Love Like a Rainbow

My cousin Rita had curly brown hair and warm brown eyes and she smiled a lot. I think now, looking back, that she practiced that smile until she got good at it. I never heard her say anything nasty, and I was always on the lookout for that. It thrilled me when the grownups got upset and said things I would have been slapped for. They weren´t so different.

Rita drove to her job in the local high school, where she was an admissions clerk. She kept the records on the students. I pitied the boys, because she looked so good. I could see that, at 13, I would have a long way to go to reach Rita´s level of allure. I would say something like that and Rita would smile, very pleased, and suggest I do something with my hair.

There was a wild storm one day just before Rita left work. She got into her car and there were still big black clouds overhead and last-minute thunder. She headed down one road and another, past the car dealerships and the small shopping plazas, to the traffic light at the crossroads. She stopped and the sun came out and she looked out over the fields beyond the car dealerships, and there was a rainbow. It was big and complete, one of those rare perfect rainbows that prompt people to make up stories, pots of gold, that sort of thing.

The light changed and she slowly started forward, one eye on the rainbow.

Another car came to the intersection, made a turn, and hit her car–lightly–on the left flank.

Both cars stopped. Both occupants stared, open-mouthed, at each other.

"I´m so sorry," Dylan Bedell said, getting out of the car. "It was that rainbow; I couldn´t take my eyes off it."

Rita had gotten out of the car, too, to survey the damage. She stood right within the rainbow´s arc and grinned. She had a devastating grin, even without the rainbow. She wore a shirtwaist dress and her hair was curled around her face. She turned her head halfway around to see the rainbow. Cars began to honk.

She looked up at the sky. "Who put that there?" she drawled (and she didn´t normally drawl).

Dylan came right beside her and looked at the sky with her and the other cars gave up and began to crawl around them. The rainbow drifted off, first the yellows and then the reds and then the blues and by the time it was completely gone they got back into their cars and drove away, each one clutching a piece of paper with a name and address on it.

On their wedding he wore a colorful striped tie and she wore a chiffon dress that had delicate, delicate hues melting back and forth into each other. From a distance it merely shimmered, but up close it looked like it had brushed very gently against the sky after an astonishing rain.




The Proposal

Dylan is tall with dark hair parted on the right side and dipping over his forehead in a curl, like Superman.

He is young and charming and attractive and he loves Rita. He works on Wall Street and no one really understands what he does, though they have an idea he counts stocks, actually thumbs through them, at the end of each trading day. Everyone somehow thought that all the trades took place on paper, that a clerk crossed the numbers out in one column and wrote them in another. But no.

He likes to move around. He goes to parties, he drinks a lot but holds it well, he drives in the country and stops at country stores for work shirts or boots because sometimes he likes to pretend he doesn´t work at a desk. Sometimes he opens the hood to his car and checks things. He doesn´t know auto mechanics, but he gets his hands dirty and he doesn´t wash off the oil; he rubs it in with rags that are stiff with layers of grime.

On the day he proposed to Rita, he wore a suit and tie and he made arrangements with the restaurant. Rita loved ice cream for dessert, and he gave the waiter the engagement ring for a surprise sundae topping.

He was richly jovial throughout the meal, telling Rita a story about lost stock, a huge stack of stock that should have been in the vault but wasn´t. There was an emergency audit, and when all the numbers were added up again and there was no typographical or mathematical error, they checked the garbage and all outgoing mail.

Someone had thrown out half a million dollars in stock.

"Oops," Dylan said, grinning. "And no one blushed, no one thinks they did it. We all have someone in mind who would be just the kind of person who would do it. After everything settled down again, I passed a brown envelope around, and I said, ‘Put in a piece of paper with the name of the person you think could have done it.´ It was just for fun."

"Oh," Rita said. "I don´t know. Isn´t there always someone who gets picked on?"

"That person is very careful," he said reassuringly. "THAT person wasn´t likely. But he got a vote. Everyone got a vote. Even I did. It was very interesting."

"I don´t know," she repeated, puzzled. “How could it work out so evenly? That´s so odd."

"Oh, I juggled it a little," he said easily. "The point was to let everyone see that it could have been them. Here´s your dessert." He beamed, he absolutely shone.

The look on his face gave her a clue, and her eyes dropped to her sundae. There was ice cream and fudge and a tube of whipped cream, and a ring, and a cherry.

"Waiter, there´s been some mistake," she said quickly. "I didn´t order this ring." Her face was turning pink.

He took her hand. "Will you marry me, Rita?"

Her eyes were moist. "This is so sudden," she said.

He got down on his knees in the restaurant. Everyone was looking at them. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the maitre d´ hovering with a bottle of champagne. She felt frightened and trapped, but only for an instant.

Rita took a deep breath and said Yes. The cork popped like a small bullet.




Little China Tea Sets

It was obvious that Rita got the fairy tale when Dylan proposed. All the girls in the family played Rita in dress-up and make-believe. The rainbow story thrilled us. With imaginary tea filling our miniature tea sets, we put on borrowed high-heeled shoes and smeared abandoned tubes of lipstick still with a waxy red stub in them around our mouths. We had imaginary engagement parties or special celebrations for Rita´s rainbow accident, for the first real date, for the multitude of dates that followed until Dylan Bedell became our storybook prince, the suitor we poured our tea for.

The night he proposed, she wore my favorite dress, sky-blue with a waist and a square neckline and a scalloped hem. Her sweater had beading on it.

I saw this because she lived across the street. This was in Brooklyn; some of the family lived on Long Island, or farther away near Coney Island, but I was lucky enough to see Rita´s romance out my front window.

Dylan pulled up in an old black car with a convertible top that never actually converted.

She flew out the door when he honked; I could see her arms winding through the air to reach him. Just watching her out through the glass, I felt a tension unfamiliar to me, like something would break. I thought it might be my heart cracking with envy. I was feeling sad that summer and looking at Rita´s love made me dizzy with loneliness.

We girls would sit around, bouncing our dolls and moving our teacups and chatting in imitation of adult conversation.

Jessie took the last imaginary chocolate cupcake, which made her sister Jane furious.

"You do that and I´m leaving!" Jane said, putting her hands on her hips and tilting her head.

"I don´t care," Jessie said in the middle of a pantomimed chew.

I heard an imaginary giant foot outside.

"Pass me the sugar," Jessie said, turning to me. "Or I´m leaving."

I heard a giant toenail scratch at the door. I passed the sugar, but Jane grabbed it.

"I dare you," Jessie breathed.

"What are you gonna do about it?" Jane snarled. She flicked a pigtail over her shoulder.

"I´m leaving!" Jessie yelled. "I´ll go anywhere to get away from you!"

"I want to see the back of your head! Anything, anything would be better than this!"

I drank my tea, which even in imagination was strangely bitter. Their thin young voices had a perfect adult pitch.

They glared at each other until I said, "I saw Rita in a blue dress," and then they giggled and the giant toenail at the door stopped scratching and went away.









Karen Heuler's latest novel, Journey to Bom Goody, was published in 2005 and concerns mysterious goings-on in the Amazon. She's been published extensively in literary and commercial journals, such as Night Train, Arts & Letters, and The Boston Review, and is the recipient of an O. Henry Award. She lives in Manhattan with her dog, Booker Prize, and the cats, Nobel and Pulitzer.
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