We didn’t know whether it was asceticism or starvation. She looked peaceful, Uncle Tucker said, without the feverish appetite of Lux, or the tight-lipped, tight-assed expression of Mary. We asked if she had carried a laminated picture of the Virgin, but he didn’t think so. She came out every morning, though sometimes, if a Charlie Chan movie was on, Uncle Tucker would forget to check.
It was Uncle Tucker, too, who first detected the smell we could never identify. One morning, as Bonnie came out to the dirt mound, she left the front door open, and Uncle Tucker became aware of an odor unlike any other he had ever encountered. At first he thought it was merely an intensification of Bonnie’s wet-bird aroma, but it persisted even after she returned inside, and when we woke up, we smelled it, too. For even as the house began to fall apart, casting out whiffs of rotten wood and soggy carpet, this other smell began wafting from the Lisbons’, invading our dreams and making us wash our hands over and over again. The smell was so thick it seemed liquid, and stepping into its current felt like being sprayed. We tried to locate its source, looking for dead squirrels in the yard or a bag of fertilizer, but the smell contained too much syrup to be death itself. The smell was definitely on the side of life, and reminded David Black of a fancy mushroom salad he’d eaten on a trip with his parents to New York.
“It’s the smell of trapped beaver,” Paul Baldino said, sagely, and we didn’t know enough to disagree, but we found it hard to imagine such an aroma issuing from the ventricles of love. The smell was partly bad breath, cheese, milk, tongue film, but also the singed smell of drilled teeth. It was the kind of bad breath you get used to the closer you go in, until you can’t really notice because it’s your own breath, too. Over the years, of course, the open mouths of women have blown into our faces ingredients of that original smell, and occasionally, poised over unfamiliar bedsheets, in the dark of that night’s betrayal or blind date, we’ve greedily welcomed any new particular reek because of its partial connection to the fumes that began blowing from the Lisbon house shortly after it was closed up, and never really stopped. Right now, if we concentrate, we can smell it still. It found us in our beds, and on the playground as we played Kill the Man with the Ball; it came down the stairs of the Karafilises’ so that Old Mrs. Karafilis dreamed she was back in Bursa cooking grape leaves. It reached us even over the stink of Joe Barton’s grandfather’s cigar, as he showed us the photo album of his Navy days, explaining that the plump women in petticoats were only his cousins. Strangely enough, even though the smell was overpowering, we didn’t once think of holding our breaths, or, as a last resort, breathing through our mouths, and after the first few days we sucked in the aroma like mother’s milk.
Dim dormant months followed: ice-bound January; unrelenting February; soiled, slushy March. We still had winters in those days, vast snowdrifts, days of canceled school. At home on snowy mornings, listening to school closings on the radio (a parade of Indian county names, Washtenaw, Shiawassee, until our own Anglo-Saxon Wayne), we still knew the vivifying feeling of staying warm inside a shelter like pioneers. Nowadays, because of shifting winds from the factories and the rising temperature of the earth, snow never comes in an onslaught anymore but by a slow accretion in the night, momentary suds. The world, a tired performer, offers us another half-assed season. Back in the days of the Lisbon girls, snow fell every week and we shoveled our driveways into heaps higher than our cars. Trucks dumped salt. Christmas lights went up, and old man Wilson sprang for his annual extravagant display: a twenty-foot snowman, with three mechanized reindeer pulling a fat Santa in his sleigh. The display always brought a line of cars up our street, but that year the traffic slowed down twice. We could see families pointing and smiling at Santa, then growing still and avid before the Lisbons’ house like rubberneckers at a crash site. The fact that the Lisbons put up no lights until after Christmas made their house look even bleaker. On the Pitzenbergers’ lawn next door, three snowbound angels blew red trumpets. At the Bateses’ on the other side, multicolored gumdrops glowed within the frosted bushes. It was only in January, after Mr. Lisbon had been out of work a week, that he came out to string lights. He covered the front bushes, but when he plugged in the lights he wasn’t pleased with the result. “One of these is a blinker,” he said to Mr. Bates as the latter walked to his car. “The box says it’s got a red tip, but I’ve checked them all and can’t find the culprit. I hate blinking lights.” Perhaps he did, but they stayed blinking, whenever he remembered to plug them in at night.
