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Look at us girls. See the straightness of our hair, unmolested by the presence of darkening roots. We move so elegantly, so refined. It is as if we are conscious of our motions, seeking to create dynamic routines for the world around us to jot down in their bibles. In our Victorian nightgowns, padded with the piety of our mother, we maneuver around our house like prissy sprites. Our likeness attracts all the boys and men in our humid neighborhood, whose admiration of our youth remains just as strong as when it first aroused itself in the second-to-last June of our lives, when a flotsam of fishflies swept in to blacken every surface. I sense that what makes us so opulent is that we are the only surface to not be blackened by these creatures, which lack mouths to nip at our fair skins.
Now blink, and find that only one of us remains. It is me. The stairs we used to saunter down in actressy ways have long been empty of our presences. We have no longer pandered to our mother to buy skirts, pulling them just below our knees so that she won't fret over its demureness. We have no longer sent our father to the store to buy boxes of Tampax, compromising him to become flustered by the reactions of the pimply-faced clerks who could only smirk at our hygienic needs. The stuffed animals we hugged to death, the diaries we poured our hearts into, the clothes and dresses that we baptized with our essential perfumes and aromas encased in pinguid swan-shaped bottles, have now been thrown away by our neighbor Mr. Hedlie. We know nothing about him, only that he is one of many to be complicit in the undertaking of destroying the evidence of our existence.
And I should be so unfortunate as to relate that the endeavor has been successful. Confined to the sanitized labyrinth of this hospital, I have been unable to rescue the remaining photos of us that Mr. Hedlie threw in the garbage, as well as shelves’ worth of our belongings and our bank of dust that took so much effort to sweep up that he had to wear a mask to not inhale the spores. I believe he must’ve had an epiphany at that point when he realized that we were not the perfect nymphs, with our juxtapositions of wooden crosses and leatherback bibles against makeup palettes with the sullied built-in mirrors. And our parents, resigning to a motel room, took to putting the house up on the market and let the goings-on of the men in our neighborhood scatter the remainder of our existences like cherry petals across a lawn. If anything, the boys are to blame: they were the ones who dug through our trash following Mr. Hedlie’s excavation and stole the photos of my sisters and I to take to their boy havens.
They stole from us even when we were alive. When Cecilia, aged fourteen, had taken her first try with suicide by slitting her wrists in the bath, her therapist Mr. Horniker suggested to our parents that the root of our issues was an inability to express our libidinal needs and that we should have more opportunities to interact with boys. I can only imagine that this sentiment made my mother clutch her cross and my father spread his lips in furtive discontentment at barely being able to contradict his own wife. But it was doctor’s orders, and soon after Cecilia was discharged from the hospital with bandages taped onto her wrists, our father invited Peter Sissen over. As a reward for helping our father build a solar system model in his classroom, he was treated to a stiff dinner where we ate peas and mashed potatoes. Lux, aged fourteen, kept kicking and nudging his legs from across the table playfully, and we could tell by how she curled her tongue, brandishing her pearly whites, and eyed him precariously while our mother feigned inattention and made me and Therese, aged seventeen, giggle. It was only Cecilia and Bonnie, aged sixteen, who tried to recreate our mother’s lack of sense. Cecilia did it more poignantly, perhaps as a ditch effort to accommodate Peter.
But Peter didn’t come to our house to enjoy our company. In fact, Lux suggested to me later that his favorite part was undoubtedly after dinner when he went upstairs to use the bathroom adjoined to our rooms. She claimed that she went up there under the guise of needing to use the restroom, and she heard the faucet running and the noise of him cluttering around. Intrigued, she knocked on the door and asked him: “You done hogging the bathroom? I need something.” He opened the door, the first and last motion of respect that he would ever display for us. She moved over to the cupboard and opened it, proudly displaying a box of Tampax to imply that she was bleeding between the legs at that present moment. (It’s none of your business if she actually was.) Lux giggled when she recounted how flushed his face had become when he saw the Tampax, and when she folded her hands behind her back and told him, “It’s private, do you mind?” he scampered off with his tail between his legs and fled the house, never to return lest he wished to dive headfirst into our domain of girlhood.
