Chapter 6

March 1999

There was something comforting about being back on the interstate. Although I had never driven this far south, I-75 looked like any other interstate I’d ever been on. Periodic rest stops, construction lane closures in the wee hours, a certain tranquility at three, four and five in the morning. I hadn’t stopped for food or gas before leaving Atlanta. There was no time to waste in putting distance between me and Calvin. When both my car and I needed a break, I chose a rest stop outside of Valdosta, not far from the Florida state border. I was headed to Gainesville to see my sister, Maren, a sophomore at the University of Florida.

It was ingenious how every interstate rest stop had been standardized for travelers. You didn’t have to worry about eating strange food in strange part of the country. Every rest stop had Burger King or McDonald’s. Cinnabon. Starbucks. Dozens of bathroom stalls and countless vending machines. Grubby people exiting their cars, blinking at the bright lights and trying to decide whether to drink Coke or coffee. You might not like it, but it was familiar, and familiarity trumped quality every time. I wondered if I looked as bleary-eyed and disoriented as the people around me. No one gave me a second glance, so I probably did.

I chose Starbucks and Cinnabon. I pumped my gas, then headed back toward my sister. It was after six and the sun peeked out, as if it were not sure it would show itself. I thought about Calvin, passed out in his hotel room. I willed my shoulders to unclench and I took a deep breath. I would call Maren when I got to Gainesville.

* * *

Since my sister went away to college, we didn’t see each other often. During holiday breaks, she came back to Durham but she stayed with Calvin. It was a reminder that she could move on and I could not; extraordinary, because she had much more to forgive than I did. It was, after all, Calvin’s half-brother who had been both her molester and, she thought, her first love. But four years had passed, and she seemed to have healed much better than I had.

She visited me on campus, but they were brief times spent trying to make up for all the time we missed. It was a relief to see her. She was my connection, the only person who loved me, I thought, no matter what. After our mother died, I appointed myself her protector in all things. I failed. She survived anyway.

I think I gasped when my sister opened the door to her dorm. She wore frayed jeans and a grey hooded sweatshirt with “UF” emblazoned on the front in orange. It was still early on a Friday morning, and she still wore black-rimmed granny glasses on the tip of her nose. Her hair, grown longer than I’d ever seen it, brushed her shoulders in a mess of tangles. She smiled at me, and I wanted to cry. She looked so much like Mom.

This was nothing new. Maren had always resembled our mother, even at fifteen when she felt ugly and boyish. She could never see what I saw, what the world saw.

Back then, Maren’s beauty lurked around the edges of her eyes, waiting for its chance to escape her insecurities and fears. Now, she was twenty years old, and I knew without being told that she drew second and third glances. There were differences, of course. Our mother had been fair-skinned. Maren was brown. Maren’s eyes were dark and her hair was kinky, not straight. But those were superficial things that didn’t matter. Standing there, an escapee from college, my father, my life, I saw Maren with fresh eyes. What I saw was our mother.

“Why are you staring at me?” Maren frowned at me and looked pointedly at her watch. I had called her on my way onto campus. It wasn’t even eight o’clock yet. “I have an exam at three, you know. I was up studying all night.”

I grinned and grabbed her into a bear hug. “I’m happy to see you, Mare. I missed you.”

She thumped me on the back and mumbled into my chest, “I missed you, too.”

Her roommate was away for the weekend, so I slept in Maren’s dorm room all day. We met up after her test that afternoon.

“How did it go?” I handed her a jacket I’d grabbed from her room. She wore only a shirt-sleeved T-shirt and jeans. It was technically spring, but the cold breeze and cloudy skies told a different story.

Maren made a face. “Biology. I hate it.”

I couldn’t relate. I’d always loved biology, any kind of science. It made sense to me. There was uncertainty, but science promised a logical way to find the truth. All you needed was perseverance.

But Maren had always hated science classes, math, anything with a right answer.

“Why are you taking bio?”

She shrugged. “I’m taking calculus, too.” She wouldn’t meet my eyes. We continued walking toward my car. She wanted to go to the mall, then dinner. I hated the mall, but I loved Maren.

We stopped at the passenger door. I grabbed her arm before she opened the door.

“Mare. Don’t waste your time trying to make other people happy.”

She stared at the door handle, willing it to open.

“What do you mean?”

I squeezed her arm, then let go. “Look at me.”

Several long moments passed before she did. She was trying not to cry.

“You think because I like science that you have to? You think that will make me proud of you?”

A tear rolled from one of her eyes and she swiped at it, angry at its escape. She folded her arms over her chest.

“I could be a doctor. We’ll both be doctors.”

And then everything will be okay. I knew that’s what she was thinking. My sister spent too much energy trying to make everything okay. She’d been a mediator since she was small—between our mother and me, between our father and me, between anyone who seemed the least bit unhappy and whatever caused their pain. But mostly me. She was always trying to make sure I was okay. And I always thought I was protecting her.

