Jeffrey Eugenides

On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide—it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese—the 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.

The year of the suicides the Lisbons’ leaves went unraked. On the appropriate Saturday Mr. Lisbon didn’t stir from his house. From time to time as we raked, we looked over at the Lisbon house, its walls accumulating autumn’s dampness, its littered and varicolored lawn hemmed in by lawns becoming increasingly exposed and green. The more leaves we swept away, the more seemed heaped over the Lisbons’ yard, smothering bushes and covering the first porch step. When we lit bonfires that night, every house leaped forward, blazing orange. Only the Lisbon house remained dark, a tunnel, an emptiness, past our smoke and flames. As weeks passed, their leaves remained. When they blew onto other people’s lawns there was grumbling. “These aren’t my leaves,” Mr. Amberson said, stuffing them into a can. It rained twice and the leaves grew soggy and brown, making the Lisbon lawn look like a field of mud.

…about the time the first cold spell hit, people began to see Lux copulating on the roof with faceless boys and men.

At first it was impossible to tell what was happening. A cellophane body swept its arms back and forth against the slate tiles like a child drawing an angel in the snow. Then another darker body could be discerned, sometimes in a fast-food restaurant uniform, sometimes wearing an assortment of gold chains, once in the drab gray suit of an accountant. Through the bronchioles of leafless elm branches, from the Pitzenbergers’ attic, we finally made out Lux’s face as she sat wrapped in a Hudson’s Bay blanket, smoking a cigarette, impossibly close in the circle of our binoculars because she moved her lips only inches away but without sound.