The Virgin Suicides Read Free Page B

shoulder skiing, and could only be convinced to get is an X ray, nothing more.
    From that time on he winced when we tried to tackle him, and raked leaves one-handed, and no longer flipped daredevil pancakes on Sunday mornings. Otherwise he persevered, and always gently corrected us when we took the Lord's name in vain. In his bedroom, the shoulder had fused into a graceful humpback. "It's sad to think about those girls," he said. "What a waste of life."
    The most popular theory at the time held Dominic Palazzolo to blame.
    Dominic was the immigrant kid staying with relatives until his family got settled in New Mexico. He was the first boy in our neighborhood to wear sunglasses, and within a week of arriving, he had fallen in love.
    The object of his desire wasn't Cecilia but Diana Porter, a girl with chestnut hair and a horsey though pretty face who lived in an ivy-covered house on the lake. Unfortunately, she didn't notice Dominic peering through the fence as she played fierce tennis on the clay court, nor as she lay, sweating nectar, on the poolside recliner. On our corner, in our group, Dominic Palazzolo didn't join in conversations about baseball or busing, because he could speak only a few words of English, but every now and then he would tilt his head back so that his sunglasses reflected sky, and would say, "I love her." Every time he said it he seemed delivered of a profundity that amazed him, as though he had coughed up a pearl. At the beginning of June, when Diana Porter left on vacation to Switzerland, Dominic was stricken. "Fuck the Holy Mother," he said, despondent. "Fuck God." And to show his desperation and the validity of his love, he climbed onto the roof of his relatives'
    house and jumped off.
    We watched him. We watched Cecilia Lisbon watching from her front yard.
    Dominic Palazzolo, with his tight pants, his Dingo boots, his pompadour, went into the house, we saw him passing the plate-glass picture windows downstairs; and then he appeared at an upstairs window, with a silk handkerchief around his neck. Climbing onto the ledge, he swung himself up to the flat roof. Aloft, he looked frail, diseased, and temperamental, as we expected a European to look. He toed the roof's edge like a high diver, and whispered, "I love her," to himself as he dropped past the windows and into the yard's calculated shrubbery.
    He didn't hurt himself. He stood up after the fall, having proved his love, and down the block, some maintained, Cecilia Lisbon developed her own. Amy Schraff, who knew Cecilia in school, said that Dominic had been all she could talk about for the final week before commencement. Instead of studying for exams, she spent study halls looking up ITALY in the encyclopedia. She started saying "Ciao," and began slipping into St.
    Paul's Catholic Church on the Lake to sprinkle her forehead with holy water. In the cafeteria, even on hot days when the place was thick with the fumes of institutional food, Cecilia always chose the spaghetti and meatballs, as though by eating the same food as Dominic Palazzolo she could be closer to him. At the height of her crush she purchased the crucifix Peter Sissen had seen decorated with the brassiere.
    The supporters of this theory always pointed to one central fact: the week before Cecilia's suicide attempt, Dominic Palazzolo's family had called him to New Mexico. He went telling God to fuck Himself all over again because New Mexico was even farther from Switzerland, where, right that minute, Diana Porter strolled under summer trees, moving unstoppably away from the world he was going to inherit as the owner of a carpet cleaning service. Cecilia had unleashed her blood in the bath, Amy Schraff said, because the ancient Romans had done that when life became unbearable, and she thought when Dominic heard about it, on the highway, amid the cactus, he would realize that it was she who loved him.
    The psychiatrist's report takes up most of the hospital record. After talking with