About The Book

As a young girl, Fiona spent summers frolicking on the lawn of her notorious grandmother’s Westerly, Rhode Island mansion. When she wasn’t eavesdropping on her relatives’ gin-soaked gossip, she and her older, more sophisticated cousin invented a future for themselves that included “normal” husbands, children and lifestyles. As an adult, “Fifi” returns to Watch Hill to help get the mansion ready for sale, and discovers that nothing about their family is “normal.”

Excerpt

Redeyes should be called something else. Croneflies, maybe. Hagflights. No woman over 40 should be allowed to take one. Unless there is free Botox involved. Complimentary brow lifts. This is what I’m thinking while a symphony of toilets auto-flush behind me. This is how I feel as I stare back at the raccoon eyes and greenish hue confronting me in the dirty mirror of a Logan airport restroom.

The items in my shoulder bag are all shifted around so that, incredulously, my lipstick’s tube-like cap has been separated from its cylinder. There had been some sort of funnel cloud on the approach to Massachusetts. East coast thunderhead turbulence, according to the captain’s hard-to-understand Southern drawl. A flash of lightning hit the wing and we dove up and down continuously for several minutes, the ding of the red seatbelt sign punctuating the surreal orchestra of panic. Which was another reason for the harried expression in the greasy mirror.

Riffling through the bag now, my newest self-help book comes tumbling out and lands cover-side down in a small puddle of water on the floor. The book’s promise to erase my ambivalence, to make clear whether or not to leave my marriage, was crap. On the five-and-a-half-hour flight from Portland all it had done was add to my growing frustration and confusion. Or maybe that was the fault of the Ambien.

I kick the book under the sink thinking that I should leave it there for the next disenchanted wife. Maybe the soggy prescriptive sham would add clarity to the decisions of another. But with me, thrift and order always win out, so I scoop it up, cram it into my bag, soggy cover and all, then twist the stub of Cabernet Evening up from its tube toward lips lined with a network of tiny wrinkles.

More and more, it’s Dottie’s face I see while smearing on creams and emollients. My decaying mother and her ever-increasing list of aging lady issues. Through my childhood, my mother made this trip every year with us four kids. Like me, she’d packed her trunks, tranqued and crated the dog, and left her philandering husband at home for the summer to engage in who knew what. I never saw her reading a self-help book—that was what her sisters were for. For her nerves, there was Valium and gin. Back then, we all dressed up for the flight, and the stewardesses would issue wing pins and decks of cards branded with long, sleek 727s soaring through puffy clouds. My brother Mead and I would stay up all night playing three-deck war on the little table trays that folded out of the armrests of the bulkhead. Dottie always managed to get the bulkhead.

The droopy lids, they’re Dottie’s, not mine. Their lineage is as clear as pedigree papers. And, as I scowl, my mother’s nagging voice supplies, “Fiona, this plastic surgery stuff is a slippery slope. Don’t get started or you’ll end up like Grandmother—wide eyed and skeleton-faced. You’ll look like a white Michael Jackson in your coffin, is that what you want?”

Praise for Suzy’s Fiction

“To read Suzy Vitello’s work is like sneaking a look at a complicated diary—compelling, funny, sometimes terrifying in the hard details of humanity.” -Monica Drake, author of Clown Girl and forthcoming Stud Book

“What I love most about reading Suzy Vitello’s stories is that I feel like I am inside the world of her characters so deeply that I start talking aloud to them. They are my friends, my sisters, my mother, my lovers, my husbands and ex-husbands and daughters and sons.  I could stay inside her stories and not come out.” -Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Chronology of Water and forthcoming Dora: A Head Case