How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #7
They could sense Mrs. Lisbon watching them, and even though they were close enough to feel the Lisbon girls' breath and to smell the first perfume they had ever been allowed to wear, the boys tried not to stick the girls or even to touch them. They gently lifted the material from the girls' chests and hung white flowers over their hearts. Whichever Lisbon girl a boy pinned became his date. (3.140)
This scene reads like an anthropological account of a mating ritual. The girls are allowed to act like women for the first time, wearing perfume and going out alone with boys. The boys know that this is a big deal, and treat the young women like they are forbidden fruit, not touching them, trying not to poke them with the pins of their corsages. Each boy claims his girl by putting a flower on her. Mrs. Lisbon watches and makes sure there's no body contact. But to her credit, she actually instructs her daughters what to do with the corsages. It's the first piece of useful feminine advice we see her give them, kind of an initiation into the world of proper young women.
Quote #8
The smoky sound of her voice brought the scene to life for us: the old woman at the kitchen table, her skimpy hair up in an elasticized turban; Mrs. Lisbon tight-lipped and grim in a chair opposite; and the four penitents, heads lowered, fingering knickknacks and porcelain figurines. There is no discussion of how they feel or what they want out of life; there is only the descending order—grandmother, mother, daughters [. . .]. (4.8)
This scene exemplifies the feminine archetypes of women: Maidens (the daughters), Mother (Mrs. Lisbon) and Crone (the grandmother). Do the girls look at mother and grandmother and see their futures? Right now they're the "penitents," the low men (women) on the totem pole, but they short-circuit the progression with their suicides.
Quote #9
In addition to a pregnancy test, Dr. Finch gave Lux a complete gynecological exam. [. . .] The simple appraisal "mild abrasions" reports the condition of her uterine walls, and in an advancement that has since been discontinued, a photograph was taken of her rosy cervix, which looks like a camera shutter set on an extremely low exposure. (It stares at us now like an inflamed eye, fixing us with its silent accusation.) (4.33)
The boys get their hands on the records of the gynecological exam from Lux's trip to the emergency room, which they find "titillating," (4.33) because it describes a sexually active girl and includes photos of her cervix. The narrators have some guilt about this admittedly very intrusive spying on Lux's private moments, but they're still fascinated. The dry clinical details of the medical report further objectify poor Lux, who went to the ER in a state of desperation about a possible pregnancy.