Recalculating Read Free Page A

Her life was folding laundry, packing lunches, washing dishes, ferrying her children where they needed to be. And most of all, her life was the dark bedroom, when she stood in front of her husband while he hissed insults in her ear and pinched her until she cried.
    For years she had lived that way, like a princess pent up in a tower, seeing Laura in September for her mammogram, the rest of her family maybe twice a year, at Christmas and on the Fourth of July. Her children grew up, Liza loud and rebellious, given to tantrums and tears and the slamming of doors. Tommy was quieter, a thin, pale version of his father, with a watchful look on his face. Maureen wondered about him sometimes, wondered whether he’d inherited his father’s taste for pinching and calling names. Suddenly both of them were gone, Liza to Penn State and marriage, Tommy Junior to Oberlin and an engineering job in Ohio. Then it was her and Tommy, alone in the big house.
    He would pinch her if dinner was late. He would pinch her if the steak was overcooked, if the table wasn’t set, if his favorite shirt wasn’t back from the dry cleaner when he wanted it. The pinches were bad, the names were worse, but being so alone, having no one to talk to, was hardest of all. Still, Maureen couldn’t imagine leaving. Where would she go? And once she got there, what explanation would she offer?
My husband was abusing me.
When did it start?
Oh, let’s see, 1981, it must have been. Why didn’t I say anything until now? Why did I put up with it all those years?
She had no answers for those questions. And it wasn’t that bad. That’s what she told herself. Just pinching. Just words.
Sticks and stones will break my bones
and all. She was sure there were other women living similar secret lives, maybe even nice-looking Joan Bornstein, with her little Saab and her smart leather purse.
    Then Tommy had caught himself a cancer. He’d come home from the physical she’d scheduled with a look on his face that she knew meant trouble. “Tommy? What’s wrong?”
    He sat down in his recliner and beckoned for his drink, the martini she knew to have ready for the moment he walked through the door. “Prostate,” he said shortly. There were circles under his eyes, and his lips looked thin. “You’ll need to take me to the hospital for the operation, and then chemo after that.” She’d nodded, not knowing whether she should comfort him or what would come next.
    After he’d left for work the next day, she’d called Dr. Orloff, even though she wasn’t sure what he could tell her without Tommy’s permission. “Encourage him to have the surgery,” he told Maureen. “There’s no guarantees, but at least then he’ll have a shot.” Which begged the question: what kind of shot did she want Tommy to have?
    She thought it over as she drove through her appointed rounds, from the grocery store to the drugstore to the bookstore to the dry cleaner’s. Sometimes a near-death experience changed a person … and this cancer could very well kill Tommy, even with the surgery. They might not get it all; the chemo might not work. Maureen had done her homework, surfing the Internet late at night while her husband snored and twitched and moaned and sweated beside her. Maybe he would emerge from the operating room a sweeter man. Maybe the surgeon, all unwitting, would have cut out his temper along with the tumor.
    Of course that didn’t happen.
    Tommy was weak when he came home—“weak as a kitten,” he said, another one of those famous Tommyisms. The first time he tried to pinch her, for some infraction she couldn’t remember, his fingers could barely exert enough force to leave a bruise. Now he’ll leave off, Maureen thought … but the next day Tommy had gone to the office, worked from noon until five, and come home with a box marked Office Supplies. In the box were four heavy binder clips, molded black wire, ugly things that reminded her of praying mantises made of metal.
Fat
,