Life is About Rainbows

Published in The New Yorker's October 5, 2020 issue, 'Rainbows' by Joseph O'Neill is oddly arresting. The story opened with the narrator remembering her young 23-year-old self at college, with a mentor whom she had respected enormously. There was an account of an incident of sexual harassment (hinted at), and her mentor advised her to drop it and not file charges, and get over it. That was the last time she met said mentor.

The narrator Clodagh, is an academic, a migrant from Ireland. She lives in America with her husband Ian, and her 18-year-old daughter Aoife. The daughter was in the last semester of her senior year, and has an issue with harassment on Instagram by a James Wang in her school, and who apparently stalked her too. The school authorities were brought in, and James Wang was suspended from classes.

Then the narrator realized the relationship between the laundromat she had used for ten years, the Chinese owners and their son, who is the said James Wang. The narrator wished they had sorted this out differently, family to family. She didn't make the link between the school harassor James Wang, and the laundromat's James Wang. Aoife didn't state it clearly. She would have known that it's the same James Wang who has made the delivery drop of their laundry for years. 

I know when my daughter is lying and when she isn’t. The missing-panties detail was absurd, but the rest of it added up. It didn’t add up to much, to my mind, because James was a child. He had feelings that he couldn’t understand or manage. The important thing was that I was informed. Information enables action.

Right there, on the sidewalk, I called Ms. Vincenzullo. It was a Sunday, but it couldn’t wait. That is my core skill, I believe: making phone calls promptly and persistently. It is a surprisingly rare skill. I left a message. I wasn’t optimistic about hearing back.

But Ms. Vincenzullo did ring back, right away. It took me by surprise. I hesitated to accept the call.

The action I’d had in mind was to advocate on behalf of James and to ask if the complaint could be struck from his record. But I knew how American organizations worked. It was a dark wood of decision trees. Either Aoife had had a well-founded grievance or she hadn’t. Either she would have to retract her complaint or the school would have to retract its decision. The school would not retract, and neither, I knew, would my daughter, nor would I advise her to. To admit to second thoughts would be to invite trouble.

Everything was a mess, everything was wrong. I didn’t answer Ms. Vincenzullo.

She had a discussion with her husband. They decided there was cause to protect their daughter. Life went on. They found a new laundromat. Aoife got into college. She ran into her college mentor on the train, and was confident enough to have a conversation with her, wanting closure to that incident all those years ago and trying to find out what she really thought.

She was condescending to me, and the encounter now felt fully anachronistic. I wasn’t that girl from Newcastle West, and Paola was no longer the cool professor who jingled keys to an enigmatic adult world. My former self would have wanted to know what she was thinking—about me, about everything—would have wanted to assure her that I wasn’t in the habit of ambushing near-strangers with autobiographical monologues. But I felt sorry for her, this childless, too-thin woman in her sixties who couldn’t quit smoking and was still interested in her air of mystery.

I finished my drink and smiled. Quite amiably I said, “It was very nice to see you, Paola.”

“Goodbye, Clodagh,” Paola said, just as amiably. Giving nothing away, she smiled once again. She picked up her book.

The story wouldn't be complete if we didn't know what happened to James Wang, or if this incident and how it had been handled would always be a sore point for the narrator. Towards the end, it had to include a chance meeting in the checkout line with Mrs Wang of the laundromat, mother of James Wang. The narrator learnt that the boy had gotten into an Ivy League college. The meeting was brief and finished with pleasantries, and it answered Clodagh's questions if she had inadvertently killed James Wang's future with a sexual harassment record in his school years. 

The title. Well, make of it what you will. The story suggested that Ireland is full of rainbows. Hahaha. The family made a trip to Ireland to visit the narrator's family. And they landed on a windy spring day, they saw many many rainbows all the way during the drive from the airport to their destination Adare.