All winter, the girls remained elusive. Sometimes one or another would come outside, hugging herself in the cold, her breath clouding her face, and after a minute would go back in. At night, Therese continued to use her ham radio, tapping out messages that took her away from her house, to warm southern states and even to the tip of South America. Tim Winer searched the radio waves for Therese’s frequency and a few times claimed to have found it. Once she was talking to a man in Georgia about his dog (arthritic hips, operate or not?), and another time she spoke, in that genderless, nationless medium, to a human being whose few responses Winer managed to record. It was all dots and dashes, but we made him put it into English. The exchange went something like this: “You too?”
“My brother.”
“How old?”
“Twenty-one. Handsome. Beautiful on violin.”
“How?”
“Bridge nearby. Swift current.”
“How get over?”
“Never will.”
“What is Colombia like?”
“Warm. Peaceful. Come.”
“Like to.”
“You are wrong about bandidos.”
“Have to go. Mom calling.”
“Painted roof blue like you said.”
“Bye.”
“Bye.”
That was it. The interpretation is, we think, quite obvious, and shows that as late as March, Therese was reaching out toward a freer world. About this time she sent away for application materials from a list of colleges (the reporters would make much of this later). The girls also ordered catalogues for items they could never buy, and the Lisbons’ mailbox filled up once again: furniture catalogues from Scott-Shruptine, high-end clothing, exotic vacations. Unable to go anywhere, the girls traveled in their imaginations to goldtipped Siamese temples, or past an old man with bucket and leaf broom tidying a moss-carpeted speck of Japan. As soon as we learned the names of these brochures we sent for them ourselves to see where the girls wanted to go. Far East Adventures. Footloose Tours. Tunnel to China Tours. Orient Express. We got them all. And, flipping pages, hiked through dusty passes with the girls, stopping every now and then to help them take off their backpacks, placing our hands on their warm, moist shoulders and gazing off at papaya sunsets. We drank tea with them in a water pavilion, above blazing goldfish. We did whatever we wanted to, and Cecilia hadn’t killed herself: she was a bride in Calcutta, with a red veil and the soles of her feet dyed with henna. The only way we could feel close to the girls was through these impossible excursions, which have scarred us forever, making us happier with dreams than wives. Some of us abused the catalogues, taking them off into rooms alone, or sneaking them out under our shirts. But we had little else to do, and the snow came down, and the sky was unremittingly gray.
We’d like to tell you with authority what it was like inside the Lisbon house, or what the girls felt being imprisoned in it. Sometimes, drained by this investigation, we long for some shred of evidence, some Rosetta stone that would explain the girls at last. But even though that winter was certainly not a happy one, little more can be averred. Trying to locate the girls’ exact pain is like the self-examination doctors urge us to make (we’ve reached that age). On a regular basis, we’re forced to explore with clinical detachment our most private pouch and, pressing it, impress ourselves with its anatomical reality: two turtle eggs bedded in a nest of tiny sea grapes, with tubes snaking in and out, knobbed with nodules of gristle. We’re asked to find in this dimly mapped
place, amid naturally occurring clots and coils, upstart invaders. We never realized how many bumps we had until we went looking. And so we lie on our backs, probing, recoiling, probing again, and the seeds of death get lost in the mess God made us.
It’s no different with the girls. Hardly have we begun to palpate their grief than we find ourselves wondering whether this particular wound was mortal or not, or whether (in our blind doctoring) it’s a wound at all. It might just as well be a mouth, which is as wet and as warm. The scar might be over the heart or the kneecap. We can’t tell. All we can do is go groping up the legs and arms, over the soft bivalvular torso, to the imagined face. It is speaking to us. But we can’t hear.
