Recalculating Read Free

computerized, said, “Hello, Maureen. Where do you want to go today?”
    “It knows my name!” Maureen tried to smile, to look happy at her new gift, but she couldn’t keep a shudder from rippling over her skin. Liza looked at her and dropped her voice. “You still miss him, don’t you?”
    Maureen looked at her daughter, her rosy-cheeked, well-married girl, nodded, and said, “Every single day.”
    * * *
    First came Liza, then, fifteen months later, Tommy Junior, and for years Maureen felt like she had been exiled to some strange and desolate planet where the air was slightly less oxygenated than necessary, where she never got enough food or sleep, where she was always slightly out of breath. Tommy pinched her maybe once or twice a month, confining his attentions to the parts of her body that couldn’t be seen when she was dressed, concentrating on her hips and her nipples, which he’d grab and pinch and twist so cruelly that she was convinced that he meant to tear them off. Worse than the pinching was the name-calling.
Fat bitch. Dumb bunny. Cunt. Slut, tramp, fat-ass whore.
It didn’t even make any sense, Maureen would think—who would even want a fat-assed whore? She tried to make a joke of it one morning as she examined herself in the mirror, butwhen she saw the bruises, the deep-purplish welts, instead of laughing she had started to cry.
    It was Tommy who’d picked out the house where they moved once he’d gotten promoted, the McMansion way out in Bucks County, its yard still raw dirt when they went to see it. The town was miles and miles away from Maureen’s parents, who still lived in South Philadelphia, and from Laura, who had moved with her husband and children in Collingswood. “You get more for your money out here,” Tommy decreed, and because it was his money they’d be spending, of course the final say was his. At first she’d bundle the kids into the car and take them into the city, meeting friends at the Franklin Institute or the Please Touch Museum, inviting them over to her place for lunch or a dip in the pool they’d installed in the backyard, but after the first year that had slowed down, and after the second year it had stopped. It was just so much trouble to pile the kids in the car, with their snacks and sippy cups, the diaper bag and her purse. She always ended up forgetting something, leaving an essential package of wipes at home or losing her raincoat at the museum, and gas wasn’t cheap. Every month when the credit-card statement came, Tommy would go through it line by line, item by item.
Another sixty bucks for gas? Christ! Do you think it grows on trees?
Sometimes he’d read the bill and not say anything, and that was always worse, because the silence meant pinches would follow, later that night when the children were sleeping.
    She would have made friends with her neighbors if there had been any neighbors. But the house that Tommy picked was at the end of a cul-de-sac with thick woods on both sides, and only two other houses, half built, on the block. Their nearest neighbors, the Bornsteins, moved in when their house was complete. They seemed nice, but Tommywarned her to keep her distance. “They’re Jews,” he’d explained, “not like us,” even though Joan Bornstein looked perfectly nice and normal the few times Maureen had seen her, walking to her station wagon with a smart leather bag over one arm. She knew the other mothers from her children’s classes, from Tommy’s soccer team and Liza’s Girl Scout troop, but only as acquaintances. She’d had friends as a girl, and there’d been her sisters, of course, but somehow, over her years with Tommy, she’d become the strange one. Other women could sense something different about her, that she wasn’t like them, and she was rarely invited along when they went to grab coffee after a game or planned a girls’ night out. Her life was her house and car, and Tommy required that she keep them both scrupulously clean.