How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
He inventoried deodorants and perfumes and scouring pads for rubbing away dead skin, and we were surprised to learn that there were no douches anywhere because we had thought girls douched every night like brushing their teeth. (1.12)
The hilarity of the final phrase in this sentence shows the narrators' youthful misunderstanding about young women. The items the boy finds in the Lisbon bathroom are all very closely linked to the girls' femininity—hiding smells and getting rid of dead skin is part of a traditionally feminine image.
Quote #2
In the trash can was one Tampax, spotted, still fresh from the insides of one of the Lisbon girls. Sissen said that he wanted to bring it to us, that it wasn't gross but a beautiful thing, you had to see it, like a modern painting or something, and then he told us he had counted twelve boxes of Tampax in the cupboard. (1.12)
We'd never really considered the beauty of a used tampon before. Why on earth would this be so fascinating? Perhaps because a menstrual cycle is the sign of puberty, that a girl has become a woman, and this makes them more sexually attractive to the boys. The tampon was from the "insides" of one of the sisters, so imagine the fantasies that produces…
Quote #3
Our local newspaper neglected to run an article on the suicide attempt, because the editor, Mr. Baubee, felt such depressing information wouldn't fit between the front-page article on the Junior League Flower Show and the back-page photographs of grinning brides. (1.21)
The five Lisbon sisters don't behave properly—their suicide attempt is so out of the norm that no one knows what to do with it. The newspaper editor has an idea of what kinds of news about young women is acceptable: flower shows and weddings with happy girls all around.
Quote #4
She came back still wearing the wedding dress. Mrs. Patz, whose sister was a nurse at Bon Secours, said that Cecilia had refused to put on a hospital gown, demanding that her wedding dress be brought to her, and Dr. Hornicker, the staff psychiatrist, thought it best to humor her. (1.25)
While Mr. Baubee, the newspaper editor, can only think of women in terms of flowers and weddings, Cecilia turns the stereotype of the blushing bride on its head. She's suicidal, but also insists on a wedding dress as her costume. It's a traditional symbol of virginity and purity, but she turns it into a bizarre get-up whose meaning is unclear. It's cut short, tattered, and dirty from constant wearing and it gives Cecilia a strange vibe, like a defiled ghost. We're told that Cecilia gets her period right before her suicide attempt, so the wedding dress might have some sexual connotations. Some orders of nuns have wedding ceremonies, complete with white gowns, in which they are joined to God as "brides of Christ." Being raised in a strict Catholic home, Cecilia may have also been playing with or attacking this idea.
Quote #5
[A] creature with a hundred mouths started sucking the marrow from his bones. She said nothing as she came on like a starved animal [. . . ] with terror he put his finger in the ravenous mouth of the animal leashed below her waist. It was as though he had never touched a girl before; he felt fur and an oily substance like otter insulation. Two beasts lived in the car, one above, snuffling and biting him, and one below, struggling to get out of its damp cage. (3.57)
Once Trip shows some interest in her, Lux's sexual desire comes roaring out. When she pounces on Trip in his car she's compared to a wild animal, even a monster (a hundred mouths, what?) rather than a virginal young woman. Her vagina is referred to as a beast (two beasts, one above and one below), as though her sexuality were predatory. Trip is sexually experienced, so he can handle it, but imagine if it would have been one of the other neighborhood boys. They would've run for the hills.
Quote #6
Usually Mr. Lisbon did their raking alone, singing in his soprano's voice, but from fifteen Therese had begun to help, stooping and scratching in mannish clothes, knee-high rubber boots and a fishing cap. (3.67)
The division of labor between the genders is alive and well, especially when it comes to the home. Mr. Lisbon, as the only man in his family, takes on all of the yard work. When Therese helps him, we see her disguise herself as a man (not literally, of course). Therese is the least traditionally feminine of the sisters. She's not much interested in clothes, and she's a science nerd—typically a boy's thing in the 1970s.
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.
Quote #10
"It's the smell of trapped beaver," Paul Baldino said, sagely, and we didn't know enough to disagree, but we found it hard to imagine such an aroma issuing from the ventricles of love. The smell was partly bad breath, cheese, milk, tongue film, but also the singed smell of drilled teeth. (4.66)
There are lots of myths about what a woman's vagina smells like. Paul Baldino's vulgar reference to the Lisbon girls compares the smell that comes from their closed-up house to the girls' repressed sexuality. It's a disgusting description, and some of the narrators, still caught up in their romantic idealization of the girls, don't believe it.