Recalculating

by Jennifer Weiner

  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 Tommy warned 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. 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, he’d say to her, clamping each clip in place, making her writhe in pain, making her feel like her skin was screaming. Fat. Fat. Fat.

  That night, after he’d fallen asleep, she’d lay in bed, bruised in half a dozen spots, each one of them its own planet of agony, and a voice had spoken up inside of her head. This voice sounded a little like her mother’s and a little like her sister Laura’s and a little bit like her own. You know he’s going to kill you if this keeps up.

  Maureen’s eyes fluttered open, then slipped shut again. So what? she thought. Let it be over. Let this end.

  He’s going to kill you—unless you kill him first.

  She had laughed out loud, shaking her head. Kill Tommy? Unthinkable. It was like pretending that you could kill … well, that you could kill God.

  But he’s sick, said the voice … and then Maureen remembered an old joke, a bad one, but one somehow appropriate to the situation. A doctor calls a woman into his office. “Your husband is very ill. Terminally ill,” he says. “The only chance of saving his life is if he gets three home-cooked meals a day, he gets to watch sports or whatever he wants on the TV all day long, and you give him regular massages and blow jobs whenever he wants them.” The woman nods, takes notes, then walks into the waiting room, where she’s left her husband sitting. “What did the doctor say?” the husband asks, and the woman answers, “He said you’re going to die.”

  * * *

  “Turn left,” said the pleasant female voice of the GPS. Maureen put on her blinker, looked both ways, then turned. “Follow the road to … ” A slight hesitation. “White Horse Pike. Then bear right.”

  “It’s amazing,” she murmured, and Liza, in the passenger’s seat, clapped her hands in delight. “But what if I don’t do what it says?”

  “Try it,” Liza said. So Maureen drove past White Horse Pike, watching as the little virtual car on the GPS map ignored the big red arrow. The screen blanked out.

  “Oh, no, I broke it!”

  “Just wait,” Liza cautioned as the voice said calmly, “Recalculating.” An instant later, the map was back online, with a different route plotted, another red arrow indicating the next turn.

  “Wow,” said Maureen.

  “See, Ma, you can do it. You’re going to be fine.”

  Maureen had spent the next week fiddling with her GPS—the GPS from Beyond the Grave, as she sometimes thought of it—and she’d pleased herself with how quickly and with what little effort she’d mastered the system. She’d plugged in all of the places she went—her hair salon, the Y, where she did Aqua Aerobics twice a week, the grocery store, of course, and the cemetery where Tom was buried. Just lately she’d taken to typing in the names of places far away, places she’d never seen. Santa Fe, New Mexico. Carmel-by-the-Sea. San Francisco. The Arcadia National Park in Maine. The voice of the Ouija, the ghost in the machine, never told her she was stupid or dreaming to think of these places, to look at the mileage and the routes; it never called her fat-ass or lardbucket or dumb-bunny dyke. Calculating, it would say in its cool and somehow bemused female voice. Then Route found. Tommy had been dead for six months and seven days, and with every moment that passed Maureen believed more and more that one of those trips might be possible. She was fifty-four, and fifty-four was a
long way from dead. She could put the big house on the market, maybe move in with Laura, whose children had also left the nest. The two of them could go on road trips, as they had when they were teenagers, with the Little Playmate cooler full of ice and beer and Diet Coke in the backseat, with tote bags filled with beach towels and suntan lotion, and a boombox and a few cassette tapes, Juice Newton and Linda Rondstadt singing “It’s So Easy to Fall in Love.”

  A week after she’d found the box in the attic, she’d called her sister and asked if she wanted to meet for lunch.

  “Sure, absolutely!” said Laura. “Where were you thinking?”

  “I read about this place out in New Hope,” Maureen began.

  Her sister had whistled. “New Hope! Look at you! You sure you can get there all by yourself?”

  Maureen felt herself flushing. Her sister must have noticed that for all the years of her marriage, only Tommy had driven the car when they were together, and he’d tell anyone who listened that Maureen, like most women, was terrible with directions. Couldn’t find her own piehole with both hands and a flashlight, he’d announced at Thanksgiving dinner … the last Thanksgiving, now that she thought about it, that they’d celebrated with her family.

  “I’ve got a GPS. I’ll be fine,” she told her sister, and Laura had said, “You know what, little sister? I’m really proud of you.”

  Glowing with pleasure, wearing a brand-new skirt, Maureen had gotten in the car, fired up the Ouija, and tapped in her destination. She was badly startled when she heard that the voice had changed. Instead of the voice of a pleasant, serene woman, someone Maureen always pictured as smiling, the voice was now a man’s. “Turn right,” it said curtly as she backed out of the driveway.

  She pulled over to the curb instead, frowning, and tapped the buttons that would call up her Saved Settings. “Select voice—female.” There it was, still checked. “Turn right,” the male voice said again … and was Maureen being paranoid, or did she imagine that the voice sounded a little impatient? She sighed. There was a troubleshooting guide, but that was back in the house, in the box that the Ouija had come in. She’d look for it later.

  She followed, only half listening to the GPS talking her through the turns, even though somehow it didn’t feel right. She didn’t know exactly how to get to New Hope, but she at least knew the general direction, and she felt very strongly that the GPS was leading her astray. But what could she do? She didn’t have a map in the car. She did have her cell phone, but even if she called someone, what would she say? I’m lost, and I don’t know exactly where.

  “Take the highway,” said the GPS … and then, in a voice that was low and somehow musing, it said, “I didn’t like it underwater.”

  Maureen screamed. Her hands froze on the wheel, her foot stomped on the gas, and she shot down the ramp into traffic, narrowly missing an eighteen-wheeler, which blatted its horn furiously and flicked its lights at her. “No,” she was whispering. “No, no, no.”