Every night we scanned the girls’ bedroom windows. Around dinner tables our conversations inevitably turned to the family’s predicament. Would Mr. Lisbon get another job? How would he support his family? How long could the girls endure being cooped up? Even Old Mrs. Karafilis made one of her rare journeys to the first floor (it not being bath day) just to stare down the street at the Lisbon house. We couldn’t remember another instance where Old Mrs. Karafilis had taken interest in the world, because ever since we had known her, she had lived in the basement waiting to die. Sometimes Demo Karafilis took us downstairs to play Foosball, and, moving among the heating ducts, spare cots, battered luggage, we would tunnel through to the small room Old Mrs. Karafilis had decorated to resemble Asia Minor. Artificial grapes hung from a ceiling lattice; decorative boxes housed silkworms; the cinder-block walls were painted the precise cerulean blue of the old country’s air. Taped-up postcards served as windows into another time and place where Old Mrs. Karafilis still lived. Green mountains rose in the background, giving way to chipped Ottoman tombs, red-tiled roofs, a puff of steam rising in one Technicolor corner from a man selling hot bread. Demo Karafilis never told us what was wrong with his grandmother, nor did he think it odd they kept her in the basement amid the vast boiler and gurgling drains (our lowland suburb was prone to flooding). Still, the way she stopped before the postcards, licking one thumb and pressing it to the same whitened spot, the way she smiled with her golden teeth, nodding toward the vistas as though greeting passersby, all this told us that Old Mrs. Karafilis had been shaped and saddened by a history we knew nothing about. When she did see us, she said, “Close the light, dolly mou,” and we did, leaving her in the dark, fanning herself with the complimentary fan the funeral parlor that had buried her husband sent every Christmas. (The fan, cheap cardboard stapled to a Popsicle stick, showed Jesus praying at Gethsemane, portentous clouds piling up behind him, and on the flip side advertised mortuary services.) Other than to take a bath, Old Mrs. Karafilis came upstairs—a rope tied to her waist, Demo’s father lightly pulling, Demo and his brothers assisting behind—only when Train to Istanbul came on television every two years. Then she’d sit, excited as a girl, leaning forward on the couch and waiting for the ten-second scene where the train passed a few green hills that held her heart. She’d raise both arms, let out a vulture’s cry, just as the train—same way every time—disappeared into the tunnel.
Old Mrs. Karafilis never cared much about neighborhood gossip, mostly because she couldn’t understand it, and the part she did understand seemed trivial. As a young woman, she had hidden in a cave to escape being killed by the Turks. For an entire month she had eaten nothing but olives, swallowing the pits to fill herself up. She had seen family members butchered, men strung up in the sun eating their own privates, and now hearing how Tommy Riggs totaled his parents’ Lincoln, or how the Perkinses’ Christmas tree caught fire, killing the cat, she didn’t see the drama. The only time she perked up was when someone mentioned the Lisbon girls, and then it wasn’t to ask questions or get details but to enter into telepathy with them. If we were talking about the girls within her hearing, Old Mrs. Karafilis would lift her head, then raise herself painfully from her chair and cane across the cold cement floor. At one end of the basement a window well let in weak light, and, going up to its cold panes, she stared at a patch of sky visible through a lace of spiderweb. That was as much of the girls’ world as she could see, just the same sky above their house, but it told her enough. It occurred to us that she and the girls read secret signs of misery in cloud formations, that despite the discrepancy in their ages something timeless communicated itself between them, as though she were advising the girls in her mumbling Greek, “Don’t waste your time on life.” Mulch and blown leaves filled the window well, a broken chair from when we’d made a fort. Light shone through Old Mrs. Karafilis’s housedress, as thin and drably patterned as paper toweling. Her sandals were right for wearing to a hammam, some steaming place, not across that drafty floor. On the day she heard about the girls’ new incarceration, she jerked her head up, nodded, didn’t smile. But had known already, it seemed.
From her weekly bath of Epsom salts, she talked of the girls, or to them, we couldn’t tell which. We didn’t get too close, or listen at the keyhole, because the few contradictory glimpses we’d gotten of Old Mrs. Karafilis, with her sagging breasts from another century, her blue legs, her undone hair shockingly long and glossy as a girl’s, filled us with embarrassment. Even the sound of the tub running made us blush, her muffled voice coming over it, complaining of aches while the black lady, none too young herself, coaxed her in, the two of them alone with their decrepitude behind the bathroom door, crying out, singing, first the black lady, then Old Mrs. Karafilis singing some Greek song, and finally just the sound of water we couldn’t imagine the color of, sloshing around. Afterward, she’d appear just as pale as before, her head wrapped in a towel. We could hear her lungs inflating as the black lady fitted the rope around Old Mrs. Karafilis’s waist and began lowering her down the stairs. Despite her wish to die as soon as possible, Old Mrs. Karafilis always looked fearful during these descents, gripping the banister, eyes magnified behind rimless glasses. Sometimes as she passed we’d tell her the latest about the girls, and she’d cry, “Mana!,” which meant something like “Holy shit!,” Demo said, but she never really seemed surprised. Out past the weekly glimpsed windows, out past the street, lived the world, which had, Old Mrs. Karafilis knew, been dying for years.
