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Chapter 3
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Virgin Suicides, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Obsession, Gossip, and Scandal
Coming of Age and Nostalgia
Suburban Life, Class, and Decline
Loss, Mourning, and Uncertainty
Summary
Analysis
After homecoming, the Lisbon house begins to function like a prison. Mrs. Lisbon keeps a close watch on her daughters, whom she and her husband take out of school. Years later, the neighborhood boys interview Mrs. Lisbon herself, who says she made the decision to take the girls out of school because she thought it was best for them—the only people paying attention to them were boys, and not for the right reasons. What they needed, Mrs. Lisbon thought, was to be out of the public eye. She admits that she has no idea why all of her daughters decided to die by suicide. She resents the fact that Dr. Hornicker seemed to think she and Mr. Lisbon were the problem, and she doesn’t say much beyond this, abruptly leaving the boys—men, now—in the bus station café where she agreed to meet them.
The Virgin Suicides presents readers with a number of difficult situations, but it doesn’t necessarily resolve these situations or offer up answers for why, exactly, they happened. There’s no direct indication that Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon are the reason that the Lisbon sisters all died by suicide, and though characters set forth a number of different theories throughout the novel, there’s no single explanation for why the girls decided to die. Nonetheless, it’s clear that Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon are quite strict, and though it wouldn’t be fair to say that this is the sole reason their daughters died by suicide, it’s not unreasonable to consider the possibility that their draconian rules might have in some way exacerbated whatever the girls were dealing with in the aftermath of Cecilia’s death.
Themes
During this period, Mrs. Lisbon also forces Lux to burn all of her rock and roll records. Lux is devastated, but Mrs. Lisbon shows no mercy. Meanwhile, the house looks increasingly shabby and dilapidated, to the point that the neighborhood boys’ parents start making disapproving comments about its outward appearance. Most surprisingly of all, though, the boys discover that Lux has been sneaking unknown boys and men through her house and onto the roof, where they have sex. Astounded, the neighborhood boys watch Lux having sex atop her own house, taking in the scene from one of the boys’ attics.
Mrs. Lisbon’s decision to burn Lux’s rock and roll records implies that she associates the trouble and tension sweeping through her family with the changing cultural landscape. Like many parents in the 1970s, she sees rock and roll as an antagonistic force capable of corrupting her daughters, so she makes a point of purging her household of such music. On another note, the neighbors start to judge the Lisbons a bit more harshly in this section, as if the family’s grief has lasted too long and is now impacting everyone around them—a feeling mostly brought on by the fact that the Lisbons don’t aesthetically maintain their house and yard, which is, in the world of this upper-middle-class suburban neighborhood, a cardinal sin.
Themes
The partners Lux brings onto the roof are mysterious—nobody knows how she meets them, since she never leaves the house. Even more alarmingly, some of them are full-grown adults and thus risk statutory rape charges by sneaking through the Lisbon household to have sex with teenaged Lux. From afar, the neighborhood boys watch carefully, learning various positions and techniques that have stayed with them for their entire lives. Years later, they often find themselves thinking about Lux out there on the roof, imagining they’re having sex with her as they make love to their own partners.
The more her parents try to control her, the more Lux rebels against them. If Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon hadn’t taken Lux and her sisters out of school and forbade them from seeing other people, Lux most likely would have kept dating Trip or some other guy at school. Now, though, she goes to extremes by having sex with older men. Meanwhile, the neighborhood boys continue to invade her privacy by carefully watching her have sex, and the fact that they still—as adults—think about watching her is a good illustration of their continued obsession with her.
Themes
Around the time Lux starts having sex on the roof, the boys notice how frail she has started to look. She’s extremely thin and looks sickly. Then, one day, the paramedics pull up to the Lisbon house for the first time since Cecilia’s death. This time, though, it’s because there’s something wrong with Lux’s health—the boys are surprised to see her come out on a stretcher looking “very much alive” but in some sort of abdominal pain. Half an hour later, the boys hear a rumor that Lux’s appendix burst.
