Elin Hilderbrand - The Love Season

When Renata reached Finnerty 205 with her father in tow-hauling boxes and milk crates and all of her hanging clothes in six separate garment bags-Shawna was on her cell phone, crying. Renata was grateful for this for several reasons. First of all, Renata was positive that she, too, would cry when it came time to say good-bye to her father (and certainly her father would cry). Second, it showed Renata right off the bat that the person she was going to share a room with for the next nine months had a soft spot somewhere. Third, and most important, it gave Renata a chance to get over her shock at Shawna Colpeter’s physical appearance. Shawna Colpeter was black, and although it mattered not one bit, there was still an adjustment to be made in Renata’s mind, because Renata had not been thinking black. She had been thinking pale and unwashed and Greenwich-Villagey looking. She had been thinking ennui and devil-may-care; she had been thinking pot smoker; she had been thinking orange glass bong on top of the waist-high refrigerator.

Shawna Colpeter smiled at Renata apologetically and wiped at her eyes.

“My roommate’s here,” she said into the phone. “Gotta go. Okay? Okay, honey? Love you. Gotta go, Major. Bye-bye.” She hung up.

Immediately Renata protested. “Don’t mind us.”

Daniel dropped the load he was carrying onto the bare mattress that was to be Renata’s bed, then he offered Shawna a hand. “Daniel Knox. I’m Renata’s father.”

She shook his hand, then fished a raggedy tissue from her pocket and loudly blew her nose. “I’m Action Colpeter.”

“Action?”

“It’s a nickname my parents gave me as a baby. Supposedly, I wore them out.”

Another adjustment. Not Shawna but Action, which sounded like a name for an NFL running back. The girl, when she stood up, was six feet tall. She had long, silky black hair that flowed all the way down to her butt. She wore purple plaid capri pants and a matching purple tank top. No shoes. Her toenails were painted purple. She wore no makeup and even then had the most exquisite face Renata had ever seen: high cheekbones, big brown eyes, skin that looked as soft as suede.

“That was my brother on the phone,” she said. “My brother, Major. He’s ten, but with the mind of a three-year-old. He doesn’t understand why I’m leaving home. I explained it, my parents explained it, but he does nothing but cry for me. It’s breaking my heart.”

Daniel cleared his throat. “I’m going down to get more stuff from the car.” He disappeared into the hallway.

Renata didn’t know what to say about a ten-year-old brother with the mind of a three-year-old. She could ask what was wrong with him-was it an accident or something he was born with?-but what difference would it make? It was sad information, handed to Renata in the first minute of their acquaintance. Renata decided that since her father was out of the room it would be a good time to explain something herself, in case Action started asking where the rest of her family was.

“My mother is dead,” Renata said. “She died when I was little. I don’t have any brothers or sisters. It’s just me and my dad.”

Action flopped backward on her bed. “We’re going to be okay,” she said to the ceiling. “We’re going to be fine.”

Renata was too young to understand the reasons why two women clicked or didn’t click, though with Action, Renata believed it had something to do with the way they had opened their hearts before they unpacked a suitcase or shelved a book.

They did everything together: classes and parties, late-night pizza and popcorn, attending the football games all the way uptown, writing papers, studying for exams, drinking coffee. Action knew the city inside out. She taught Renata how to ride the subway, how to hail a cab; she took her to the best secondhand shops, where all the rich Upper West Side ladies unloaded their used-once-or-twice Louis Vuitton suede jackets, Hermés scarves, and vintage Chanel bags. Action gave Renata lifetime passes to the Guggenheim and the Met (her mother was on the board at one and counsel to the other); she instructed Renata never to take pamphlets from people passing them out on the street and never to give panhandlers money. “If you feel compelled to do something,” Action said, “buy the poor soul a chocolate milk.” Action was so much the teacher and Renata so much the student that Action took to asking, “What would you do without me?” Renata didn’t know.

Every Sunday, Renata and Action rode the subway downtown to eat Chinese food with Action’s family in the brownstone on Bleecker Street. Action’s family consisted of her father, Mr. Colpeter, who was an accountant with Price Waterhouse, her mother, Dr. Colpeter, who was a professor at the NYU law school, and her brother, Major, whom Renata had pictured all along as looking like a three-year-old. But in fact, Major was tall and skinny like Action. He wore glasses and he drooled down the front of his Brooks Brothers shirt. (Whenever Renata saw Major he was dressed in a button-down and pressed khakis or gray flannels, as if he had just come from church.) Miss Engel, Major’s personal aide, also lived in the house, though she was never around, Sunday being her day off. Her name was constantly invoked as a way to keep Major in line. “Miss Engel would want you to keep your hands to yourself, Major.”

The front rooms of the brownstone had been recently redone by a decorator, Action said, because her parents did a lot of entertaining for work. The living room was filled with dark, heavy furniture, brocade drapes, and what looked like some expensive pieces of African tribal art, though when Renata asked about it, Action said it had all been picked out by the ID; her parents had never been to Africa. The dining room had the same formal, foreboding, special-occasion look about it-with a long table, sixteen upholstered chairs, open shelves of Murano glass and Tiffany silver. The back of the house-the kitchen and family room-was a different world. These rooms were lighter, with high ceilings and white wainscoting; every surface was covered with the clutter of busy lives. In the kitchen was a huge green bottle filled with wine corks, a butcher-block countertop that was always littered with cartons of Chinese food, stray packets of duck sauce and spicy mustard, papers, books, pamphlets for NYU Law and the Merce Cunningham dance cooperative. The Colpeters’ refrigerator was plastered with various schedules and reminders about Major’s life: his medication, his therapy appointments, the monthly lunch menu from his special school. Every week Dr. Colpeter apologized for the mess, and she always reminded them that Mrs. Donegal, the cleaning lady, came on Mondays. “This is as bad as it gets,” she said.

Renata grew to love Sundays at the Colpeters’ house because it was a whole family-noisy, messy, relaxed-enacting a sacred ritual. They always ate in the den with the football game on TV; always Mr. Colpeter opened a bottle of wine, dropped the cork into the green bottle, and poured liberally for Renata and Action so that Renata had a glow by the time the food arrived. The food was always delivered by a young Chinese man named Elton, who always came into the living room to chat for a minute about the game, his heavy accent obscuring what he was saying, and Mr. Colpeter always tipped him twenty dollars. Always Major insisted on sitting with Action in the plush blue club chair. Renata watched them closely, Action trying to eat her egg rolls while Major wiggled next to her, studying a lo them noodle, winding it around his tongue. Dr. Colpeter wore sweatpants and T-shirts on Sunday nights; she cheered voraciously for the Jets; she hogged the whole sofa lying facedown after she ate. Renata knew she was one of the most esteemed legal minds in the country, but on Sunday nights she was loose and melancholy as she watched her kids nestled in the armchair.