Цитаты из книги The Virgin Suicides

We knew what it felt like to see a boy with his shirt off, and why it made Lux write the name Kevin in purple Magic Marker all over her three-ring binder and even on her bras and panties, and we understood her rage coming home one day to find that Mrs. Lisbon had soaked her things in Clorox, bleaching all the "Kevins" out. We knew the pain of winter wind rushing up your skirt, and the ache of keeping your knees together in class, and how drab and infuriating it was to jump rope while the boys played baseball. We could never understand why the girls cared so much about being mature, or why they felt compelled to compliment each other, but sometimes, after one of us had read a long portion of the diary out loud, we had to fight back the urge to hug one another or to tell each other how pretty we were. We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together. We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn't fathom them at all. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.

The sun was falling in the haze of distant factories, and in the adjoining slums the scatter of glass picked up the raw glow of the smoggy sunset. Sounds we usually couldn't hear reached us now that we were up high, and crouching on the tarred shingles, resting chins in hands, we made out, faintly, an indecipherable backward-playing tape of city life, cries and shouts, the barking of a chained dog, car horns, the voices of girls calling out numbers in an obscure tenacious game-sounds of the impoverished city we never visited, all mixed and muted, without sense, carried on a wind from that place.

Her diary, which the police inspected as part of the customary investigation, didn't confirm the supposition of unrequited love. Dominic Palazzolo was mentioned only once in that tiny rice-paper journal illuminated with colored Magic Markers to look like a Book of Hours or a medieval Bible. Miniature designs crowded the pages. Bubblegum angels swooped from top margins, or scraped their wings between teeming paragraphs. Maidens with golden hair dripped sea-blue tears into the book's spine. Grape-colored whales spouted blood around a newspaper item (pasted in) listing arrivals to the endangered species list. Six hatchlings cried from shattered shells near an entry made on Easter. Cecilia had filled the pages with a profusion of colors and curlicues, Candyland ladders and striped shamrocks, but the entry about Dominic read, "Palazzolo jumped off the roof today over that rich bitch, Porter. How stupid can you be?"

С нашей точки зрения, горе Лисбонов было непереносимым, его глубина оставалась за пределами нашего понимания, и нас поражали любые занятия, за которыми мы замечали их на протяжении тех последних дней. Как они могли усадить себя за стол и есть? Или вечером выскользнуть на заднее крыльцо, чтобы насладиться прохладой слабого ветерка? Как смогла миссис Лисбон посреди бела дня выйти, покачиваясь, из дома, пересечь давно не стриженный газон и сорвать цветок львиного зева с клумбы миссис Бейтс? Она поднесла его к носу, осталась, кажется, не удовлетворена ароматом, небрежно сунула цветок в карман, словно использованный носовой платок, и вышла на улицу, щурясь на солнце без очков. Мистер Лисбон тоже каждый вечер, поставив автомобиль в тенек, открывал капот и сосредоточено разглядывал двигатель. «Надо же чем-то себя занять, — был комментарий мистера Юджина. — Что еще остается?»