What Are You Looking At?: The First Fat Fiction Anthology

by Donna Jarrell, Ira Sukrungruang

Overview

This anthology of thirty works by some of our best contemporary American writers looks at our perennial American obsession: fat. It's everywhere, all around you, and maybe even on you. Now, America's consuming passion at last has its own anthology. From Andre Dubus's delicious story of a young woman more comfortable in her fat body than her thin one
("The Fat Girl"), to Tobias Wolff's tale of bonding over pancakes ("Hunters in the Snow"), Dorothy Allison's poem about food and love ("Dumpling Child"), Peter Carey's surreal tale of a fat-man revolution ("The Fat Man in History"), Wesley McNair's poetic celebration "Fat Heaven", and George Saunders's "The 400-pound CEO," this bountiful feast of fiction and poetry will ensure no reader ever looks at fat quite the same way again.

Including stories and poems by
Dorothy Allison
Frederick Busch
Peter Carey
Raymond Carver
Junot Díaz
Andre Dubus
Pam Houston
Jill McCorkle
George Saunders
Tobias Wolff

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780156029070
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	09/08/2003
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.31(w) x 8.00(h) x (d)
Age Range:	14 Years

About the Author

Donna is a self-described fat-American whose fiction won Case Western's Prestigious Kennedy Prize for the Outstanding Creative Project and appeared in the anthology The Answer My Friend: stories by the people who sell them (Longfellow Press). She lives with her family in Columbus Ohio.

IRA SUKRUNGRUANG is a first generation Thai-American, born and raised in Chicago. He's had stories appear in Witness, Indiana Review, Another Chicago Magazine, and numerous other literary journals.

Read an Excerpt

FREDERICK BUSCH

Extra Extra Large

What the hell, try it once or twice. Lust after everyone. Live in a sexual lather awhile. Dine on the double veal rib, the lobster fricassee, the quail. Drink Latour. And order dessert. Baby: order anything you want. Baby: order everything.

Bernie and I look like nearly identical twins, from time to time. He's the one with the more attractively broken-looking nose. He has a strong bald head, sloping shoulders, long arms and wide hands. His legs, if you were fitting them into designer jeans, aren't quite as long as fashion might require. He cocks his bearded chin (more chestnut, less gray, than mine) and raises his slightly more peaky brows, and he sights at you down his nose-like a boxer, calculating when to duck his chin, when to pop you with the jab.

If you took my brother for a fading, spreading middleweight, you'd think of me as a heavyweight working to drop down a class. Bernie insisted I was reducing because of happiness in love.

"Believe me," I told him, "it might be love, but it isn't any pleasure."

Bernie was under stress of his own, but it made him expand. He looked swollen with vitality, pink and broad and fit for coping. He wasn't vital, coping, or fit. As his waist widened and mine declined, as his face broadened and mine diminished, our heavy heads and thick whiskers, large nose, small eyes mounted by brows that look like accent marks in a foreign language, matched each other's as our bodies did.

I thought this as we sat in Bernie's living room, in his little house in the bright countryside that rings suburban Philadelphia. We were part of the litter of the night before, I thought, two lightly sweating, pale, hungover men who rubbed our brows, took our glasses off and wiped them on the tails of our shirts-to no avail: the spots were in, not on, our vision-and nursed at light beer, waiting to feel better. The beer tasted thin and fizzy, and I kept thinking, while I watched him considering me, We'll both be fifty one of these days!

Bernie nodded judiciously. His lips frowned in evaluation and then turned up in approval. He said, "Bill, you're looking good."

I said, "For a dead person."

"You keep up the regimen," he said, "and you'll be svelte. Does Joanne make sandwiches for you, with bean sprouts in them, on homemade whole-wheat bread? You're so lucky. Does she nag you to drink mineral water and kiss your earlobes when you push your plate away?"

"This is a professional woman, Bernie," I said. "This is a lawyer. Instead of a pacemaker, she'll get an egg timer installed. I call her up because I have a sudden need to croon vapid remarks about passion, and she tells me, 'Bill, I don't have time.'"