Lux was now dead of carbon monoxide poisoning, and the last sentiment she left me was that Peter and all the other boys that we came to encounter the year following Cecilia’s first suicide attempt had one thing in common: they preferred the company of us in thought rather than in person. Indeed, she had been correct when she and all the other girls insisted that Peter had a grander time sniffing around in our bathroom, sampling the effluvia of our lives and investing his attention into my secret pack of cosmetics that I had tied up in a sock and left under the sink so that my parents wouldn’t find it. The sentiments make me cringe every time I muse over them: grazing his steady, insipid fingers over my tubes of red lipstick, my compacts, my hair-removal wax. Holding them close to his lips, his nose, inhaling the effluvia that he would somehow find erotic. I can only imagine he’d find the sights of our girlhood awe-inducing until he reached the cabinet, where our boxes of tampons sat to judge him like sanguine reliefs of fertility deities. Whenever I wore my lipstick after that night, I had boys staring at me. I had initially believed that they were staring at my breasts through my tunic top, but I saw their eyes glide up to my lips, profiling their blood-crimson color, and suddenly I saw that they were obsessed with a new color for us. Red.
I’ve never doubted Lux in my life. Even as naive as she was, she was also quite knowledgeable on how men (boys) seemed to operate when confronted with casual beauty. She had received this insight from me, and me from Bonnie, and Bonnie from Therese. We passed this information down as the years went, holding it close so that we could learn to survive in a world that gave us nothing but superficial value. We had become so conscious of the natural voyeurism of the male species that we couldn’t help but succumb to our reclusion, even if the lack of social interaction was what was killing us slowly. Cecilia had been fortunate to not be under their swift, prying eyes, but I couldn’t say the same for Lux. All of them seemed more fixated on her, which was both a blessing and a curse to the rest of us, who had barely evaded their attentions in the first place. She was fifteen by the time of her own death, and still beautiful enough to prompt men to emerge from all corners of the neighborhood to come and quest after us. In fact, when they first pulled me out of the oven that I had stuck my head in so that I could die from inhaling the fumes, the first thing I saw was a rotund man huffing and puffing. And he didn’t look transfixed by the beauty of a girl nearing the end of her teenagerhood, but rather horrified. And I wondered if he wanted to drop me off of the stretcher and send me away just so he’d never have to look at me again.
To men, we were better off as concepts, art pieces, angels. Beings to stare at and insert into wet fantasies, but never to interact with or touch. Even our own parents, who didn’t share in the boys’ lust but rather in the desire to commodify the cleanness of our souls and protect us from material wants. Our mother, steel-haired and stern, prompted us to cover our shoulders, wear our cross necklaces, and close our legs lest we wanted to distract the boys. She sang praises of our school’s modest uniforms, which had itchy black vests, itchy knee socks, and itchy skirts that extended far below the knee.
Modesty was supposed to be our lifesaver, and it ended up being our murderer. And we knew we had been damned to have our lives taken away from us after Cecilia’s second death. The chaperoned party that they held for us after Peter Sissen’s dinner visit was just as awkward, if not even worse. They were still dogged in their efforts to uplift our serotonin levels, not knowing that their own short-sighted agendas were still tearing us down. Our convictions had only grown truer when we were set up in the basement of our house, clad in our ordinary dresses that were drab enough to appease our mother and refined enough to appease the boys. Surrounded by the effervescence of blown-up balloons and our mother’s fruit punch, which we sampled to no end, we were forced to put on pleasant smiles and let the boys barely hold conversations with us. I served them punch in my blue dress with spaghetti straps, cordially covering my exposed shoulders with my hair, and I feigned intrigue in the boys’ restrained voices and longing, excruciating stares. And when they brought in Joe the Retard, whom the boys liked to use as a ploy of entertainment by tickling his chin and inciting his ears to wiggle, I looked over at Cecilia. And I saw the blankest, most void expression I have ever seen on a girl’s face. She didn’t look angry, nor upset, but rather displeased. A look of resignation, letting us know that we had failed to help her. And when she went up to our mother, rubbing her wrists where the slices had begun scarring over underneath a motley of technicolor bracelets, and asked her if she could be excused, I closed my eyes.
That was when modesty had damned us all.