  “Stay on the highway for … five … thousand miles,” said the voice of the GPS, the ghost in the machine. “Turn right,” it said … but there was nowhere to turn, nothing to her right except the breakdown lane, then metal barriers, and then a ravine, a long, steep drop into nothing. “Turn RIGHT,” said the Ouija, “turn RIGHT, you murdering bitch!”

  Instead, Maureen swerved into the breakdown lane. She put the car in park and, with shaking hands, yanked the power cord out of the outlet, fumbling with the Ouija’s off switch until she’d powered it down. Then she sat there, heart pounding, panting for breath. I imagined that, she thought. My GPS did not say it didn’t like being underwater. My GPS did not call me a bitch.

  It took her ten minutes to get her breathing under control, and when she was ready to drive again, she inched along in the right-hand lane as cars honked and swerved around her and cursed her once they’d passed. Finally she found a sign that indicated a route back to Philadelphia. She took it gratefully, tears still drying on her cheeks. The GPS sat in silence on the dashboard. She thought that it was brooding, sulking … but that was silly.

  “I imagined it,” she told herself, and her voice sounded normal to her ears. “Just imagined the whole thing.” Still, she left the GPS unplugged when she got home, the cord dangling forlornly as she went inside to make excuses to her understandably pissed-off sister, to say I guess I’m not as good on those roads as I thought.

  * * *

  She didn’t want to get in the car again, but old habits die hard, and Thursday, for her entire life with Tommy, had always been dry-cleaning day. That morning she lifted her basket into the backseat and began to drive. She left the Ouija unplugged, knowing she could find the dry cleaner without assistance, but the screen flared into life as soon as she left the driveway, talking, once more, in its male voice.

  “Turn left.”

  She gaped at it. “I didn’t tell you where I’m going,” she said.

  “Turn right.”

  Maureen did. She looked at the plug, then back at the glowing screen, and tapped the off button, but the screen stayed lit. Well, maybe it didn’t need to be plugged in for her to use it. Maybe it ran on stored-up power or batteries or something like that. She’d never been good with machines. Tommy had told her so. Just let me take care of it, he’d say about the microwave or the VCR or, later, the Blue-ray player, the CD player, the iPod that he filled with music for her one Christmas. He would sound both exasperated and pleased, somehow, at her flaws, her inability to manage life’s simplest tasks, and his exasperation and his pleasure had conspired perversely to make Maureen feel stupid, like the dumb bunny he’d always claimed she was, but also cosseted and loved … like her husband took care of her, instead of expecting her to learn how things worked.

  “Turn left,” said the Ouija, and Maureen glided to a stop in front of the dry cleaner.

  “I made it up,” she told herself, and got out of the car.

  Sam, the shop’s owner, was waiting behind the counter. He too had decorated for Halloween, with black-and-orange streamers hanging from the ceiling, and a plastic pumpkin full of fun-sized candy bars next to the register.

  “You doing okay?” Sam he asked as she passed him her ticket. “I still can’t believe he’s gone.”

  Maureen murmured something.

  “At least it was fast. If you don’t mind me saying. Sometimes, when they go quick like that, it’s a blessing. They don’t linger or suffer. Am I right?”

  She nodded automatically, holding out her arms for the clothes, Tommy’s old suits and shirts and ties that she was planning to send to Tommy Junior “Oh, let me help you,” said Sam. He carried the plastic bags out to the car and hung them from the hook next to the rear passenger door. Before he slammed the door shut, Sam noticed the new gadget, anchored to the dashboard where Liza had put it.

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  “It’s a GPS.”

  “Yeah, but what kind?”

  “A Ouija.”

  “A who-wha?”

  “Ouija,” she said.

  “Huh,” said Sam, squinting toward the front of the car. “I never heard of that one. You mind if I take a look? My wife’s been bugging me to get one forever.”

  Maureen shifted her weight from foot to foot. What if the Ouija didn’t want to be touched? What if it started talking to Sam in that strange mechanical man’s voice? “I didn’t like being underwater,” it had said … and she knew it had said that, even though she’d tried to tell herself that she’d misheard.

  “Go ahead,” she said. Sam opened the driver’s side door, leaned in and started tapping at the little black screen, which bloomed obligingly into its 3-D map, with Maureen’s route laid out in gold. “It does all kinds of things,” she said.

  Sam was still tapping on the screen. “Is that so?”

  Oh, yes, she thought. It calls me bitch. It tells me it doesn’t like the water. “Yes. It finds the shortest route, and it tells me where there are restaurants.”

 
; “Nifty,” said Sam. “Where’d you get it?”

  “A present,” she said, and felt her throat close. “A present from my husband. He bought it before … before he passed.”

  “Ah.” Sam clipped the device back into place, angling the little screen just so. “When is a present not a present?”

  “Sorry?”

  “When it’s in the past.” He laughed, and Maureen made herself smile

  “Past is past, am I right?” Sam was looking at her intently. “Past is past, dead and gone, and you just leave it alone.”

  “Sure,” she said agreeably, even though she had no idea what he was talking about.

  “Here,” said Sam, offering her a fun-sized Snickers bar that he’d pulled from his apron pocket. “Have a treat.”

  “Oh, no, I don’t … I don’t need that.” This was what Tommy had told her, raising his eyebrows when she joined the children for an ice-cream cone or nibbled on a cookie. You don’t need that, he would say.

  “Aw, come on,” said Sam. “One little bite of candy isn’t going to kill you! Everyone deserves a treat once in a while. Am I right?”

  Because it seemed easier to just agree than to argue, Maureen took the candy bar and put it in her pocket. “Thanks again,” she said.

  “You take care of yourself,” said Sam. Then he looked at her GPS again. “That’s some nifty little thing.”