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Simile
Explanation and Analysis—The Lisbon House :
On the evening of the homecoming dance, the Lisbon sisters' dates drive around while waiting for Lux to return home. Though they are briefly elated to see a light in her bedroom window, they soon sense that the sisters have been punished as a result of Lux arriving home after the curfew. Reflecting on the fateful night years later, the neighborhood boys use a simile that compares the closing window shades of the bedroom to "eyelids":
As they approached the Lisbons’ house, they saw a light burning in a bedroom window. Parkie Denton held up his hand for the other boys to slap. “Pay dirt,” he said. But their jubilation was short-lived. For even before the car stopped they knew what had happened. “It hit me in the pit of my stomach that those girls weren’t going on any more dates,” Kevin Head told us years later. “The old bitch had locked them up again. Don’t ask me how I knew. I just did.” The window shades had closed like eyelids and the shaggy flower beds made the house look abandoned.
Throughout the novel, Mrs. Lisbon has exerted an intense degree of control over the lives of her daughters, only allowing them to attend the dance because Mr. Lisbon, a teacher at the school, is one of the chaperones. Earlier, a psychiatrist linked Cecilia's suicide to the girls' state of isolation and suggested that Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon should allow their daughters a greater degree of freedom. When Lux cannot be found at the end of the dance, however, the sisters and their dates return to the Lisbon family household without her. Years later, Kevin Heard recalls feeling that "those girls weren’t going on any more dates," a prediction that soon proves accurate. The neighborhood boys, summarizing the developments of that evening years later, note that "the window shades had closed like eyelids," a simile that underscores the isolation of the Lisbon sisters, whose household is now fully shut off from the world around it.
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