In the end, it wasn’t death that surprised her but the stubbornness of life. She couldn’t understand how the Lisbons kept so quiet, why they didn’t wail to heaven or go mad. Seeing Mr. Lisbon stringing Christmas lights, she shook her head and muttered. She let go of the special geriatric banister installed along the first floor, took a few steps at sea level without support, and for the first time in seven years suffered no pain. Demo explained it to us like this: “We Greeks are a moody people. Suicide makes sense to us. Putting up Christmas lights after your own daughter does it—that makes no sense. What my yia yia could never understand about America was why everyone pretended to be happy all the time.”
Winter is the season of alcoholism and despair. Count the drunks in Russia or the suicides at Cornell. So many exam-takers threw themselves into the gorge of that hilly campus that the university declared a midwinter holiday to ease the tension (popularly known as “suicide day,” the holiday popped up in a computer search we ran, along with “suicide ride” and “suicide-mobile”). We don’t understand those Cornell kids any better, some Bianca with her first diaphragm and all life ahead of her plunging off the footbridge, cushioned only by her down vest; dark existential Bill, with his clove cigarettes and Salvation Army overcoat, not leaping as Bianca did, but easing himself over the rail and hanging on for dear death before letting go (shoulder muscles show tears in 33 percent of people choosing bridges; the other 67 percent just jump). We mention this now only to show that even college students, free to booze and fornicate, bring about their own ends in large numbers. Imagine what it was like for the Lisbon girls, shut up in their house with no blaring stereo or ready bong around.
The newspapers, later writing about what they termed a “suicide pact,” treated the girls as automatons, creatures so barely alive that their deaths
came as little change. In the sweep of Ms. Perl’s accounts, which boiled two or three months and the suffering of four individuals into a paragraph with a heading “When Youth Sees No Future,” the girls appear as indistinguishable characters marking black x’s on a calendar or holding hands in self-styled Black Masses. Suggestions of satanism, or some mild form of black magic, haunt Ms. Perl’s calculations. She made much of the record-burning incident, and often quoted rock lyrics that alluded to death or suicide. Ms. Perl befriended a local deejay and spent an entire night listening to the records that Lux’s schoolmates listed among her favorites. From this “research,” she came up with the find she was most proud of: a song by the band Cruel Crux, entitled “Virgin Suicide.” The chorus follows, though neither Ms. Perl nor we have been able to determine if the album was among those Mrs. Lisbon forced Lux to burn:
Virgin suicide
What was that she cried?
No use in stayin’
On this holocaust ride
She gave me her cherry
She’s my virgin suicide
The song certainly ties in nicely with the notion that a dark force beset the girls, some monolithic evil we weren’t responsible for. Their behavior, however, was anything but monolithic. While Lux trysted on the roof, Therese grew fluorescent sea horses in a drinking glass, and, down the hall, Mary spent hours looking into her portable mirror. Set in an oval of pink plastic, the mirror was surrounded by exposed bulbs like a mirror in an actress’s dressing room. A switch allowed Mary to simulate various times and weathers. There were settings for “morning,” “afternoon,” and “evening,” as well as one for “brite sun” and “overcast.” For hours Mary would sit before the mirror, watching her face swim through the alterations of counterfeit worlds. She wore dark glasses in sunshine, and bundled up under clouds. Mr. Lisbon sometimes saw her flipping the switch back and forth, passing through ten or twenty days at once, and she often got one of her sisters to sit before the mirror so that she could dispense advice. “See, the circles under your eyes come out in overcast. That’s because we’ve got pale skin. In sunlight … just a minute … see, like this, they’re gone. So you should wear more base or concealer on cloudy days. On sunny days, our complexions tend to wash out, so we need color. Lipstick and even eyeshadow.”