How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #7
It was full-fledged summer once again, over a year from the time Cecilia had slit her wrists, spreading the poison in the air. A spill at the River Rouge Plant increased phosphates in the lake, producing a scum of algae so thick it clogged outboard engines. Our beautiful lake began to look like a lily pond, carpeted with an undulating foam. (5.21)
Cecilia's suicide is compared in this metaphor to a spill at the Ford automobile factory, as though her death wish was contagious, killing her sisters and contaminating the community just like the algae spread over Lake St. Clair. The polluted lake is dead, too.
Quote #8
She had on so much makeup that the paramedics had the odd feeling she had already been prepared for viewing by an undertaker, and this impression lasted until they saw that her lipstick and eyeshadow were smudged. She had clawed herself a little, at the end. She was dressed in a black dress and veil […].(5.29)
Mary, the last Lisbon girl to die, becomes her own undertaker, dressing as if for her own funeral—heavy makeup and a black veil—before overdosing on pills. The smudges suggest to the narrators that her body tried to fight off death in her last minutes. The image of the dead Mary is in ironic contrast to Mary's longtime love of makeup, which was her way of exploring womanhood and was a kind of life-affirming interest. She finally got to wear it in public.
Quote #9
As luck would have it, on the day of Mary's suicide, the cemetery worker's strike was settled after 409 days of arbitration. The strike's length had caused mortuaries to fill up months ago, and the many bodies awaiting burial now came back from out of state, in refrigerated trucks, or by airplane, depending on the wealth of the deceased. (5.31)
The strike means that no one has been buried in the city for over a year. Because it ends on the day of Mary's death, all five sisters are buried together in a single ceremony. It's interesting that social class affects even the dead—the rich cadavers travel in style, while the poorer ones are trucked in. The stark death imagery really starts piling up in the novel after the sisters' suicides.