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Show Motherlunge a novel 12 "Fat girls have feelings," she had continued, her face flushing with heat or undiagnosed hypertension, "Deep feelings-and often the best personalities." She waited while the serving spoon she held aloft steamed up her son's glasses, until Walter turned his face toward her and gave her a foggy, grateful smile; his mother's advice was always easy to follow. She beamed back at him and flicked au gratin potatoes onto his plate with a heavy, punctuating glop. Recounting this last supper, Walter always reminded Pavia and me that his mother wasn't fat herself. In the picture of her he keeps on his dresser, we can see it's true: she was tall, celery-like; she stands in the backyard with one pale and stringy forearm shading her eyes from the sun. Not at all jolly, she's mean-looking in a folk-artsy way, reassuring-she seems to press back the tattered cornstalks that start at the yard's edge and go on till the grey, filmic horizon of central Idaho. "Disciplined," my father has called her, discipline being what he admires and has mostly managed to avoid in his life, starting with college. Because Walter went to college that first semester, and even before his mother died he'd met a girl-chubby, sexy Dorothy-and perhaps overdoing things a bit, gotten her pregnant. Dorothy's deep feelings about this development were happy ones. Being pregnant made her feel calm for the first time in her life. How could there be a bad decision when she felt so peaceful, so special, like someone perfectly cast as the slave girl in a Bible movie-regal in her scented scarves, the coins on her bra winking in the lamplight of the |