Fannie Flagg - Standing in the Rainbow

The next morning Dorothy told her listeners, "If you are standing up, sit down, because I never thought I'd live to see the day that Bobby Smith actually got up, combed his hair without me having to send him back to his room. Oh, isn't love grand… and I do speak from experience. For years now I have been wanting a Sweetheart Swing in the backyard. I don't know how many times I have said to Doc, wouldn't the spot right under the crab apple tree be just perfect for a little Sweetheart Swing so we could sit out here and look out over the fields and watch the sun go down? If you can believe it, yesterday morning after the show, I looked out in the backyard and there was Glenn and Macky Warren putting up a brand-new Sweetheart Swing. Glenn said, "Doc sent us over and said to tell you Happy Valentine's Day." So young people don't have a monopoly on love." Mother Smith played a few bars of "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree with Anyone Else but Me." Neighbor Dorothy chuckled. "That's right, Mother Smith… he better not sit under the apple or any tree with anybody else but me… or I'll have to bean him. Are you listening, Doc?"

Bobby fidgeted in his seat all day, waiting for the valentine party to start, when finally Miss Henderson brought out the cookies and handed out all the valentines. When she called Claudia Albetta's name, Bobby pretended to be looking around the room but he watched her as she sat down and opened the envelope. She then turned around and smiled and gave the sweetest little wave.

Bobby smiled and waved back but she did not see him. She was smiling at the boy who sat three seats behind him, a boy that Bobby forgot had brown hair and brown eyes as well. Rats.

When he came home Dorothy met him at the front door. "Well?" she said.

"I told you it was a stupid idea. Now she likes Eugene Whatley."

"Oh, dear," said Dorothy.

When their friend Mr. Charlie Fowler, the poultry inspector, arrived at the house for dinner that night the first thing he asked was how Anna Lee was doing at school.

"Just wonderful," Dorothy told him, "loving every minute of it, she says."

"And how is young Robert?"

Dorothy shook her head. "I'm afraid young Robert is having romance problems, compounded by a slight case of mistaken identity."

Claudia Albetta was not the only one that year to make a similar mistake.

When Betty Raye found the unsigned valentine that had been slipped under her door that morning she had seen Bobby in the kitchen the other day and assumed it was from him. Bobby wondered why she had kissed him for no reason. Other than the box of candy from Doc and Dorothy, it was the only valentine she got that year.

The time between February and May seemed to fly by for everyone except Bobby. To him, three months felt like ten years and by the end of the school year he was like a wild animal ready to be let out of his cage.

Dorothy did manage to get him into his good suit and a bow tie for Betty Raye's high school graduation. Dorothy wanted to be sure that everybody made a big fuss over her that day. The entire family was there, including friends like Monroe, who came along to help. They all yelled and applauded loudly when her name was announced and Jimmy even whistled. Dorothy was worried about her not being as popular as some of the other students and since the Oatmans could not be there, Dorothy wanted her to feel like she was not alone and know she had people who cared about her. After the graduation exercises were over, they were all standing around congratulating her when two girls walked up and asked Betty Raye if she was going to the party over at Cascade Plunge.

"I don't think so," Betty Raye said, and before she'd thought it out Dorothy said, "Oh Betty Raye, you don't want to miss your senior party. Why don't you go? I'll bet you'd have a lot of fun."

"Yeah," said one girl, "you don't have to have a date. You can go with us if you want to."

"I'll take you if you want me to," Bobby said.

The girls did not wait for an answer. "If you change your mind, call us." All the way home Dorothy had to bite her tongue to keep from saying anything more but she managed. She had promised Betty Raye that she would never have to do anything she did not want to, but she still hated the idea that Betty Raye was not going tonight. She had not gone to the senior prom, either. One boy had asked her but she'd told him she could not dance, so he'd asked someone else. On prom night she'd stayed home and worked on her scrapbook. She had not seemed to mind but all night Dorothy had felt just terrible about it and now the girl was missing the big senior party as well.

Later, everybody else was out on the porch and Mother Smith and Dorothy were sitting in the kitchen drinking coffee. Dorothy said, "I feel so sorry for her I just don't know what to do."

"Why, did she say something about her parents not being here today?"

Dorothy shook her head, "No… it's not that. She never says anything about that. It's just when I went in her room earlier she was sitting all by herself working on her scrapbook while everybody else is out having fun."

"Maybe she enjoys working on her scrapbook."

"Do you know what she puts in it? Pictures of houses that she cuts out of magazines."

"Houses… why houses?"

"Because she says that's what she wants more than anything else."

"Movie stars I can understand but houses, that's a new one. What kind of houses?"

"Just little houses. She must have over a hundred pictures pasted in there."

"Is that why you feel sorry for her?"

"No, it's not that. It's just that I get the feeling she's always sad about something. Not on the surface but deep down inside of her and I don't know what it is." Dorothy looked away and her eyes filled with tears. "But sometimes when I look at her she looks just like a little lost dog, wandering around all alone in the world, and it breaks my heart."

Mother Smith reached in her pocket and handed her a Kleenex.

"Sorry," said Dorothy, "I didn't mean to get so upset."

"That's all right, love. You're just too tenderhearted where that girl is concerned. I think Betty Raye is happy here."

Dorothy wiped her eyes. "Really?"

"Yes. I think she's much happier with us than she was with that family of hers."

"Do you think so?"

"Definitely."

"Well, maybe I'm wrong," she said and blew her nose, adding, "I hope so."

Dorothy had not been wrong. Betty Raye was sad. And she had felt lost all of her life but she did not know why. She also felt guilty for not being like the rest of the Oatmans and the Varners and for being such a disappointment to them for not being outgoing and a good singer like the rest of them were. She loved her family but there were times when she felt as if she had just been dropped down from another planet into a group of strangers. There was no good reason why she felt that way, no good reason why she had always felt so different from all the others. But for as long as she could remember, she'd felt set apart.

Betty Raye did not know it but there was a perfectly good reason she felt so different from the rest of the Oatmans and the Varners. She was different. In fact, she was not even remotely related to them.

They were strangers. But nobody knew it. Even Minnie Oatman believed she had given birth to her seventeen years ago, but she had not. The real truth about the matter was stranger than fiction.

In the last month of her pregnancy, Minnie and Ferris and the boys were living in Sand Mountain with Ferris's mother and daddy and when it was time for the baby to be born they all piled in the car and drove down to Birmingham and checked her into the Hillman Hospital. On November 9, 1931, three babies were born not more than thirty minutes apart. A little boy named Jesse Bates, a little girl named Carolina Lee Sizemore, and Betty Raye Oatman all saw the light of day on the same night. It was unusually busy on the fourth floor and it didn't help matters much that the entire Oatman and Varner clans all descended on the maternity ward like an invading army, including Floyd and his dummy Chester. Ferris Oatman's brother Le Roy was still singing with the gospel group at the time and he called a bunch of his hillbilly musician friends in Birmingham who sang on the Country Boy Eddie radio show and invited them to the hospital for a party. And so, combined with the normal everyday chaos of a big-city maternity ward, there was now a hillbilly band playing in the waiting room, the two Oatman boys and all their cousins running and yelling up and down the hall. Besides this commotion, plus being excited at seeing real live hillbilly stars such as Country Boy Eddie and his sidekick Butter Bean in person, was it any wonder that nurse Ethylene Buck was all atwitter that night?