Mrs. Gurney

Mrs. Gurney is a former client of Andy McGee whose dramatic transformation gives his remembered work in Port City a human consequence: she returns not only as someone he helped, but as someone who offers help in return. Her account links Andy’s use of the push to a practical, sustained change in daily life, while her reappearance in his thoughts makes gratitude a counterweight to his present distress.

Identity and Background

Mrs. Gurney came to Andy’s Weight-Off office in Port City, Pennsylvania, wearing a green pantsuit and carrying the strain of a life in which her weight had become entangled with family disappointment and marital trouble. She had borne her truck-dispatcher husband, Stan Gurney, four children between 1950 and 1957; by the time Andy met her, the children were grown and disgusted with her, and Stan was seeing another woman. Mrs. Gurney could understand his attraction to someone else, the narrative reports, even as the situation left her desperate for change.

She had weighed 140 pounds when she married and had gradually gained 160 pounds, reaching 300. Her first appearance is rendered through her green clothes, her difficulty looking down into her purse, and the three chins that become six when she bends her head. The description registers how conspicuous her body has become in her own life, but the memory also gives her a particular history and a clear desire: she comes to the office seeking a way to alter circumstances that have made her feel rejected.

Andy’s Course and Her Transformation

Andy placed Mrs. Gurney in a class with three other women. He had researched the exercises and mild diet at the Public Library, offered pep talks he billed as counseling, and periodically used a medium-hard push. The women’s experience was not limited to the number on a scale. Mrs. Gurney found that she no longer wanted second helpings because the food did not taste as good; she also began forgetting the snacks she had formerly kept around for television. Unlike her unsuccessful experience with Weight Watchers, the change reached her appetites and habits.

The other three women responded in kind, and the group discovered that they shared the same unexpected effects. Exercises that had once felt boring and painful became almost pleasant. They developed an urge to walk and felt uneasy and restless if they had not walked enough. Mrs. Gurney began walking more than two miles downtown and back each day, though the bus stop stood directly in front of her house. When sore thigh muscles led her to take the bus, she felt so restless that she got off at the second stop. Their shared experience made the course a collective transformation, not simply a private contest of willpower.

Her weigh-ins mark the scale and speed of that change: from 300 pounds to 280, then 270, and 250 at her third weigh-in. By the end of the six-week course, she weighed 225, a loss of 75 pounds. Stan was stunned, especially because she had failed at numerous diets and fads; he wanted her to see a doctor and feared she might have cancer. Mrs. Gurney showed him her fingers, red and callused from taking in her clothes with needle and thread. Then she embraced him so fiercely that she nearly broke his back and wept against his neck. The altered clothes and that physical embrace give the result a visible, intimate form: the change is no longer only a figure Andy records, but something her husband must confront.

Gratitude and Return

Andy remembers that former students and clients often came back, sometimes to thank him and sometimes to display how far they had gone. Mrs. Gurney belongs to the grateful rather than boastful group. She had returned to say hello and thank him roughly ten days before Andy began to feel nervous and watched in Port City. Before that month ended, Andy and Charlie had gone on to New York City. Her visit therefore falls at the edge of his ordinary life in Port City, just before the pressure that drives them onward.

Later, as Andy lies in an abandoned installation with a worsening headache, his mind revisits the past and then presents Mrs. Gurney beside him as a slim, pretty woman. This is a striking imagined contrast with the client whose clothes once required extensive alteration; the scene gives her transformation an almost dreamlike completeness without establishing that she is physically present. When Andy says she looks pretty, she answers, “I feel like I’ve been let out of prison.” The line makes her weight loss more than a change in appearance: in her own account, it is release.

Reciprocity and Narrative Role

In the same vision, Mrs. Gurney offers, “I’ll help you. You helped me; now I’ll help you. After all, you are the national resource, not me.” Her phrasing reverses the direction of the remembered relationship. Andy had been the person with the means to intervene, and he had watched the women’s progress with an almost paternal feeling; now the former client insists that the person who helped her is himself worth protecting. Her gratitude is not passive admiration but an offer of aid.

The episode places that offer against Andy’s physical and mental vulnerability: he is in pain, and the black horse he fears is loose somewhere in the installation. Mrs. Gurney’s presence in his recollection cannot resolve that danger, but it recalls a form of influence whose consequences were concrete in another person’s life. Her arc is brief and largely told through Andy’s memory, yet it moves from social rejection and desperation through sustained bodily change to a final gesture of care. The exchange complicates the role of helper and helped: the effect of Andy’s intervention returns to him as loyalty, at the moment when he can no longer rely on his own strength.