Fat
By Raymond Carter
This first-person short story starts off with the waitress telling her friend Rita how her experience with a fat man that has changed the dynamics of her relationship. She gives a very detailed description of how the man eats, what he eats and how he has to puff s sometimes. Out of all the people who were seated in the restaurant, he was the center of attention. He’s big, very big. Even though he’s nicely dressed this couldn’t take the waitresses attention off of his huge fingers; “Long, thick, creamy fingers.” When the waitress gets behind the kitchen where her boyfriend Rudy is, she gets annoyed by him mocking the fat man. “He can’t help it” she says. Who would’ve thought that the same woman who was thinking what everyone else were thinking, would get mad when boyfriend said it out loud? She stood up for him. She could see though his outer looks, in her eyes he was more than just a fat man. So she started to bring him even more food, she started to have a real conversation. She could see that this fat man actually was really nice and kind to talk to. After the waitress came home she noticed something. She started to think; What if she and Rudy had a child and it would end up like that? What would Rudy then do? Would he act the same way as he did just now, mock and bully his own obese child. She started to look at herself, is she even happy being in a relationship with a man who can accept others? She had taken a shower, and went to bed. Rudy then made love with the waitress but the waitress didn’t make love to Rudy. She couldn’t help but think that now she is fat. Now she is the “fat man from the circus”. She turned huge and Rudy is now small. She felt depressed and has no one to talk about this to even her friend doesn’t give it a thought. She decides that she can change herself, and now her life it going to change just because of a fat man that she had watered for.
My interpretation of this story is that the fat man is giving the waitress what she is missing. She’s missing kindness and the politeness. It seems like her boyfriend Rudy is a very cold hearted man and only cares for him and likes to bully others when he sees something different. It seems as if the waitress can’t get out of this relationship because he is very hard to deal with. But the fat man shows the opposite, he says; “But there is no choice”. This gives the waitress the realization that she could have a choice about Rudy, that there are some things that you can control. When they get home, Rudy shares some child hood stories about some obese children; Wobbly and Fat. This validates her concern, and this is where she feels like she’s the fat one between them two. Somehow having a dialog and observing how Rudy is describing his childhood while bullying these obese children and the fat man, she feels their experiences of being fat. While making love to Rudy she feels even bigger, fat, and massive. Somehow being fat becomes superior to Rudy and the idea of being fat might be her ticket out of this relationship. This might also have something to do with Rita and when the waitress talked about the fat man with her, she again started to feel fat because Rita laughed at what the waitress was addressing with her. And pointing out Rita’s dainty fingers she reveals that she actually thinks that Rita is overweight.
I think that Rudy could symbolize her mean self, that she wants to change. She isn’t an angel in this story because she is thinking the same as Rudy, but she wants to change that. She wants to break free of this negativity and find more of what the fat man showed her. The fat man shows her that even though he knows that he’s being mocked while he’s eating, he still is able to be kind to others. He shows that just because some people are ignorant doesn’t mean we all have to be.
The ending isn’t as open as I would prefer it, because you actually don’t know if she did leave Ruby or if she met the fat man again. But one thing is for sure, the fat man changed her perspective of the world and how she feels as if her life really is going to be different now.
This story is very sad but in some way life changing and the fat man helps us come to that realization. If more and more people started to not care of how they looked they would be happier. This story really helps us to think that if we just stopped looking at the outer part of people, and actually saw the person behind the flesh, we could learn more.