The boys keep close tabs on the Lisbon household, so Lux’s medical event is undoubtedly exciting and monumental, especially since they don’t know at first why the paramedics have come. They are, in other words, plunged into uncertainty. The last time the paramedics visited the Lisbon household was when Cecilia died by suicide, so their appearance has an ominous and foreboding quality (especially since readers already know that the other Lisbon sisters will eventually die by suicide, too).
Themes
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Not much later, though, the boys hear the real story about why Lux went to the hospital. Once she gets out of the waiting room, she mostly stops acting as if she’s in pain. She pretended something was wrong, she eventually explains to the doctor, because she hasn’t had her period in 42 days and is worried she might be pregnant. The doctor is unsurprised—he could tell from the anxious way she kept touching her stomach that she was worried about pregnancy. But this, she says, was the only way she could get out of the house without coming clean to her parents. She convinces the doctor to give her a pregnancy test without telling Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon.
The mere fact that the boys learn the real reason Lux went to the hospital is a testament to just how thoroughly they have worked their way into her private life. It’s as if they have ears and eyes everywhere in town; nothing, it seems, can stop them from finding out what they want to know. And yet, in the end, they’ll never find the true answers they’re looking for. They might have access to information like this detail about Lux’s hospital visit, but they’ll never know why Cecilia decided to die by suicide or, for that matter, why the other sisters eventually do the same.
Themes
The doctor ends up telling Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon that Lux just had really bad indigestion. Privately, he relieves Lux by informing her that she’s not pregnant. However, she does have HPV (human papilloma virus). The neighborhood boys obtain a copy of Lux’s gynecological exam results, which they—to this day—consider one of their “most prized possessions.” Included in the results is a close-up picture of Lux’s cervix, which “stares” out at the boys “like an inflamed eye, fixing [them] with its silent accusation.”
The boys’ invasion of Lux’s privacy reaches new heights in this section, as they violate her rights by obtaining a picture of her cervix. What’s more, the fact that they still consider this one of their “most prized possessions” is—to put it plainly—super creepy. Of course, it’s never justifiable for anyone to steal a picture of somebody else’s reproductive organs. It’s one thing, though, for a group of teenaged boys to treasure this possession, and it’s something else entirely for a group of grown men to do it. That the neighborhood boys still think of this picture as their “most prized possession” emphasizes just how intense—and even pathological—their obsession with Lux and the other Lisbon sisters really is; it’s as if their own maturity and development has been frozen in adolescence.
Themes
Dr. Hornicker, who briefly had the chance to talk to Lux while she waited for the results of her gynecological exam, sets forth a new theory: the Lisbon girls, he thinks, suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. He writes a report outlining why he thinks this is the case, noting that adolescents who lose a sibling to suicide are more likely than the average adolescent to embrace “suicidal behavior” themselves. Everyone in the community quickly takes to this theory, partially because—as the neighborhood boys put it—it “simplifie[s]” the entire matter, making it seem as if Cecilia’s suicide has doomed her sisters to unhappiness. This, it seems, gives rise to the general feeling of Cecilia’s suicide as a sort of infectious, “airborne virus” that the other sisters have contracted.
Everyone in the neighborhood and broader community latches on to Dr. Hornicker’s theory about PTSD and suicide because it helps them make sense of something that is otherwise disturbingly uncertain. People want to know why somebody like Cecilia would take her own life, and then they want to use this explanation as a way of understanding the challenges the other Lisbon sisters face in the aftermath of her death. What’s ironic, though, is that the neighborhood boys seem skeptical of the idea that everyone wants a “simpl[e]” theory to apply to Cecilia’s suicide, even though this is exactly the sort of thing the boys themselves have been searching for. Like the rest of the community, the boys want answers to seemingly unanswerable questions. The only difference, perhaps, is that they possibly understand that their search for these answers may never come to an end.
