Siblings are the first people we love irrationally. Their faces and behaviors are like funhouse-mirror versions of our own, formed into different configurations of the same genetic material, but eerily similar to our own. It is similarity but not duplication that renders sisters capable of the envy and competition for which they are well-known. But sisters also share the strange fate of being carriers of their family’s genes but often not of their family’s name, particularly in a Catholic family in the 1970s Midwest. Together they inherit the tradition of womanhood that asks them to fold quietly into the family histories of men. They must surrender much of that which bound them to those they first loved so they can contribute to the immortality project of some other name. Their tenderness toward one another is a function of knowing their finitude as members of the unit into which they were born and inside which they first loved.
No sister in her right mind would willingly draw her sisters closer to the call of death alongside her. Sisters want each other to live. But the Lisbon sisters are not in their right minds. They are driven mad by the knowledge that they are being obsessed over by boys who cannot and should not know them because the boys have neither their interest nor their consent. They respond to this obsession and the self-aggrandizement that makes the boys think they can save the Lisbon sisters by luring them into the promise of exile but deliver only cold reminders of the body’s borders at mortality. The boys are traumatized not by the deaths of the girls but by their own impotence. “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,” they recall in the book’s last lines. But the Lisbon sisters heard them loud and clear. They simply declined their offers.
Though Jeffrey Eugenides’s second novel, Middlesex, makes rich use of Greek mythology, it is strangely absent from The Virgin Suicides, where I think it would find kindred spirits. The Pleiades are the seven daughters of Atlas and Pleione who have the misfortune of catching Orion’s eye, leading him to fall in love with them and pursue them across the earth. The gods take pity on them and turn all seven first into doves and then into stars. The seven stars are situated in the sky next to Orion, forever fatigued by his pursuit. There are dozens of variations on this myth, but all center on a unit of girls too grief-stricken to carry on without a member of their family. Without a title like widow or orphan to name the grief of losing siblings, their corpses cascade onto each other in an unknowable and unnamed sorrow.
It is in the variations of these myths scattered around the world that it becomes clear the weight of the heavens was borne not by a man but by a group of young girls. Even as one myself, I invested so much anger in a girl whom I did not know but on whom I laid the weight of many of my own sorrows. I was baffled at the prospect of rejecting an opportunity to be seen because I did not yet know the curse of being seen without also being known. I think of the love of Trip Fontaine for Lux, which was described as “truer than all subsequent loves because it never had to survive.” And then I think of my sister, whose love will survive whether I want it to or not. I think of the stars we were born under, the peculiar pain of inheriting and the particular joy of sharing it from time to time. And then I think of the foil star she gave me when we were girls. It is faded and worn thin now but bears celestial weight in its meaning: She believed I had a right to own a piece of the heavens alongside her. And though the boys look at the Lisbon artifacts like the oddly shaped emptiness of countries they cannot name, I look at the clearly defined shape of my artifact and know that sisters are not to be confined to the finitude of nations but freed to the eternity of the stars.
Broken-Bodied Girls
On the Horror of Little Girls Grown
WATCHING HORROR FILMS AS A child was primarily an exercise in witnessing the injured inflict more injuries. Freddy Krueger’s body is a giant burn that doesn’t heal. The only kindness ever extended by Jason Voorhees over the last three decades has been to cover his deformed head with a hockey mask. The eerily symmetrical torture inflicted on Pinhead’s skull on display in Hellraiser was less merciful. But while these ghoulish men frightened me out of more nights of rest than my mother can likely count, they never inspired the same inconsolable terror that would reverberate in me after encountering the disfigured young girls of the genre—notably, Regan from The Exorcist and the lesser-known but far more gruesome Zelda from Pet Sematary.
Most men in horror movies show no evidence of having ever been children. While a perfunctory nod is given to Jason as a child victim in the first Friday the 13th film, the bloodthirsty adult is too unsympathetic to render his backstory much more than an afterthought. But we meet Regan as a bright-eyed adolescent whose innocent tinkering with a Ouija board was hardly sufficient vice to invite the brutal possession that followed. In Pet Sematary, Zelda is introduced in her sister Rachel’s painful memory of being left by their parents to care for her in the excruciating stages of advanced spinal meningitis. Unlike their adult male counterparts, a major focal point of their respective stories was the girls as victims before they were villains. Growing up, I was afraid of running into Freddy or Jason in a dark alley or a nightmare, but I was more afraid of becoming Regan or Zelda.
I watched each of these movies at least a dozen times and so find it difficult to pinpoint my inaugural viewings. The sleepovers and all-nighters I pulled with my older sister bleed into one another and blur what might have indeed been revelatory moments. But my horror-bingeing definitely hit its peak (or its rock bottom, depending on your chosen addiction model) in the sixth grade, that especially cruel point in youth at which half the girls have crossed over into puberty while the other half have remained behind. Both groups are humiliated by belonging to their respective camp, indulging in misguided fantasies that the grass might be green anywhere on the landscape of early adolescence.