"Well," he said, "it's tough for women in the law. The guys are waiting for them to make a mistake. They call it the Affirmative Action Grace Period-usually it's about five minutes long, I hear."

"No, she's good. They wanted her. They use her for the tough cases. Felony drug stuff. She's mean. She can be."

"And this is the person you're making a physical comeback for?"

I said, "How do you pick the women you love?"

"Right," he said. "Pow. You're right."

"I'm sorry, kid."

"No," he said, "you're right. There's Rhonda checking me out-long distance, of course-for one more open wound to lay the salt in, and I'm telling you how to pick lovers."

"You realize something? I'm forty-four years old. You're forty."

"Possibly," he said.

"And we're sitting around here in boxer shorts, talking about the dangers of dating. We- Bern: we ought to maybe grow up."

He closed his eyes above the soft, dark skin of their sockets, and he slowly nodded his head.

"You'll get through this, Bern," I said.

"Oh, of course," he said. He opened his eyes, and I couldn't meet them. "And you," he said, "you'll get through your-your-"

"-happiness," I said.

Showered and changed, I sat in the car as Bernie made the ritual inspection. Our father had always done this when one of us drove off-the pausing to prod with a toe, but not kick, each tire; the squinting at belts and pipes and filters under the hood. Bernie even checked my oil by wiping the dipstick on his fingers, his fingers on his pants. Then he gently lowered the hood and latched it, smiling his assurances with our father's expression of grave pleasure.

"Looks like everything's under there," he said, coming to my window. He leaned in, and we kissed each other's bearded cheek. Bernie patted my face as he withdrew. I made for I-95, climbing north and east, leaving Bernie to his heat, his solitude, his turn-of-the-century woodwork, his turn-of-this-century's architecture software and computer. I thought of how you aren't supposed to die of, starve for, fatten on behalf of, or mime Linda Ronstadt songs about, love. Yet I was consuming too few calories for comfort and strength, I was groaning situps on the clammy floor of my apartment, because of what I thought of as love.

And Bernie was going the other way, and because of a dark, intense and brilliant woman named Rhonda, who, with real sadness, I think, and with a regret that hurt Bernie as much as her determination, had left. Someone hugs a middle-aged man, or suffers him to seize at her, while someone else gives him back the house keys, and hundreds of pounds of American flesh begin to shift.

I stopped on the road at one of those joints that tried to look like another of those joints. I ordered the garden salad under plastic, and a diet soda. I ate in the car so I wouldn't smell the hamburgers frying. I sighed, like a man full of salted potatoes. What I wanted to do was go back inside and call Bernie up and ask him if he remembered the time that our father's heart, swollen and beating unreliably, and independent of our father's needs, had first been diagnosed. Bernie, from his high school's public phone, had called me at college.

He'd said Dr. Lencz's name, and that occasioned a long and difficult silence into which we breathed wordless telephone noises for relief. He'd been the doctor who attended our mother. He'd helped us be born, visited our school-day sickbeds, torn out our tonsils, lectured us on sexually communicated diseases, eased our mother-mercy-killed her, Bernie once said he suspected-and now he was fingering our father's flawed heart.

In the silence and static, I in New Hampshire and he in New York each knew what we thought: things could look up awhile, with doctors, but then they always come down. I'd traveled home by bus, I'd met him secretly at the Port Authority-he'd liked it, I remembered, that we were both playing hooky-and then, taking turns with my overnight bag, we'd stalked our father.

What can you do when you fear the man you know you can't protect, and whom you seek to shelter from his own internal organs? We needed to be underneath his skin, yet we sought to avoid his mildest displeasure. I usually called him sir. Bernie still called him Daddy. And we followed him.

Since he was at his office, we ended up standing on lower Broadway, or pacing in front of Trinity Church's wrought iron fence. At the lunch hour, we trailed him to a Savarin and watched him prod what seems now to have been poached fish. We trailed him back to his office building and watched him into his elevator car. I was broad and strong, pimple-faced, with a head of dark hair. Bernie was only slightly shorter than I, but very lean, his face full of shadows. We talked little, looked at everything, and waited until half past five, when our father emerged, one of hundreds of men there in dark blue Brooks Brothers suits and gleaming black wingtips. "Never wear brown shoes with blue," he'd warned me when I left for college, "and treat every woman with reverence." We watched his dark fedora as it rode on the large bald head that was fringed in the same pattern, I thought while I drove, as Bernie's and mine.

