I cocked my head at her, wondering why she was being so charitable. ‘That would be great.’
‘Remind me. I’ll write it down for you.’
‘Thanks.’
‘So we’re getting these?’ Samantha handed me the box of wine glasses. I took them. The box felt so substantial in my hands. Heavier than Stella, maybe. My head was suddenly cloudy, and it felt like Wal-Mart’s overhead fluorescent lights were giving me sunburn. I couldn’t remember the tilt of the conversation before this. I opened my mouth to tell Samantha yes, we were getting them, but she was knifing through the aisles, already on her way to the checkout.
21
For the rest of the gray, weary day, I felt lost in Philip. Samantha wrote down his email address and phone number on a piece of her Samantha Denver, Realtor stationery. Philip’s last name was Singh, a detail I’d never known.
It was folded up in my pocket, it was sitting in a crumpled blob on my desk, it was unfolded and stared at. I tried to imagine what Philip was doing. Was it truly possible that he and I had walked down the same city streets, climbed aboard the same subways? It was Friday, so perhaps he was at work, at this mythical architecture company Samantha said he worked at.
Most likely, Philip’s life had evolved, changed, grown. My life in Cobalt, on the other hand, had stagnated-I had designed it that way. Each new day unfolded exactly as the last: I ate white toast with unseeded strawberry jelly. I read the encyclopedias, trying to live as if it were 1965. The Betamax video recorder was an amazing new invention, AIDS was unheard of. Watson and Crick had laid out their ‘Central Dogma’ of DNA, explaining the links between DNA, RNA, and proteins, but there certainly wasn’t any DNA testing, engineering, or even much understanding yet. I tried to avoid any news of current-day New York City, as well as references to it in movies, TV shows, magazines and books-every time I saw an image of New York, I was reminded of my father.
It hurt that I didn’t just call my father. It hurt that he didn’t call me. Surely he knew I was here-certainly Stella had let him know. Or what about Dr North, whom I’d called shortly after I’d arrived in Cobalt? Dr North had assured me that he’d keep tabs on my father-in fact, my father had already called him, saying he was coming back and needed someone to manage and monitor his medications. Surely Dr North had immediately turned around and told my father that I’d reached him. But maybe my father was so fine with Rosemary and Rosemary alone, he had no need for anyone else.
Certain images of my father and Rosemary together were manageable-them sleeping in the same bed, for example, as long as they didn’t touch. The two of them riding in the car together, as platonic as brother and sister. But did he draw greeting cards for her, like the one he’d drawn for me when he’d been in the hospital for the snow globe incident? Did he lay his head in her lap and make up songs for her? I thought of Rosemary wandering the rooms of our house, running her hands against the top of the credenza, against the refrigerator magnets, along the muzzles of the dogs. My father was probably trying to make his life hers-showing her how to tell Wesley to roll over, demonstrating how to achieve the right blend of hot and cold with the shower taps, walking her through the box of memories.
Philip probably had roommates, a girlfriend. My memories of him hardly amounted to more than a few sharp, painful fragments-the look on his face when I left him, the feel of his lips on mine, the heaviness of the moment when I told him about my father and the snow globe. It was inconceivable that what I’d constructed in my mind about him even remotely resembled the person he was today. And anyway, Philip had more than likely forgotten about me as soon as I left Cobalt; I was just a girl from out of town who needed some sympathy. He had asked Samantha about me out of politeness, nothing more.
After we returned from Wal-Mart, Stella made her way into the downstairs den, which was now her bedroom. I sat on the living room couch, leafing through the H encyclopedia’s layered tracing paper overlays of the human body (first there was the leaf with the skin, then the muscles, then the bones, then nerves, then organs, and then the organs beneath those organs, until you turned the page and it was just text again). It was comforting to know that the people of 1965 saw the human body exactly as we did today.