Themes
The Lisbon house reaches new depths of dilapidation, one of the slate tiles of the roof slipping off and leading to a leak in the living room. Other leaks appear over the next few days, the household filling with pails to catch the water. The exterior looks worn down, too, with the gutters drooping under the weight of wet leaves and uncleared gunk. When the mailman comes, he uses the spine of a magazine to open the mailbox instead of touching it with his hand. Mr. Lisbon is the only one to leave the house, driving to school looking dejected and blank. In the halls, he makes jocular displays of good cheer by jokingly hip-checking boys as they walk by, though they pick up on an uncomfortable sense of desperation as he pins them to the wall.
The steady dilapidation of the Lisbon house is representative of the emotional and psychological decay taking place inside. It’s also symbolic of the family’s inability to go through the motions of maintaining an attractive suburban façade—an inability that ultimately attracts scorn and disapproval from the surrounding community, who not only holds the family’s grief against them but also seems afraid of somehow becoming infected with that grief themselves. This is evidenced by the mailman’s efforts to avoid actually touching the Lisbons’ mailbox with his hand (as if the family’s sorrow is so potent and powerful that merely touching their property could be dangerous).
Themes
Before long, Mr. Lisbon resigns. The boys hear about it afterward. Though the exact reasons surrounding his departure are never made clear, the prevailing sentiment is that he was encouraged to resign because of a growing feeling among local parents that somebody who can’t “run his own family” shouldn’t be given the power to teach other people’s children. Now that he doesn’t go to work, it’s as if the Lisbon house is void of life—sometimes, the boys notice, the lights never even come on at night.
This is a turning point in the novel, as the Lisbon family enters a darker, more isolated stage of grief. The community has clearly turned against Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon, resenting the idea that they haven’t moved on yet from Cecilia’s suicide. There’s also the fact that everyone in the community has come to see Cecilia’s suicide as a sort of “airborne virus,” almost seeming to believe that the Lisbon family’s troubles might infect everyone around them. This is why the local parents are so judgmental about Mr. Lisbon and his ability to effectively teach their children: they’re worried that some damaging aspect of his internal emotional landscape will transfer onto the students.
Themes
That winter, Therese orders a number of college brochures. She and her sisters also order travel pamphlets—pamphlets that the neighborhood boys also order, liking to peruse them and imagine themselves on vacation alongside the Lisbon sisters. Later, in the spring, the local Parks Department goes around identifying trees that will have to be cut down to prevent the spread of the Dutch elm disease. The elm tree outside the Lisbon house is one of these trees. But when the men show up to cut it down (after having already trimmed some of the dead limbs), the Lisbon sisters rush outside and jump between the tree and the approaching chainsaws. This tree, after all, was Cecilia’s favorite. “Go away,” Mary says. “This is our tree.”
Although the Lisbon family has now plunged into isolation and decay, the fact that Therese orders college brochures suggests that she has no plans to end her life. On the contrary, she’s planning for the future and, in doing so, demonstrating a certain capacity for emotional healing. To that end, the sisters band together in an arguably healthy way when they stop the Parks Department workers from cutting down Cecilia’s favorite elm tree. Though it’s unclear whether or not the sisters talk about Cecilia behind closed doors, this is really the first time the boys have witnessed the girls collectively acknowledge their sister’s death. At the same time, though, their refusal to let the workers cut down the tree also hints that they’re (understandably) having trouble letting go of the time before their lives were upended by Cecilia’s suicide.
Themes
The workers from the Parks Department try to appeal to Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon, but they have no luck—neither Mr. nor Mrs. Lisbon is willing to tell the girls to step away from the tree. Mr. Lisbon tells the workers that he’s a proponent of an alternative “therapy” for the infected trees, and he refuses to listen when the workers insist that this approach doesn’t work. When the men with chainsaws threaten to call the police, Mrs. Lisbon points out that her daughters are just standing on their own property. Eventually, the men leave. Linda Perle, the local reporter, writes a schmaltzy piece about the whole event, talking about how the Lisbon girls banded together to save their dead sister’s favorite tree. Meanwhile, the Parks Department goes on cutting down other infected elms in the neighborhood.
