Taking the coffee, she started upstairs. For all she knew, he might have dropped down from the moon.
She passed his room and couldn’t prevent a quick snicker when she heard the frantic sounds of a television game show. The man, she thought as she slipped behind her own door, was easily entertained.
Chapter 4
It was an education. Cal spent several hours engrossed in a sea of daytime television. Every ten or fifteen minutes he switched channels, moving from game show to soap opera, from talk show to commercial. He found the commercials particularly entertaining, with their bright, often startling, intensity.
He preferred the musical ones, with their jumpy tunes and contagious cheer. But others made him wonder about the people who lived in this time, in this place.
Some selections showcased frazzled women fighting things like grease stains and dull wax buildup. He couldn’t imagine his mother—or any other woman, for that matter—worrying about which detergent made whites whiter. But the commercials were delightful entertainment.
There were others that had attractive men and women solving their problems by drinking carbonated beverages or coffee. It seemed everyone worked, many outside, in sweaty jobs, so that they could go to a bar with friends at the end of the day and drink beer. He thought their costumes were wonderful.
On a daytime drama he watched a woman have a brief, intense conversation with a man about the possibility of her being pregnant. Either a woman was pregnant or she wasn’t, Cal mused, switching over to see a paunchy man in a checked jacket win a week’s vacation in Hawaii. From the winner’s reaction, Cal figured that must be a pretty big deal in the twentieth century.
He wondered, as he caught snippets of The News At Noon, how humanity had ever made it to the twenty-first century and beyond. Murder was obviously a popular sport. As were discussions on arms limitations and treaties. Politicians apparently hadn’t changed much, he thought as he snacked on a box of cookies he’d found in Libby’s kitchen, his legs folded under him. They were still long-winded, they still danced around the truth, and they still smiled a great deal. But to imagine that world leaders had actually negotiated over how many nuclear weapons each would build and maintain was ludicrous. How many had they thought they needed?
No matter, he decided, and switched back to a soap. They had come to their senses eventually.
He liked the soaps the best. Though the picture was wavy and the sound occasionally jumped, he enjoyed watching the people react, agonizing about their problems, contemplating marriages, divorces and love affairs. Relationships had apparently been among the top ten problems of this century.
As he watched, a curvy blonde with tears in her eyes and a tough-looking bare-chested man fell into each other’s arms for a long, deep, passionate kiss. The music swelled until fade-out. Kissing was obviously an accepted habit of the time, Cal reflected. So why had Libby been so upset by one?