old on the brink of death. They do not see Lux’s sex rampage as an act of desperation, the frantic search by a young person to find her own pulse. Or so I can hope. The alternative is that they see the desperation of a broken child with perfect clarity and still find it arousing.
More dreadful still is the fact that the boys track down the men with whom Lux had her starlit dalliances, and they are all inexplicably ready to chat about fucking a fourteen-year-old and revel in the memories of her figure, diminished at this point by what sounds like anorexia. “All sixteen mentioned her jutting ribs, the insubstantiality of her thighs, and one, who went up to the roof with Lux during a warm winter rain, told us how the basins of her collarbones collected water,” the narrators report. I read this and longed to physically disappear from the world so that I might psychically reappear in the male imagination as Lux did, her body defined by its absences rather than its substance. It is perfect because it is not much of anything at all. As someone with naturally deep wells on either side of my clavicle that have been made more hollow by disordered eating from time to time, I knew that ears obstruct rain from pooling there, and lying down would make the rain slide down and out. But it didn’t make the idea of gathering the rain with my hunger any less appealing. I think back to the girl I was in high school, reading these passages and wanting so badly to be Lux Lisbon specifically that I could not see how much I was like her generally.
I did not consider the possibility that I was imprinting as a one-dimensional memory on the men in their mid-twenties who took me to parties where they’d fill me with drugs and alcohol and tell me how different I was from other girls my age. On midnight excursions I’d go on with such men to the beaches of the southernmost points of San Diego, we’d remark in drunken stupors on nonsensical things like how the lights from nearby Tijuana, Mexico, did not reflect the language barrier that our border did and proceed to kiss for hours under their illumination. And yet in the throes of these melancholy and impossibly young dalliances with men and mortality, I still saw my life as pedestrian and Lux’s as so cerebral.
Drawing the boys into the rotting home that they will soon vacate in body bags is an even greater victory for the girls than the suicides themselves. The boys think they are invited to the Lisbon home the night of their planned suicides to help the girls run away with them. The girls reply that they would literally rather die by dying. The unlucky and beautiful Mary survives her attempt to gas herself in the oven and must endure a dreadful month of sleeping and six-times-daily showers before joining her sisters in suicide with a mouthful of sleeping pills. The town awaits her death with the self-interested disposition of vultures.
“In the end we had the pieces of the puzzle, but no matter how we put them together, gaps remained, oddly shaped emptinesses mapped by what surrounded them, like countries we couldn’t name,” the men declare, as they acknowledge their bafflement by the riddle of the Lisbon sisters when they take inventory of the evidence they gathered in the months and years that followed. “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,” the men say, dwelling on what they felt they lost the night of June 15 when the remaining four sisters executed their grand self-executions.
But the Lisbon sisters knew exactly what happened when decisions were left to God. Their own mother’s hypervigilance was born of godly instruction and culminated in the girls’ residential incarceration; the physical decay of their home as its upkeep was neglected grew more unbearable than even death. And to speak of girls in these circumstances as “too powerful” and “too self-concerned” demonstrates the nearsightedness of these men’s entitlement. It is when the men refer to “the outrageousness of a human being thinking only of herself” that it is most clear they had not learned a thing about their alluring neighbors in the intervening decades. In all that time, they never seemed to realize that the impenetrability of the Lisbon fortress was made possible by the bonds of sisterhood the boys could never hope to penetrate.
The phrase “Lisbon girls” appears in the book fifty-six times. Surprisingly, the phrase “Lisbon sisters” does not appear once. The boys did not seek out the points at which the sisters’ lives intersected, those ties that felt like simple family structure at times and like the binding of the cosmos at others. Anyone with siblings knows that these strange and infuriating creatures with whom we share blood and shelter inform our interior lives more than anyone else, both during childhood and, for some of us, even once we have escaped it. To lose a sibling is to feel mortality closer at hand than in any other death. The suicides were not individual acts of selfishness but a collective act of grief. They grieved over the death of their youngest sister, Cecilia, but they also grieved for one another, seeing flickers of themselves reflected in each other’s faces and recognizing the pain of inheriting an ungentle world that was second in its torment only to the pain of being cloistered away from it.