The event surrounding Cecilia’s favorite elm tree is the first time that the entire Lisbon family comes together. All of the family members support each other in this moment, as even Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon make points for why the elm tree should be spared. Of course, the entire ordeal is framed as scandalous and gossip-worthy in Linda Perle’s article, but it’s actually rather wholesome, since the Lisbon family bands together and shows some resilience against external forces that try to force them to adhere to suburban expectations.
Themes
As baseball season winds up, the neighborhood boys feel out of touch with the Lisbon sisters. The girls used to come to baseball games with their father, but now they never do anything outside the house. Just when it feels as if the boys might lose contact with the sisters completely, the Lisbon girls reach out to them—or this, at least, is what the boys say. All over the neighborhood, laminated Virgin Mary cards start showing up in mysterious places: under a windshield wiper, in a neighbor’s rose bushes, in a neighborhood boy’s bicycle spokes, and wedged into Tim Winer’s study window. When the boys study the card, they see it’s just like the one Cecilia had in her hand on her first suicide attempt.
The significance of the laminated Virgin Mary cards isn’t self-evident, but this is exactly the point: readers don’t know what the card is supposed to mean, and neither do the boys. Instead of discovering some sort of key to the Lisbon girls’ internal emotional world, both readers and the neighborhood boys are left to put together disparate insights and pieces of information. The only thing that seems evident in this section, then, is that the Lisbon girls are interested in making contact with the outside world.
Themes
By late spring, the boys start to think the Lisbon girls are communicating with them in other ways, too. At night, a Chinese lantern in Lux’s room blinks on and off in what they think is Morse code, though they’re unable to decipher any sort of message. They also notice the flickering light of candles in Cecilia’s room, realizing that the sisters have made a shrine to their dead sister. As the boys try to figure out what the Lisbon girls are trying to tell them, they receive a letter in one of their mailboxes. It’s from Lux, and the message is short and simple: “Tell Trip I’m over him. He’s a creep.”
It's now undeniable that the Lisbon girls want to contact the outside world, considering the fact that Lux sends a letter to the boys. The purpose of their desired contact, though, remains unclear. Furthermore, other than the letter, the signs that the boys supposedly pick up on—a light flashing in Morse code, for instance—are questionable and far-fetched at best. It seems entirely likely that the boys are just reading into everything they see at the Lisbon house, further illustrating the depths of their obsession with the sisters.
Themes
Over the next few weeks, the boys receive more letters. All in all, they end up with eight letters with short messages like “Remember us?” and “Down with unsavory boys.” In another, the message is: “Watch for our lights.” Finally, they receive the most meaningful one: “In this dark, there will be light. Will you help us?” But then the letters stop coming. Unsure of what to do, the boys wait for another sign from the sisters. But the house is quiet and lifeless—even their trash on the curb shows evidence of a family in hibernation or hiding.
Although it seems quite far-fetched that the Lisbon girls are communicating to the boys through Morse-code flashes of light, the girls’ letters do specifically tell the boys to pay attention to their lights. And yet, their messages are still extremely cryptic. It’s almost as if they’re purposefully playing into the obsession the boys have developed with them and, in turn, are intentionally fueling the boys’ far-flung, even romanticized ideas about the sisters.
Themes
Finally, the boys think of a simple solution: they call the Lisbon sisters. Mr. Lisbon answers, but the boys don’t say anything. Mr. Lisbon seems to think the boys are someone else—someone who has apparently been calling frequently, judging by the fact that Mr. Lisbon says, “I’m waiting. Today I’ll listen to all your crap.” Then, quite abruptly, Mrs. Lisbon grabs the phone and screams, “Why won’t you leave us alone!” before hanging up. But the line doesn’t go dead. The boys can tell there’s somebody listening. When they say hello, one of the Lisbon girls says “Hi” in a small, weak voice. The boys are astonished by the sound of this voice—it sounds broken and “irreparably altered.”
The way Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon conduct themselves is somewhat mystifying, but it’s possible that reporters have been pestering them, since the novel has already established that the media has been running wild with segments about adolescent suicides sweeping the nation. Either way, this is just one more layer of uncertainty surrounding the family’s life behind closed doors, and the boys—and readers alike—are left to guess what, exactly, Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon are talking about.