I shook my head.

“We are who we are. You could be the best doctor in the world. And still, we are who we are.”

She watched my eyes as I spoke. I didn’t know if I was making sense.

“I guess what I mean is, nothing will ever be okay if you keep pretending that it is. You know?”

She nodded. “But if I stop pretending…”

I put my arms around her shoulders and drew my sister close to my chest.

“If you stop pretending, then everything will be okay.”

The tears came then. When she was finished crying, I felt as if she’d released something in both of us. We pulled apart, and I smiled at her.

“Now dry up. There’s no crying at the Gap.”

* * *

Maren had been here for two years, but this was the first time I had visited Gainesville. I had intended to drive her down from Durham, to set her up in her freshman dorm, to make sure she would be safe. But of course, Calvin had insisted that this was his job. I would not do the drive with our father. Maren had cried, but even my sister the mediator had to agree it was best for Calvin and me to avoid the close quarters of a road trip.

I wished I had remembered that wise decision before I agreed to go on the book-signing tour with Calvin. Well, that didn’t last long. Anyway, I don’t know what I was thinking. Why would I look to Calvin, of all people, for some kind of solace? He didn’t have answers. I didn’t even know what the question was.

I sat on an upholstered bench in the mall that looked liked every other mall in the world. The bends and curves of Gainesville’s streets were strange to me, but the people were familiar. It reminded me of Durham: a place known by outsiders and students only for the university the city hosted. But also a place where regular people, people with jobs that didn’t require a Ph.D. or even an A.A., lived, worked, laughed, mourned and resented the presumptuous intrusion of professors and students.

Academics swooped in and out of the city with the seasons, bringing both their money and their derision. Or perhaps derision wasn’t the right word. Indifference was more like it. The people in this mall were invisible to the students, unless they needed a refill on their Coke or a price check on a pair of one-hundred-dollar shoes. The differences weren’t necessarily economic, and I was a perfect example of this. I had no money at all, really, although I hid it well behind my aging BMW and my designer clothes, leftovers from another era. It was more about class, and the knowledge that Gainesville, or Durham, or any other college town, was a mere rest stop on the way to somewhere better. Or, if one lived here, it was a means to an end that had nothing to do with caring about the city itself.

From the corner of my eye I saw a young woman with pockmarked skin and brassy blonde hair that hung limp around her face. She wore a cheap nylon jacket and jeans that were too tight. She dragged a grubby toddler behind her. His face was covered in some kind of sticky dirt, and it looked like he’d drawn on his bare arms in brown marker. I was trying to make out what he’d written when I realized the woman, who wasn’t any older than me, was glaring.

She recognized it immediately, the difference between us. We might both be at the mall, but we were different. I was just like those UF students who used up Gainesville and then left as soon as they could. She was stuck here with her dirty kid and no father in sight. To make matters worse, I was black and wearing a cashmere sweater that probably cost twice as much as her week’s grocery budget.

I caught myself feeling sorry for her. She seemed to know it, because she hissed as she passed me.

“What are you looking at, nigger?”

I put on my biggest, most ingratiating smile and waved to her. She stomped off, madder than ever. I sighed and sat back. I couldn’t work up the energy to be offended. I couldn’t really blame her for hating someone. That it happened to be me was beyond both of our control.

Maren flitted in and out of nearby stores, holding up bags as a kind of plea for my patience. I shook off the memory of the young woman and smiled at Maren, a real smile, this time. I would sit there all night for Maren. She was buoyed by our earlier conversation. She thought I had granted her permission to do what she wanted, take the classes she wanted, to be whatever she desired. The thing was, she had never needed my permission. All I did was tell her the truth. I didn’t feel like I’d learned much in my twenty-two years of living. But I’d told her one of the things I was sure of.

Watching Maren spend money neither of us had, watching her try on clothes that made her look impossibly pretty, imagining her free of the crippling burden of our family history, the numbness was all but gone.

* * *

“Are you okay?”

This was the first reference Maren made to my sudden appearance at her doorstep on a random Friday morning. She was good that way, knowing when not to ask questions. Sometimes I thought it got her in trouble, this reluctance to question motives. It was certainly part of the reason why our uncle Chris was able to convince her they were in love. He helped her forget what she’d always known—that no matter how close in age they were (he was twenty-one when she was fifteen), no matter how tenuous the DNA connection (he was technically only our half-uncle), no matter how good he made her feel, it was wrong. Of course, it was his fault, not hers. The only thing was, this lack of questioning made her an easier target, if there was anything easier than a motherless fifteen-year-old with self-esteem issues.

We were sitting at dinner in the restaurant Maren had chosen. It was one of the chains, something with an Italian name that was two steps above the Olive Garden but not nearly as good as real Italian food. Our mother would have hated this place, with the hokey opera music playing in the background, the cheery wait staff and the cheap table wine. She had loved Italian food, but only if it was expensive and authentic. Also, since she was a locally famous television personality on her way to being a nationally famous one, she liked a place where it meant something to be seen.