The last straw was the homecoming dance, following Cecilia's second and final attempt at suicide. We had all gotten our own dates at the reluctance of our mother, and we let ourselves be auctioned off to various boys on the football team. We had no say in the matter, as if we were brides in China being arranged to husbands older, fatter, and wealthier than us, but we still found ourselves eager for the big night. Under the watchful eye of our mother, we purchased simple, frumpy fabrics that we saw elegance in. We hoped for the tight-fitting, complimentary dresses that we figured the other girls would wear with their dates, but in the end it didn’t matter what fabric we chose, as mother opted to trim the lace and add an inch to our bustlines and two inches to extend over the knee. The night the boys pulled in, wearing velveted outfits that had clearly been either borrowed from a father or fitted by a jolly, twice-married tailor with comically-large wrist pins strapped around their arms. They gave us white corsages, telling us that they didn’t know what we were wearing and that they had been advised to buy white roses because “white went with everything.” Black went with everything as well, but they couldn’t have known that.
I suppose whether or not we had fun that night is irrelevant. Parkie Denton took my arm into the gymnasium, lit up into a spectacle of balloons and artificial candy lights. Parkie was nice enough, but none of it mattered because Lux and Trip went on to win Homecoming king and queen; as expected, considering that Lux was the fixation of every boy in our school and Trip the fixation of the girls. All the girls except us, of course; all of us knew he was garbage. Hot, steaming garbage, a personality type that we were far too familiar with. Even Lux was conscious of it, but she was so eager to experience even a fraction of teenage love that she let herself be stupid for a night. She let him lull her away from the gymnasium and out to the football field, where he went on to abandon her and cause her to miss curfew.
I don’t blame Lux for our deaths. We had been angry at her initially, seeing as that she was the immediate cause, but overtime we grew to understand that the consequences were a part of a greater force that was out of our control. One that pulled us out of our classes and kept us stuck in our house in maximum security. I wish I could say that the fools in our grade who snuck into the girls’ Human Growth lesson (which our mother had nearly forbade us from going until she learned about its strong emphasis on abstinence) and jumbled up the information so badly that Paul Baldino, the braceface son of a Mafia mobster who we heard all about but saw nothing of, affirmed that girls bled from their nipples, had been the cause. Stupidity does kill, but it wasn’t what made Cecilia jump to her death and impale herself on the iron fencepost in front of our house. It wasn’t what made Lux trap herself in a garage to die from carbon monoxide poisoning, what made Bonnie hang herself, what made me cram myself in the oven, and what made Therese stuff herself with sleeping pills. I could easily say it was ourselves, but that would suggest that we had a choice in how we ended up. And truthfully, the reason we did it was because he felt we didn’t.
The boys in our life had come in, damned us, and then left without any repercussions. We never saw Trip after that cursed night, and frankly we wouldn’t have wanted to. I knew from the start that he was questing after Lux, and he began it by approaching us during our lunch period and watching TV with us on school evenings. Whatever his fascination was with Lux was ultimately what drove our lives into the mud, and in our final days we suspected that our isolation was a greater comfort than the company that boys gave us.
Suicide was, if anything, our revenge. All the boys in our suburb were indulgent perverts who wanted nothing more than to have us embody their deepest, most intrinsic fantasies, all while refusing to communicate with us and instead taking strides to invade our home through underground sewer tunnels and casual means of trust. They stole our diaries, our photos, our belongings. Cecilia’s poetry, Lux’s underwear that had the names of fleeting boy crushes bleached out time after time, my nude-colored nylons with gentle film running through it, Bonnie’s cultish, red candles that she lit for penance — all gone. They swept through every inch of the rooms that had been our safe havens, our domains of femininity where we had spent long hours in solitude, thinking about a world like the one that the Amazonian women lived in. Away from the advances and exploits of men, living in solidarity and learning how to become proficient in the art of battle and self-preservation, living under lionhearted queens who didn’t care for virtue. How nice it would’ve been to live with them, and be carried away in their tall arms and dressed in smooth, loose-fitting stolas and never be judged for our bodies.