Themes
That first phone conversation doesn’t last long, nor does anyone say much. But the boys call again the next day around the same time. Instead of talking, they hold the phone up to speakers and play a song on the stereo system. They choose a song they feel communicates their feelings, then they hang up. The following day, the Lisbon girls are the ones to call. Like the boys, they don’t say anything, instead playing a song into the phone. When it’s over, the boys play one of their own selections, and this is how the entire phone call goes, with the boys and the girls responding to each other’s songs as best they can. Many of the boys’ responses are thematic. For example, when the girls play “Alone Again, Naturally,” the boys play “You’ve Got a Friend.”
There’s something quite wholesome and endearing about the way the boys and the sisters trade songs over the phone. In fact, this feels like a normal thing teenagers might do, not something tied to the pain and ugliness surrounding the Lisbon sisters’ experience in the past year. On the whole, the boys are eager to connect with the girls, which is why they play “You’ve Got a Friend” after the girls play a song that suggests they feel isolated from the outside world. What the boys really want, it seems, is to save the Lisbon sisters from their dreary lives.
Themes
The boys mostly play love songs, whereas the Lisbon girls keep their selections “impersonal”—until, that is, they play “Make It with You” by Bread, cutting off the song after the lyrics, “And if you’re wondering what this song is leading to / I want to make it with you.” The girls hang up the phone, leaving the boys feeling as if the Lisbons have just confessed their love for them. They never thought the girls might actually love them back, and now they feel “dizzy” with emotion and surprise. Lying back, the boys go through all of their previous interactions with the Lisbons, deciding that the girls have been trying to reach out to them the entire time. The girls have been waiting, the boys now believe, to be saved.
It’s reasonable to assume that the boys are right about one thing: the Lisbon girls do want to make some sort of connection with them. It’s less clear, though, whether or not the sisters have fond or romantic feelings for them. In fact, even considering the implications of the song “Make It with You,” it seems a bit excessive to conclude that the Lisbon sisters are in love with the boys—after all, there are (seemingly) more boys than there are Lisbon sisters. Who, in this scenario, would love whom? But these details don’t matter right now to the boys, who are too wrapped up in the notion of staging some kind of heroic rescue to stop and think realistically about the situation.
Themes
In the coming days, the boys don’t hear from the Lisbon sisters. The girls don’t answer the phone, nor do they call the boys. Desperate, the boys discuss grand plans to dig a tunnel into the Lisbons’ basement, and then they remember that they could use the storm sewers—but when they try to do this, they discover the sewers have been flooded with water.
Even though the circumstances surrounding their contact with the Lisbon girls are quite heavy and serious, the boys’ overall energy in this section highlights their immaturity and lack of life experience. In other words, they almost treat this situation like a Hardy Boys mission they’ve been tasked with solving. There’s a slight sense of adventurous camaraderie, to say nothing of the somewhat self-aggrandizing notion that the boys think they can, as a rag-tag group of teenagers, save the Lisbon sisters from grief.
Themes
Three nights after the last phone call, the boys use binoculars to watch through the windows as the Lisbon sisters drag a suitcase into Bonnie’s room. They start packing the trunk with their belongings, though some of the items—like an iron doorstop—don’t make much sense. Nonetheless, Paul Baldino declares that the sisters are going to “make a break for it.” They will, he says, be gone by the end of the week. In retrospect, the boys note that Paul was right—the girls are gone by the end of the week, but not in the way Paul thinks. The final letter the boys receive from the Lisbon girls arrives that evening. It reads: “Tomorrow. Midnight. Wait for our signal.”
Again, the boys are quite wrapped up in the exciting nature of the Lisbon girls’ messages. When Paul Baldino announces that the sisters are going to “make a break for it,” he accurately captures the dramatic spirit at play among the boys, talking about the situation as if it’s directly out of an adventure movie. And to be fair, the Lisbon girls seem to play into this dynamic with their final letter, which tells the boys to watch for their “signal” at midnight the next day.
