The Believers by Zoë Heller

drew up one of the spindly revolving office chairs. "Do you want me to go up and pack a bag for you?" she asked.
    "I think I can pick out my own knickers, Karla," Audrey replied.
    "Oh, I know," Karla said, "I just thought..." She stood up. "I should probably call Rosa and tell her what's going on."
    Audrey shook her head. "She can call herself if she wants to know."
    Karla bit her lip anxiously. She felt awful about the fight at the hospital. If it hadn't been for her grinning like an idiot, Rosa would not have felt obliged to speak up for her. Still--she glanced at Audrey--there was no point in agitating her mother any further. She would just have to wait and call Rosa later on. She began wandering about the room, gathering up dirty coffee cups.
    "Don't do that," Audrey said.
    "I might as well, Mom--"
    "Leave it."
    Karla sat down again.
    Her mother studied her with dissatisfaction. "You look like you've put on weight," Audrey said.
    "Thank you."
    "Don't get the hump. No one else is going to say it."
    "Okay," Karla said evenly.
    "What kind of a response is that?"
    "I don't know. Just...okay."
    Rosa often berated Karla for her passivity in the face of Audrey's remarks about her weight. "Why do you put up with it?" she asked. "Why don't you just tell her to fuck off?" But Karla never did. She could not have explained it to Rosa, but there was something in the brutal candor of her mother's sallies that pleased her. Her mother was right: no one else would say such things to her. No one else would ever speak the dread word "fat" in her presence. It was not for want of courage so much as lack of interest. It would simply never occur to anyone else that Karla's figure was worthy of comment.
    Her problems with size were not, after all, a recent phenomenon. She had been sent to her first summer fat-camp in the Berkshires when she was twelve. While the matter of her girth was an intense and ongoing saga for her-- a daily drama of doughnuts nobly forsworn and later feverishly salvaged from the garbage; of nonfat yogurt lunches canceled out by furtive french-fry snacks; of painfully tiny losses and appallingly sudden gains--for most people, she could see, her weight did not register as any sort of narrative at all. It was a static fact, an eternal and therefore unremarkable feature of the landscape. Only her mother, it seemed, was still sufficiently invested to notice when she grew infinitesimally smaller or bigger. Only her mother retained faith in the possibility of a non-enormous Karla. Although Audrey didn't like to speak of it as a rule, she too had had weight problems when she was young. Once, long ago, she had shown Karla a picture of herself, aged nine--a furious, balloon-faced child, busting out from her frilly nylon party dress like a sausage from its casing. "You get it from me, love," she had said, sadly. "And I got it from my mum. The only answer is discipline. Constant discipline."
    "Are you going to do something about it?" Audrey asked now. "The weight?"
    "Yes."
    "It's important, you know. Mike might not say it, but believe me, he'd be over the moon if you lost forty pounds."
    Karla was silent, wondering if her husband had actually been so disloyal as to discuss her weight with her mother.
    "And," Audrey went on, "apart from anything else, it'd probably help you with getting pregnant. It can't help. The extra flab, I mean."
    Karla nodded. "Uh-huh."
    "And how is all that?"
    "What?"
    "The trying to get pregnant."
    "Mom!"
    "What's the big deal?"
    Upstairs, the doorbell rang.
    "That'll be Mike," Karla said, getting up. "I told him to meet me here."
    "Stay," Audrey ordered. "Julie'll get it. What were you going to say about trying to get pregnant?"
    "I wasn't. There's nothing to say."
    "Oh, fine. Be a woman of mystery."
    There was a pause, and Karla allowed herself to hope that her mother had now exhausted the subject of her fertility.
    "So." Audrey took a long, hungry drag on her joint. "How much do you weigh at the