Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris

Author:David Sedaris
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3, pdf
Tags: Literary Collections, Humor, Form, Paris, Americans - France - Paris, Fiction, Paris (France), Americans, General, Essays, France
ISBN: 9780316776967
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2001-06-05T07:00:00+00:00

The passage of time has not altered my father’s obsessive attention to my sisters’ weight and appearance. He wonders why the girls don’t drop by more often, and then when they do, he opens the door asking, “Is it just my imagination, or have you put on a few pounds?”

Because she has maintained her beautiful skin and enviable figure, Amy remains my father’s greatest treasure. She is by far the most attractive member of the family, yet she spends most of her time and money disguising herself beneath prosthetic humps and appliquéd skin diseases. She’s got more neck braces and false teeth than she knows what to do with, and her drawers and closets overflow with human hair. Having dreamt of one for years, she finally broke down and bought half of a padded, custom-made “fatty suit,” which she enjoys wearing beneath dirty sweatpants as tight and uninviting as sausage casings. Unable to afford the suit’s matching top, she’s been reduced to waddling the streets much like two women fused together in some sort of cruel experiment. From the waist up she’s slim and fit, chugging forward on legs the size of tree trunks and followed by a wide, dimpled bottom so thick that she could sit on a knitting needle and never feel a thing.

She wore the fatty suit home one Christmas, and our father met us at the Raleigh airport. Visibly shaken, he managed to say nothing on the short ride to the house, but the moment Amy stepped into the bathroom he turned to me, shouting, “What the hell happened to her? Christ almighty, this is killing me! I’m in real pain here.”

“What?”

“Your sister, that’s what. I just saw her six months ago, and now the girl’s the size of a tank! I thought you were supposed to be keeping an eye on her.”

I begged him to lower his voice. “Please, Dad, don’t mention it in front of her. Amy’s very sensitive about her… you know.”

“Her what? Go ahead and say it: her big, fat ass. That’s what she’s ashamed of, and she should be! You could land a chopper on an ass like that.”

“Oh, Dad.”

“Don’t try to defend her, wiseguy. She’s a single woman, and the clock is ticking away. Who’s going to love her, who’s going to marry her with an ass like that?”

“Well,” I said, “from what I’ve been told, a lot of men prefer rear ends like that.”

He looked at me with great pity, his heart breaking for the second time that day. “Man, what you don’t know could fill a book.”

My father composed himself when Amy reentered the room, but when she turned to open the refrigerator door, he acted as though she were tossing a lit match into the gas tank of his Porsche. “What in God’s name are you doing? Look at you — you’re killing yourself.”

Amy stuck a tablespoon into an economy-size vat of mayonnaise.

“Your problem is that you’re bored,” my father said. “You’re bored and lonely and you’re eating garbage to fill the void.

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