Girls in White Dresses
For Norah
We didn't wear the white dresses again. We gazed at them, fingered the material lovingly, reverently, but never again did we put them on. Mary, Bonnie, Therese; our dresses pure white, like nun's wimples or something virginal like that. Lux's, her dress was grass-stained. But we didn't wash them, even though Mom told us to. If we washed them, all the magic contained in the folds would disappear, and the memories might go with it.
Sometimes when we feel particularly bitter, we blame the dresses. Lux, sliding down the stairs with the peach crates, while we watch from our hideaway upstairs. Mom's got the fire roaring. We watch as she pleads. "Mom, please, not Aerosmith! Oh, Mom, KISS? Styx? Please, Mom!" Escalating, crying like a child. "Mommy, Mommy, no! Mommy!"
She returns, her pale face blotchy with crying and smelling of burnt plastic, like the time Mary left her curling iron on one of Lux's Barbies. "She burnt them all . . .the ones she didn't burn, she threw away. I hate her." The Barbie's perfect legs melted into blobs of perfect tan, and her hair didn't curl, either. Wonder if her plastic hair is still stuck to the tongs.
-
Whenever we dream about them, they're wearing white. And sometimes, when we're high as can be, for some strange reason the sweet, grassy fragrance of the pot smells like noxious burnt vinyl. We watched Mrs. Lisbon burn the records. That was before the curtains closed downstairs. Chase Buell stole a couple from their garbage pile, ELO and Aerosmith's Toys in the Attic. "I guess they got to keep their Joni Mitchell."
"Do you ever wonder what they're thinking?"
"All the time."
"Crazy old bitch, what does she think she's doing, locking them up?"
"Isn't there a law about this sort of thing? Like, child abuse?" You don't take four beautiful girls and lock them away. This isn't Rapunzel, but if they'd let down their hair we'd free them.
"Do you think they think about the Homecoming Dance?" Conley asks. His most precious memory is the kiss with Bonnie under the bleachers, dizzy with Schnapps and her perfume. "Girls in white dresses."
--
"Do you think they think about the Homecoming Dance?" Bonnie's staring out the window to the murky world below.
"Bonnie, come off it. By the time we get out of here, they'll be married. Who'll want us when our hair is gray?" Mary's tweezing her eyebrows in the magnifying mirror she considers her most prized possession, next to her hairdryer.
"But do you think they think about us?"
"I'm sure they do," says Lux, crossing out all the "I love Trip" hearts she's
doodled in her notebook with a mean red marker. Surveying her massacre, she writes them all over again.
"Remember when Mom used to sing to us before we went to sleep?" Therese sings in her tuneless voice. "Girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes, snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes. But how does the rest of it go?"
Things begin to fade away when you haven't been a child for a long, long time. We remember being little girls in frilly, lacy pinafores; yellow for Therese, pink for Mary, green for Bonnie, purple for Lux, and white for Cecelia. Before things changed, when we splashed happily in our plastic baby pool and went to the petting zoo. Cecelia liked the baby giraffe. "It looks so different from all the other animals, it can't walk so good." Lux stroking a whale, the wind was cold on the ocean. "I didn't think it would smell so bad." Picking flowers for our mother, dandelions whose stems left our baby hands sticky. Halloween; Therese a scientist, Mary Miss America with a plastic crown, Bonnie in a blue gingham dress as Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz. Lux never wanted to be anything but a princess, and Cecelia cared little. We remember our father taking us to a baseball game, eating cotton candy. Now, when we try to recall the taste of that sugar-spun sweetness, all that comes to mind is a dry throat, the cotton too saccharine and impossible to swallow.
--
More visits to the Lisbon family trash have yielded treasure. A picture of the five Lisbon sisters as little girls. Each girl has a bob haircut, sausage curls tied back with a ribbon matching the ruffled dresses they wear. Yellow for Therese, pink for Mary, green for Bonnie, purple for Lux, and white for Cecelia, who is a chubby, serious-faced baby. We think it might be Easter. On the back of this photo someone has penciled "My favorite things." Why do these images, glimpses into the happy past, keep ending up in the garbage? And who is throwing them away?
"I love you, Luxsh Lishbon," slurs Trip. The beautiful boy has joined us on this night to watch, as we always do, the windows of the decaying home. So far, nothing. The lights are dim, and the shrine for Cecelia is burning as it does each night. Sometimes we can taste the dull wax of the candles. We're drinking rum and Coke, vodka and bitter port wine snatched from unassuming suburbian parent's cabinets. Never peach Schnapps, the sweetness of that liquor makes us choke.
The minutes turn into hours, and the candles burn
agonizingly on as we stare at the Lisbon house, Led Zeppelin playing on the
record player and the bottle of rum almost empty. It's two in the morning.
"They're not coming tonight." Our drunken giddiness has worn away to
melancholy, the kind that comes from skies of gray and the rain beating down
upon elm tree stumps and dead kittens in a yard. "No Lisbon sightings to fuel our wet dreams."
But wait. Stairway to heaven. Are we really this intoxicated? Before our
very eyes, all pairs hazy, blurs of gold and white begin to dance through the
window of the room that had been Cecelia's.
"Oh my God," comes Trip's hoarse whisper. The girls are real.
They've got the window open, and each girl wears her white Homecoming
dress. Those prairie gowns, dowdy on
any other girl. Angelic. Smiling serenely, teetering dangerously
close to the edge of the windowsill. If
they fell, would those dresses act as parachutes? We don't forget the whoosh of Cecelia's ancient babydoll whore
wedding uniform. I think everyone's
praying to a nonexistent God to keep those girls safe. Imagining them lying limp on unkempt grass,
doll parts. Imagining Lux's dress
bunched up to her armpits, a circle of "Trip"s adoring her little girl's
panties. Imagining combing Mary's
beautiful hair and collecting the strands.
Imagining Bonnie and Therese's limbs at odd angles like the Barbie dolls
we stole from our sisters and ravaged with a G.I. Joe. We don't want them to die. We want them to live, to dance with us and
sing to the Beach Boys, to be wives and mothers and grandmothers. We don't want them to die.
--
The early morning vision never leaves us. It was the last time we saw them alive. In the ghost house after the suicides, we search for those white dresses. We ache to feel their fabric again, inhale the grown-up perfume they got to wear once. Those dresses, elusive, like the sisters who wore them. One day, perhaps, in a dream world, we'll dance with girls in white dresses, but for now all we feel is empty.