Themes
The next night, the boys prepare for the signal. But they don’t know what to look for. The Lisbon house shows no signs of anything out of the ordinary—it’s dark and lifeless. Joe Hill Conley climbs a tree to get a better look, but he sees nothing, so the boys make their way to their old treehouse, which is falling into despair but is still usable. When they get inside, they’re surprised to find pictures of the Lisbon girls that they apparently put up long ago—they don’t remember putting them up. Waiting for midnight, the boys lounge and sip beer, at one point peering into the Lisbon house using a telescope. Every once in a while they catch sight of Lux in her bedroom, but the telescope image is too magnified for them to discern what they’re looking at.
This scene reminds readers that the boys have been interested in the Lisbon girls for a long time—long enough that they don’t even remember having put up pictures of them in their communal treehouse. Now, though, their interest in the sisters has grown exponentially, most likely because they feel implicated in the tragedy that befell the family when Cecilia died (since they were there to witness it). Fittingly, the boys want to be part of the Lisbon girls’ escape from unhappiness, and their desire to involve themselves in their lives in such a way fills them with excitement.
Themes
Midnight passes unceremoniously. But then a flashlight goes on in one of the girls’ bedrooms. It moves around and turns on and off several times. When it comes back on, the sisters appear in the open window frame. They stare out at the boys. Mary blows a kiss, the window closes, and the flashlight goes off, the girls disappearing in the darkness. The boys automatically jump down from the treehouse, astonished how short the drop feels now that they’ve grown taller. Feeling emboldened by this newfound sense of maturity, they walk across the Lisbon yard and around the back, where they peer in through yet another window.
The way the Lisbon girls are behaving is noticeably melodramatic, as if they actively want to confuse the boys and draw them closer. The boys, for their part, are all too happy to oblige by hopping out of the treehouse and sauntering toward the Lisbon house—an image that is somewhat symbolic, as they leave behind the childish treehouse and make their way toward the dark, foreboding Lisbon house, stoically preparing themselves to finally come face to face with the complexities of the sisters’ hardship instead of observing it from afar.
Themes
Once their eyes adjust, the boys realize they’re peering beyond a windowsill of dead houseplants and into the living room, where Lux is absently smoking a cigarette in a beanbag chair. The boys recognize the halter top she’s wearing because it’s rather revealing. “July, two years ago,” Joe Hill Conley says, referring to the last time they saw her wear it. Some of the boys wonder if they should knock, but then they simply enter the house, walk over to Lux, and say, “We’re here.” Lux isn’t startled. “About time,” she says. “We’ve been waiting for you guys.”
Joe Hill Conley’s comment about Lux’s revealing halter top is decidedly creepy, but it also serves as yet another reminder that the boys have come to see themselves as the Lisbon sisters’ unofficial biographers. They keep track of everything, even the clothes the girls wear—a good illustration of just how obsessed they are with these sisters.
Themes
The boys explain that they have the use of Chase Buell’s car (or, rather, his mother’s). They can load the Lisbon girls in and drive away. It’ll be a tight fit, though. But Lux doesn’t mind, simply asking, “Which one of you studs is going to sit up front next to me?” When the boys ask where her sisters are, she says they’re coming. As she says this, the boys hear a heavy sound downstairs. This makes them skittish, so they inch toward the back door, hoping to hurry Lux and her sisters along. But Lux doesn’t do anything, telling them it’ll be another five minutes because her sisters are still packing. They had to wait until their parents were asleep, she explains.
There’s some humor at play when the boys note that the car available to them actually belongs to Chase’s mother, not to Chase himself. They clearly want to posture as confident men who have come to rescue the Lisbon girls from their sad life, but there’s no getting around the fact that the neighborhood boys are just that—boys, not men.
Themes
Lux points out that not everyone will fit in Chase Buell’s car, so they should probably take the Lisbon car. She asks Chase if he can drive a station wagon, and he says he can (as long as it isn’t stick shift). As he says this, Lux walks up to him and starts undoing his belt in front of all the other boys. Nobody says anything. In fact, even though Lux is undoing Chase’s belt, all of the boys feel as if she’s touching their belts. Just as Lux reaches into Chase’s pants, though, another sound comes from downstairs. Lux takes her hand away, saying, “We can’t do this now.” She then declares that she has to get some “fresh air” because the boys have gotten her “all worked up,” so she decides to wait in her parents’ car.
