The Fat Woman's Joke by Fay Weldon Weldon Read Free Book Online

fault all the time?”
    â€œThat’s very unfair.”
    â€œWhat are you doing with that butter?” Alan’s hand shot out to restrain Esther’s. They both stared at their touching flesh, as if at something strange. Alan dropped her hand, quickly.
    â€œYou’ve got to have butter to make an omelette, silly.”
    â€œIt says on the diet sheet no dairy products whatsoever.”
    â€œDon’t be stupid.” She sneered quite visibly, her top lip curling over her tiny sharp teeth. “How can you make an omelette without butter?”
    â€œI don’t know, but you’ve got to!”
    â€œThen you do it!” She shouted at him. A glass mobile trembled, and the noise of its tinkling shamed her and pleased him. He seized the omelette mixture and poured it straight into the unbuttered pan. He took up the wooden spoon and scraped it off the bottom. It looked more like scrambled egg than omelette.
    â€œThere, you see!” she cried, vindicated. “You’ve made a mess of it the way you make a mess of everything.”
    Alan decided it was time to bring the situation back under his control. “Esther,” he said, “either we do this diet or we don’t. I think it is important that we should. We would both benefit by losing weight.”
    â€œYou mean I would. You don’t find me attractive any more. You’re ashamed to be seen out with me because I’m fat and horrible, and you think people will be sorry for you because you’re married to me.”
    Alan still held the frying pan in his hand. The whites of his eyes glinted in the light from the oil lamp. It seemed for a moment that he was going to throw the omelette full in his wife’s face, but at that moment his son, Peter, came into the room, and he lowered the pan and rearranged his face into a less manic pattern. Esther, for her part, stopped cowering, straightened up and smiled maternally.
    Peter was six feet two, some six inches taller than his father, and was proportionately broader across the shoulders. He was pink-faced, blonde, and gave an immediate impression of health and cheerfulness. The school uniform he was obliged to wear did not succeed in making him look like a child.
    â€œYou two squabbling?” He strode to the refrigerator, plucked it open, and peered inside. “Can I make myself some sausages and bacon? And fried bread?”
    â€œYou’ll get fat,” said his mother.
    â€œNot me. I’ve got youth on my side.”
    â€œYour heredity’s working against you, don’t forget that,” said Alan, meaning Esther.
    â€œYou should learn dietary discipline now,” she said, “so in the future you will be able to control your weight at will.”
    â€œHark who’s talking. Really, Mum!”
    â€œI’m sure I hope my children will be better than I. Because I am morally frail and weak-willed, this is no reason for you to be content to be the same. There is no possible point in procreation if one’s children do not out-strip one in every respect. Put the bread away. Fried bread is going too far.”
    â€œWhy don’t you two sit down and eat that omelette? You’d feel much better.”
    They obeyed.
    â€œWhy is it,” he asked, as the smell of frying bacon filled the room, “that people who are quite willfully spoiling their own enjoyment cannot rest there but are also obsessively anxious to spoil other people’s? ‘Put the bread away,’ indeed!”
    â€œStop trying to talk like your mother,” said Alan. Scraping the last scrap of egg from his plate, he added, “There’s a very odd smell in here.”
    â€œI can smell it, too.” Esther had already finished and now sat, desolately, with her knife and fork neatly together on her bare plate. She turned her head like a questing dog, sniffing.
    â€œIt’s the bacon,” said Peter. “Incidentally, it is very thinly cut