But those are fleeting wishes. I am now stuck in my own domain, where I am destined to die in accordance with the words of those around me. My family is better off dead: my sisters were successful in their suicide free-for-all, and my parents were already resigned to their efforts of forgetting that we ever existed. And instead of being paraded in fine-funded funerals like Cecilia was, we were left to evaporate like the tail end of a dream that had never existed. The blonde girls, living in the house in Grosse Pointe with unraked leaves and dead trees and parents so fraught up in their nonsense that they couldn’t hope to see why their daughters would do something so awful.
They already speak about me as if I am dead. Always in past tense. And I suppose I should be dead as well, judging by how much medication they’ve given me to boost my serotonin. They were always trying to explain things with medicine: they called our suicides copycat behavior, as if to replicate the exploits of a bygone sister. But frankly, she had always been destined to die, and so had we. Even if I would be the last to die, directly interfering with the narrative that Lux, the only girl whom the boys had ever been able to touch, had died last, it didn’t matter to me. Death is in arms reach, and nobody is going to try and stop me if I go for it.
But perhaps I don’t want to die. Perhaps I want to recover on my own time and continue my life outside of Michigan, away from the confines of my steel-haired parents. I could find my way into a college, master in Biology and minor in Photography. I could immerse myself in the company of other girls, who don’t think that being young and blonde rationalizes the mindsets of men who come to pick you apart into pieces to criticize and judge, and maybe I could someday find a man who treats me right and allows me to prosper into the person I was always meant to be. And I could live on as a sentiment of survival in a family where everyone had died by their own hands. My sisters are dead, and I doubt my folks will be around for much longer, given that they wear their Catholic misery like matronly jewels.
But I don’t know who I’m supposed to be. And the only thing I can feel after all that I’ve been through is resentment aimed at the boys in my neighborhood. They’ll spend the rest of their lives wondering why my sisters did what they did, and they’ll argue and bicker over conspiracies and sequences of events, pieces of information that I hardly know myself. And they’ll go to every alumni, every teacher, every elderly neighbor for information regarding us — who had seen us undress, who had seen us wail at various stages of life, who had smoked with us — but they’ll never go to me. In fact, they’ll probably forget about me, even when all they do is linger over my family. And the reason for it is simple: it’s not me they’re thinking about, but the vast concept of what the Lisbon sisters mean. What are we meant to be, other than light fixtures that draw fishflies in and disappoint them when we burn out? Are we foreboding witches that determine the overdoses of Vietnam veterans, the decline of our state’s auto industry, the corruption of our graveyard?
They’ll ponder over these questions late into adulthood, when their youthful, tight skin begins to sag and their pomaded, rustled hair turns scarce and hoary. And at the notion of seeing their bellies protrude like pregnant guts, they’ll turn to their wives and daughters and see that they are not blonde and prim like us. And time and time again, they’ll pester them aloud about how they can never be as perfect as us, no matter how gracefully their sundresses dance in sargasso afternoons.
But we were never perfect. At various points in our life, possibly all at once, we were ugly, improper, harsh. We judged and we grimaced, we spat and we cried. We did everything that would upset men in the confines of our domesticity, so as to not be judged for being rank. Lux used to smoke in the quiet locker rooms at our school or in our bathroom with the window open. Bonnie and I used to spew mean gossip about our Nazi neighbors, and how burly, dignified men a few feet from our lawns would have extramarital affairs with their maids. Therese used to pout about Greek life, claiming that she’d never want to lift her breasts just to be accepted. I sense that how my family has concluded itself is a direct rebellion of this convention. It begs the question that answers itself: how could these purehearted, saintly girls can compel themselves to die, even with all the affection and desire in the world? They had been looked at lovingly for so long, and then in the blink of an eye they disappeared and died the deaths of confessional poets and madwomen. Jumping to death, overdosing on sleeping medication, poisoning themselves with toxic fumes. The first one dies twice, and so must the second one.
And I fear that none of the boys will learn this lesson as well as I have unless they stop attempting to feel the same solitude that we felt in our final days. Burgeoning through our hells scented with lavender and floating around in our nightgowns, when we had no reason, no purpose to even do anything beyond brush our hair and flip through magazines. If they had been in our skin, then they would make it known to the world their suffering and build entire societies around deciphering its complexities, its nooks and crannies. But they were not, and they will never; so the suffering that I have endured shall be my own until the day I die. And I will not disclose it to any of them unless I have the power to inflict it on them.