The Fat Girl...and Her Father 4 comments

By Caroline Langston

It has been ten years since Andre Dubus, the acclaimed short story writer and essayist, died of a heart attack at age 62.

That realization hit me earlier this spring. It was maybe a month after my second child was born, and I was still in the thick of hot, headachy nights listening to all-night news radio and somnambulistic days rambling around the house in a breast-milk stained t-shirt.

I was standing in front of the kitchen sink, voraciously spooning something luscious (macaroni? bread pudding with whiskey sauce?) into my mouth, possessed by that instant hunger and thirst that can overtake breastfeeding moms, when I thought about Dubus’ story “The Fat Girl,” and that it had been ten years since he died.

I had missed the date, in fact, by several months, as I found out when I looked up his February 26, 1999 New York Times obituary online. I felt bad about having missed it, as though I had not kept my side of a bargain. He was that kind of writer, one who could inspire such an intimate loyalty. I lit memorial candles for him in church after he died.

It was not that he was an expatriate southerner (like me) or even that he was a devout Catholic, albeit one who had been multiply divorced, drank, and wrote rather often about such subjects as adultery, or stunning acts of violence. As you might expect, therefore, he is often cited in the company of writers like Raymond Carver and Richard Ford.

I worry that it is these “tough guy” kinds of subjects will be the shorthand for which he is remembered, especially given the subject matter of the two films made of his work during the last ten years, In the Bedroom (go rent it, but it involves a father’s attempt to avenge his son’s murder), and We Don’t Live Here Anymore, which I haven’t seen but which revolves around two couples in the wake of the Sexual Revolution, entwined in adultery.

He sometimes wrote stories that were explicitly religious, and many stories depict certain details of pre-Vatican II family life that have disappeared from the lives of most mainstream Catholics (the challenges of observing the “rhythm method,” for one, or waiting in line, panic-stricken, for confession).

Far more often, though, he wrote about the moments of earned guilt and unearned grace that can startle all of us and which make us human. He wrote what I regard as the best story ever about teenage boys and masturbation, “If They Knew Yvonne.”

But it is his portrayal of women that makes me especially love him. Dubus understands women, viscerally and emotionally, in a way unlike most other male writers of his generation—though if you do a Google search on it, you’ll find lots of folks who disagree with me on this. And he particularly understands the griefs and longings of women, particularly wives and mothers, and how they change over time.

In “The Fat Girl,” for example, protagonist Louise has spent her whole life characterized, and commodified, solely by her size, and by the uptight nervous glances of her mother who fears that she will never get married:

It started when Louise was nine. You must start watching what you eat, her mother would say. I can see you have my metabolism. Louise also had her mother’s pale blonde hair. Her mother was slim and pretty, carried herself very erectly, and ate very little. The two of them would eat bare lunches, while her older brother ate sandwiches and potato chips, and then her mother would sit smoking while Louise eyed the bread box, the pantry, the refrigerator. Wasn’t that good, her mother would say. In five years you’ll be in high school and if you’re fat the boys won’t like you; they won’t ask you out.

Finally, when she is in college at a prim girls’ school in the Northeast, supported by a dedicated girlfriend, Louise goes on a diet that enables her to lose some seventy pounds. A whole academic year is described in terms of her skipped meals, humiliating dinners of bare chicken slices and early-morning walks instead of breakfast.

Her success is dazzling: she wins the approval of others, and back in the fold of her wealthy Louisiana family, wins an engagement ring from a young partner in her father’s firm and is married in an elaborate Episcopal wedding.

But the birth of a son, in addition to the weight she regains on account of the pregnancy, changes Louise, and causes her to re-evaluate the value of all her diet exertions, and she begins again to sneak candy bars in the dark. At the end of the story Louise stands alone, finally accepting herself, motherhood having given her courage to shrug off all the others she was trying to please.

And there are other women, too: the protagonist of “Rose,” who lost her children but also saved them by committing one noble act that ruined her life; the daughter Jennifer in “A Father’s Story,” whose father burdens himself with guilt in order to protect her.

It occurs to me as I look over what I have written that perhaps Dubus’ gifts go beyond simply his understanding and depiction of women. Rather, his kenotic, self-abandoning capacities helped him to understand the whole terrain of family life: wives, daughters, the sorrows of being a parent.

That, in itself, is feminist.

When there is so much cultural hype about parenting, Dubus offered if not a model, a witness of what parenting is actually like, and how to approach it with compassion and virtue.

That is something that this fatherless daughter sure appreciates.