"Hmm . . . well . . . uh . . . ," he replied.  

"Well, do they or don't they?  Just answer the question.  "Do these pants make me look fat?"  

"Well . . . hmm . . .er . . . uh,"  he finally managed to inarticulate.  

Now if there is one thing my husband has learned after 25 years of marital bliss, it's that a question such as this can zap the bliss right out of the marital in nothing flat.  This is because when a wife asks her husband, "Do these pants make me look fat?" what she is really saying is "I feel fat.  Convince me I'm wrong, dead wrong."  

Frankly I think the divorce rate would decrease dramatically if husbands would take a few minutes to figure out a proper answer to this question. The following are the lousy answers my husband has managed to come up with over the years, coupled with what I think he was really thinking when he gave them.  

"Fat? Honey!  You don't look fat in those pants."
(You don't look as fat in those pants as you do in all your other pants.)    

"What?  Do you look fat?  Are you asking me?"
(I've got to stall for time so I can think, think!)  

"I don't want to answer that because no matter what I say it'll be the wrong thing." 
(I don't want you to know I think you're fat.)    

"There's no way you look fat!"
(I wonder if that Seahawks game will be televised.)   

"You don't look fat in those pants, you look good in those pants."
(Considering ...)   

"You're perfect, I love you just the way you are." 
(It doesn't matter to me that you're fat, really!)   

"Honey, if you are worried about looking fat why don't you go on a diet -- although I don't think you need to."
(You're fat, but so what?)    

"You've never been fat in your life."
(I wonder what I did with that red pen.)  

"You sure look a lot better than you did last year." (You're not as fat as you were last year, whoa!)  

"No comment." 
(Don't make me hurt your feelings.) 

Of course, come to think of it, I don't think there is any way a husband can answer this question and still come out all right.  Maybe his best course of action upon hearing his wife utter any sentence containing the word "fat" would be to freeze, then slowly, very slowly back out of the room and run like crazy.  

Linda Vernon lives in Sonora, California, with her husband and three children.  She has been writing essays for the last 12 years.  

In addition to suffering from a severe case of writer's cramp, she is also the 1990 Bulwer Lytton Fiction winner (It was a dark and stormy night...).

Linda likes to spend her spare time trying on pants.  

E-mail Linda at Benchley51@aol.com