We pushed and pulled at each other on the rush hour subway, we instructed each other in the tradecraft of spies, his learned from TV shows, mine from the Geoffrey Household novel I'd read on the bus. At home, once we let him enter, then made our announcement of intentions, he seemed pale, weak, thin, pleased, and unsurprised. He sat in his shirt and tie while I fried the liver I'd instructed Bernie to buy. Somebody's mother, maybe even mine, had said that liver gave you strength. We sat, then, not eating, to watch our father try to chew what amounted to everything we could offer him. The sum of our courage and ability, all we could assay, was on that thistle-pattern platter from Stengl of Flemington, New Jersey-gristly, charred, oily, raw. And what he gave us in return, I wanted to say to Bernie, was his serious attention to the inedible. He let us, in our fright, push him around a little, as he pushed the liver around on his plate, bending his identical head to what we had served.

Bernie's Rhonda was tired, she had said. She was in her thirties, and too young to be so tired, she had said. She was afraid that Bernie tuckered her out by needing so much. "What else do you love people for?" Bernie had asked me during our weekend. We'd been walking into an art theater to watch the Truffaut film made from the Henry James story where Truffaut rants for about two hours. Good ranting, by the way: I could still remember the rhythms, and the splendid woman who loved him unrequited. "Need," Bernie had said as he bought our tickets. "Love is need."

That made sense. I thought of my daughter, Brenda, and her distant mother, removed once by divorce, then twice by remarriage. We'd been a case of need overstated, and surely our child (whose specialty these days was understating need) had chosen Columbia for college because of something like a requirement for me, since I and Columbia lived in the same city. Or so I insisted. And then there was Joanne, just this side of structural steel, but happy with me, at least often, I often thought. And surely you had to need somehow to hang around an older man if you were young and trim and flourishing among the other assistants in the office of the Manhattan district attorney. If Joanne's schedule and attention sometimes implied other needs, I forgave them, in light of my lack of any choice. Kissing my earlobes, Bernie?

On the other hand, I thought, picturing him as poised in mid-chew to answer me, eating too much is need, and drinking too much, driving too quickly on Route 95, overcharging on the American Express card, or simply saying her name in despair as you reach, in the early morning, on the living room floor-your hands clasped, like a prisoner of war's, behind your head-to touch your straining elbows to your knees. Actually, Truffaut did requite her love. But it was awfully close to the end, and I thought she'd deserved far better.

Postcard, in early autumn, from Bernie to me:

B-

Am currently designing condos for the erotically deficient-no bedrooms, but two kitchens. All of course is well.

B

All wasn't, of course. I wanted to call. I also didn't. Two nights later, while Joanne worked late, I telephoned. I held the Arshile Gorky postcard-The Betrothed, this serious incomprehensibility was called-when I punched out his number; I looked at the painting, and not Bernie's words, when I spoke.

"Bern, how's it going?"

"Ça va. Lots of va. Except, it seems I apparently called up Rhonda one night. On the phone."

"And she didn't tell you she was pleased."

"No."

"You didn't expect her to."

"No."

"She hung up on you?"

"Worse," he said. "She let her breath out very, very, very slowly. It was like listening to the Goodyear Blimp deflate. On and on and on and on, and then she said in that control voice of hers, the I'm-trying-to-land-all-these-jumbo-jets-at-one-time voice, she says, 'What, Bernie?' You know what I mean? Just 'What' and just 'Bernie.' I mean, what in hell am I supposed to say?"

"What did you say?"

"I puled."

"Well, you picked the right phone call for it."

"This is true. I was on target."

"What'd you say, Bern?"

"I believe I said. 'Oh, Rhonda.'"

"Damn."

"Yeah. I wanted, see, to make sure I didn't have any pride or anything sloshing around in the tank."

"No, I think you got it all."

"Any honor or pride or anything," he said.

