Virgin Suicides Chapter 5 Summary

  • The ambulance comes yet again. The boys have all hidden back in their beds after their terrible discovery. The paramedics manage to save Mary.
  • Mary survives for another month.
  • The girls have killed themselves on the anniversary of Cecilia's slitting her wrists (not her death), June 16.
  • Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon give up on life as we know it.
  • Mr. Lisbon hires a fellow teacher to clean up the house to get it ready for sale.
  • He throws everything away, and the boys go through the discarded stuff to find remnants of the girls' lives that might give them a clue about why they did what they did.
  • A young couple buys the house.
  • Mary and her parents sleep in a sleeping bag while they wait to move out. She takes six showers a day and sleeps most of the time.
  • For some strange reason, she shows up unannounced to take a voice lesson from her voice teacher.
  • The neighborhood goes to a debutante party and, when they go home the next morning they see the ambulance at the Lisbon house. By now, this seems routine.
  • Mary's taken sleeping pills and killed herself.
  • That day the cemetery strike finally ends and the Lisbons can bury all of their girls at once.
  • The next day the Lisbons leave town, and the new young couple moves in.
  • Everyone associates the neighborhood's eventual decline with the Lisbon girls' suicides.
  • The boy, who we now know are narrating this from 20 years later, realize they'll never understand what happened to the Lisbon girls no matter how often they think about them.