Jeffrey Eugenidesby
Jeffrey Eugenides
Copyright C 1993 by Jeffrey Eugenides All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Published simultaneously in Canada by Harper Collins Canada Ltd First edition, 1993
A portion of this novel appeared in The Paris Review. The author wishes to thank the editors of that publication and to express gratitude for support received from the Ingram Merrill Foundation. Most of all, thanks go to Margot Frankel, for encouragement, discernment, and patience.
Excerpt from "Make It with You" by David Gates copyright 1970
Colgems-EM! Music Inc. All rights reserved.
International Copyright Secured. Used by permission Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Eugenides, Jeffrey. The virgin suicides / Jeffrey Eugenides. - 1st ed.
For Gus and War L
On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide-it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Theresethe two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope. They got out of the EMS truck, as usual moving much too slowly in our opinion, and the fat one said under his breath, "This ain't TV, folks, this is how fast we go." He was carrying the heavy respirator and cardiac unit past the bushes that had grown monstrous and over the erupting lawn, tame and immaculate thirteen months earlier when the trouble began.
Cecilia, the youngest, only thirteen, had gone first, slitting her wrists like a Stoic while taking a bath, and when they found her, afloat in her pink pool, with the yellow eyes of someone possessed and her small body giving off the odor of a mature woman, the paramedics had been so frightened by her tranquillity that they had stood mesmerized.
But then Mrs. Lisbon lunged in, screaming, and the reality of the room reasserted itself: blood on the bath mat; Mr. Lisbon's razor sunk in the toilet bowl, marbling the water. The paramedics fetched Cecilia out of the warm water because it quickened the bleeding, and put a tourniquet on her arm. Her wet hair hung down her back and already her extremities were blue. She didn't say a word, but when they parted her hands they found the laminated picture of the Virgin Mary she held against her budding chest.