I pushed my menu aside and fiddled with my paper napkin.

“Have you talked to Calvin?”

Maren frowned. “No. Please tell me nothing happened.”

I weighed this. What had happened, exactly? I went to him for some kind of solace, enveloped in a misguided (delusional?) father-son fantasy, and he did what? Proved to me yet again that all he cared about was himself? Was that news?

“Have you read his new book?”

She raised her eyebrows. “Have you?”

I was happy that the cheery waiter, Brett, came by to take our orders. I couldn’t talk about the book without going off onto a rant, and I didn’t want to spoil our dinner together. The other alternative was to pretend that I didn’t care about Save Me. But I had promised my sister that I’d never lie to her.

Maren ordered some kind of pasta with vegetables. I got the veal parmesan. It didn’t matter. I knew I wouldn’t be able to taste it anyway. I decided not to get into the whole Atlanta thing. She’d find out one way or another, and I didn’t have answers for the inevitable first question: Why did I ever agree to go with him in the first place?

“Did you know it’s a memoir?”

Maren nodded. She looked off to the side of the large dining room, where a family, parents and two small kids, had been stashed. It was late for dinner—nine o’clock—and the little boy showed some signs of tiredness. The main sign was that he dripping ketchup from the dispenser on the floor around his chair in a bright red semicircle. His parents seemed not to notice, as they were shoving lasagna into their mouths and gulping the cheap table wine. The little girl, perhaps four years old, was slumped in her chair, asleep with a piece of garlic bread clutched in one hand.

Maren watched this with a slight smile. I wondered what she was thinking. Then she turned back to me.

“You didn’t answer my question. Are you okay?”

Our dinner arrived then, giving me a few minutes to consider my answer while our meals were covered in fresh ground pepper and freshly grated parmesan cheese.

I wished I could lie to Maren, tell her something that would make her feel good, make her feel safe. But we promised each other we wouldn’t lie.

“I walked out of class earlier this week because I watched a dead man being cut open and I didn’t feel a thing. I went, of all places, to see Calvin. He and I went to Atlanta together, where I left him alone in a hotel room last night. I came here without calling, or without any reason, really, except that I missed you. I just ordered a plate of something I can’t even taste. I haven’t tasted food in months.”

I took a dramatic bite of my dinner and chewed the amalgam of Playdoh, cotton and grass.

“So no,” I said, my mouth full, “I’m not okay.”

Maren set down her fork and looked at me.

“Is it Angela?”

I tried to swallow, but the wad caught in my throat, stretching and pulling. Finally, my mouth and throat were clear, but the mass sat in my stomach, heavy and threatening.

“I gave you the list. I never said anything about Angela.”

Just to say her name made my stomach tighten around the undigested lump.

Maren stared. I shrugged and took another bite. Angela hadn’t been in that classroom. She didn’t drive me to my father’s house. She wasn’t in Atlanta, and she definitely hadn’t written a book about my family.

But of course, Maren was right. It was Angela. It was always Angela.

* * *

Calvin on careers and relationships:

When Vanessa’s career began to take off, I was overcome with a crippling sense of jealousy. She was a natural in front of the camera; when I first saw her doing the news on a small cable station, I couldn’t imagine her more comfortable anywhere else. She was meant to be on television, and I mean that in the best way possible. Vanessa was everything we want from the people who deliver news—sincere, intelligent, beautiful, articulate.

And I hated her for it. Even though she was still working freelance when we broke up, I knew that she was headed in the right direction. And where was I headed? Nowhere, really. I studying a variety of subjects in college, none with overwhelming success. I must have changed my major four times before I settled on English, and that’s only because it was the subject in which I had the most credits. I had no intention of being an English major when I first went to college. I had read all the beat poets in high school, and I had this romanticized notion of a writer as someone who wasn’t created in the classroom, but in the world. College was a way for me to get out of Durham and into the rest of the world, so I wasn’t too concerned about what I studied.

The problem was, I didn’t write a decent word while I was in college, and afterward, when Vanessa and I got married and had the kids, I used them as an excuse for why I wasn’t writing. The excuse didn’t hold up to scrutiny, because being a wife and a mother didn’t stop Vanessa from actually pursuing her goals in a realistic way. I just worked as a substitute teacher and other odd jobs, not wanting to be too tied down when the muse finally visited. I was certain that a career would block any creative inspiration, and I’d read enough Hemingway and Faulkner to convince myself that drinking to excess was also part of the necessary creative process.

Instead of hating myself, I tried to diminish each of Vanessa’s successes, trying to convince her that she wasn’t doing nearly as well as she thought. Every step forward, I reminded her of someone who was three steps ahead. The drunker I got, the meaner I became. I was certain that she simply didn’t believe in me, and if only she supported me, I could have written freely. I can’t blame Vanessa for finally tiring of me.

—From Save Me: A Memoir by Calvin Emory