"Did she answer you?"

"She waited a very long time, and then she whispered. Like a mother."

I said, "Like you were young and she was extremely old."

"You got the one," he said. "You ever do this before?"

"I wrote the lyrics and the music for it."

"Yeah," he said, "I guess we all do some supplicating now and then."

"But what'd she whisper to you?"

'Please,'" he whispered.

"And then she hung up."

"Really gently. No rattle or bang, just the little click. I kept listening to the phone. She sounded good to me, Billy."

"You know-"

"You have the solution," he said. "You're on the verge of giving me the solution, aren't you?"

"No, kid."

"No."

I said, "You want to come up to New York for a while?"

"Later. One of these days I'll come in, maybe you can get tickets for something. We can take Joanne to the Stadium, she can watch a team play ball without being distracted by winning. You believe this, Billy? A couple of middle-aged guys who go through this?"

"We're late bloomers," I said, "it's not our fault."

"You're still starving yourself?"

"I'm being pretty good," I said. "I don't mean anything smug."

"Be smug. Listen: I am almost out of the Lands' End catalogue for pats. They don't believe in creatures of my proportion."

"You talk about guys like us, Bern," I said, "you're talking about proportion. Come on. You think Captain Marvel was sized Medium? Samson?"

"Even Delilah," he said.

"Atta boy."
Copyright © 2003 by Donna Jarrell and Ira Sukrungruang

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be mailed to the following address:
Permissions Department, Harcourt, Inc., 6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.

Table of Contents

Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction

FREDERICK BUSCH
Extra Extra Large

JUNOT DÍAZ
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

WESLEY MCNAIR
The Fat Enter Heaven

ANDRE DUBUS
The Fat Girl

JILL MCCORKLE
Crash Diet

RHODA B. STAMELL
Love for a Fat Man

ALLISON JOSEPH
Full Figure

ERIN MCGRAW
Ax of the Apostles

CONRAD HILBERRY
Fat

STEPHEN DUNN
Power

PETER CAREY
The Fat Man in History

KATHERINE RIEGEL
Nouveau Big

JACK COULEHAN
The Six Hundred Pound Man

REBECCA CURTIS
Hungry Self

DOROTHY ALLISON
Dumpling Child

VERN RUTSALA
The Fat Man

GEORGE SAUNDERS
The 400-Pound CEO

S. L. WISENBERG
Big Ruthie Imagines Sex without Pain

PAM HOUSTON
Waltzing the Cat

TERRANCE HAYES
I Want to Be Fat

DENISE DUHAMEL
For the One Man Who Likes My Thighs

J. L. HADDAWAY
When Fat Girls Dream

SHARON SOLWITZ
Ballerina

DONNA JARRELL
The Displaced Overweight Homemaker's Guide to Finding a Man

PATRICIA GOEDICKE
Weight Bearing

TOBIAS WOLFF
Hunters in the Snow

CATHY SMITH-BOWERS
The Fat Lady Travels

RAWDON TOMLINSON
Fat People at the Amusement Park

MONICA WOOD
Disappearing

RAYMOND CARVER
Fat

Permissions Acknowledgments
Contributors

Editorial Reviews

This singular and delightful anthology of stories and poems told by and about "fat" people is compelling in its honesty and surprising in its range-morbid narratives of murder and dark compulsions mingle with thoughtful reflections upon fatness in relation to family, friends, and culture. Andre Dubus's "The Fat Girl" follows Louise, who loses weight and loses herself in the process. Jill McCorkle presents sweet revenge in "Crash Diet." Peter Carey's "The Fat Man in History" is a bizarre and mysterious tale of a small clan called the Fat Men Against the Revolution that ends with cannibalism and a twist. Like any addiction, the focus is rarely on the poison of choice but rather on the relationship of the addict to himself and his environment and is ultimately a commentary on the complexities of a world where people are constantly trying to "find themselves" amidst a confusing array of social conventions. But the real joy of this anthology is that there is no "message" or moral that is thrust upon the reader, only stories attempting to illuminate aspects of the human condition-as all good stories should. Highly recommended.-Ann Kim, "Library Journal" Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal