THE VIRGIN SUICIDES POST 1

"We've tried to arrange the photographs chronologically, though the passage of so many years has made it difficult. A few are fuzzy but revealing nonetheless. Exhibit #1 shows the Lisbon house shortly before Cecilia's suicide attempt. It was taken by a real estate agent, Ms. Carmina D'Angelo, whom Mr. Lisbon has hired to sell the house his large family had long outgrown. As the snapshot shows, the slate roof had not yet begun to shed its shingles, the porch was still visible above the bushes, and the windows were not yet held together with strips of masking tape. A comfortable suburban home. The upper-right second -story window contains a blur that Mrs. Lisbon identified as Mary Lisbon. "she used to tease her hair because she thought it was limp," she said years later, recalling how her daughter had looked for her brief time on earth. In the photograph Mary is caught in the act of blow-drying her hair. Her head appears to be on fire but that is only a trick of the light. It was June 13, eighty-three degrees out, under sunny skies."

This passage contains foreshadowing and a seemingly average and pristine setting that acts as a biting contradiction to what the reader already knows. The photograph is described as depicting a "comfortable suburban house", but the proceeding diction creates dark images of what this house eventually became. Visibly pleasing aspects of a common home such as "slate roof", "shingles", "windows" and "porch" seem to be part of a common appearance, but the "strips of masking tape" and overgrown "bushes" proceed to cover them, showing signs of neglect and careless delapidation. The author uses harsh alliteration to further make the scene dismal: "slate roof" "shed its shingles". As this picture of normalcy was taken just before the first suicide attempt, it gives insight to the not-so-obvious troubles underneath the seemingly normal appearance of the household. The visible image of Mary in the window where "her head appears to be on fire" is possible foreshadowing of her death, and perhaps even the way in which she will die.