It’s unclear why Lux would suddenly start undoing Chase’s pants. It’s a bold move—so bold that it’s as if she’s purposefully indulging the boys’ wildest fantasies, playing into their obsession with (and attraction to) her. But then she stops and says she’s going to wait in the car, leaving the boys in a stupor that ultimately emphasizes how helpless they are in her presence.
Themes
Lux tells the boys to wait for her sisters, who will need help with their luggage. She also asks where they should all go, and Chase Buell says Florida. Lux approves of his decision and then goes into the garage. Left to themselves, the boys fantasize about driving long hours with the Lisbon sisters, imagining themselves stopping at deserted gas stations and becoming accustomed to the feeling of sitting next to the girls. As they daydream, they keep hearing thuds from various places in the house, but then everything goes silent. After a moment, Peter Sissen notices there’s a light on in the basement, so the boys tentatively descend the stairs—only to find that everything from the party they attended a year ago is still there: melted ice cream, a scummy bowl of punch, partially deflated balloons.
The fact that the decorations from last year’s party—when Cecilia died by suicide—are still in place is quite eerie, as it’s a physical manifestation of the Lisbon family’s struggle to move on from tragedy. This, it seems, is what the Lisbon sisters want to escape, and understandably so: the remnants of the party are terrible reminders of Cecilia’s gruesome death.
Themes
The boys feel like they’ve returned to the party. One of them even starts dancing, pretending to do the box step with one of the Lisbon sisters. His shoes slosh through the inch of water that has flooded the neglected basement, and this intensifies the smell of sewage, which then alerts the boys to another smell—a smell they will never be able to forget. Looking up, they see Bonnie hanging lifeless from a beam in the ceiling. Suddenly, the boys feel a “shame that has never gone away”—a response that doctors later say is related to shock. But the boys think it’s really something more like guilt. They’ve failed, they think, to save the Lisbon sisters. They realize they never really even knew Bonnie. And this, they think, is why the Lisbon girls lured them inside: to show the boys how little they knew them.
The boys were, until this moment, so confident that they were going to whisk the Lisbon sisters away from sorrow and hardship. But now they see that this was nothing but a fantasy. They haven’t come to rescue the girls—they’ve come to witness yet another tragedy. Once again, they’ve somehow become part of the Lisbon family’s grief by being there to observe it firsthand. The “shame” they feel while looking at Bonnie’s lifeless body might have something to do with their previous excitement and the way they’ve viewed the Lisbon girls as some sort of bizarre spectacle to obsess over. In the end, their obsessive surveillance of the girls has led only to more tragedy and death.
Themes
The boys think Bonnie died while they were upstairs fantasizing about life on the road. When Mary heard Bonnie kick over the heavy trunk she was standing on, she put her head in the oven. The boys must have walked right by her on their way to the basement. By then, Therese would already have been dead, having swallowed a handful of sleeping pills and chased it with gin. Lux, the boys put together, died after they left the house running and screaming—they forgot to check on her in the garage. She died of asphyxiation, the car purring and the radio playing in the dark garage. She had unbuckled Chase’s belt just to stall them, waiting to hear the signal of Bonnie’s trunk tipping over in the basement.
The four remaining Lisbon sisters pre-orchestrated this group suicide, and part of this orchestration involved the boys. For one reason or another, the girls wanted the boys to be there, as evidenced by the fact that they told them to look for a “signal.” But there’s no obvious reason why they wanted the boys to witness their deaths. One possible reason is that the girls were aware of just how much scrutiny the boys (and perhaps the entire community) had already placed on them, so luring them into the house was a way of acknowledging that scrutiny while also rebelling against it—a way of showing the nosey community members that they could pry into their lives all they wanted but might not, in the end, like what they find.
Themes
