THE OLYMPICS: WINTER GAMES AT ALBERTVILLE : They Find Themselves Poised on a Rainbow

She’s a waitress. He’s a trucker. She’s 31. He’s 26. She weighs 93 pounds. He tosses her around.

They are in debt. She sometimes pulls down two jobs at once. Both of them have worked tending bar. She takes college classes on the side. He helps pave the New Jersey Turnpike.

She’s a chatterbox who finishes his sentences, more girlish than the teen-agers they skate against. He’s a guy’s guy who races motorcycles and won’t wear his tights until he absolutely has to, in case somebody’s looking.

He hates it when his brother teamsters tease him about being some sort of sissy figure skater, same way his schoolmates did. She makes him dress up like Mickey Mouse, including the ears.

She’s a Slavic-Polish girl from Chicago. The little Urbanski kid brought up in Skokie. Been married twice. Mother runs a beauty salon. Yugoslavia-born Anna Urbanski keeps needling her daughter to take off her ice skates long enough so she can become a grandma. Calla is content with a husband, two dogs and three parrots.

He’s an Italian boy from Jersey. At birth he was Rocco Marvaldi, but he changed it to Rocky Marval. His father ran a meat-packing plant and popped Rocky with a left hook once when he gave him some lip. Rocky spent time with raw slabs of ribs, like that character in the movies.

Calla Urbanski and Rocky Marval. They are a story for the movies.

When they skate here Sunday night in the Olympic pairs competition as the ranking U.S. pairs champions, their story will be told and retold. It is a charming one, right up there with Kitty and Peter Carruthers, the brother-and-sister silver medalists from 1984 who grew up in an orphanage.

“The difference is, people didn’t really discover Kitty and Peter until after their Olympics,” Ron Ludington, who coached them as well as Urbanski and Marval, said here Friday. “For some reason, Calla and Rocky caught on before the Olympics.”

For what reason?

“Hey, they’re a neat little story,” Ludington said.

Funny thing is, they probably won’t even win a medal. Even Calla concedes that she and Rocky simply are shooting for the top six. That only with a lot of luck might they “sneak into a bronze.”

Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter to the people who have been sending in unsolicited donations to keep Calla and Rocky going, the people who supported them when they fell $45,000 in the hole.

Doesn’t matter to the gang down at Kid Shelleen’s, the yuppie pub in Wilmington, Del., where Calla works, that was named after Lee Marvin’s drunken cowboy from the movie “Cat Ballou.” Come Sunday, they will be watching her on TV. A week or two from Sunday, she will be serving them burgers and beer for $2.33 an hour, plus tips.

Doesn’t matter, either, to the crowd down at Marvaldi Trucking, the small hauling concern in New Egypt, N.J., that Rocky inherited from an uncle. He has 15 employees and nine $90,000 rigs, but business is slow, times are hard and Rocky often takes out loads of stone and asphalt himself.

They have both been through many a mill.

She has had five busted ribs, a broken wrist, seven knee strains, a broken tailbone and a slash near her temple that took 45 stitches to close.

He has smashed head-on into another dirt bike at 70 m.p.h., breaking his jaw and fracturing his face in six places. He suffered amnesia for three days, saying later: “I looked like the Elephant Man.”

And if they weren’t broken, they were broke.

“At one point, Jay (her husband) and I were down $45,000,” Calla says.

Calla worked two jobs, simply because she never knew when one of her employers, fed up with her skating conflicts, would lay her off. She designed “I Helped Urbanski and Marval Go for the Gold” lapel buttons and dispensed them to Delaware schools, seeking donations.

Meanwhile, in New Jersey, some Newark junior-high kids raised $4,000. And Rocky’s elementary school in New Egypt held a “rock-a-thon” to raise money before the Olympics, where part of the scenery featured boys in rocking chairs reading Marvel comic books.

“Rocky Marval, get it?” Calla asked.

Her 4-foot-11 body was bouncing and bubbling here Friday, red flower in her hair, in anticipation of the games. Her beautician mother, hair dyed pinkish-orange, fussed and fluttered nearby. Everything was happening so fast. Calla was even giddy because a Chicago radio personality called simply to ask if it were true that Peggy Fleming had had a nose job.

“Philadelphia Park race track’s jockeys put up their whips and silks for auction just to raise us some money!” Calla interjects, breathlessly. “The Horsemen’s Benevolent Assn. sent us $500! Tom Bowman, (figure skater) Christopher’s brother, works there and sent us horseshoes for good luck!”

“We never know what will happen next,” Rocky says. “We’ve been . . . “

“Hearing from everybody!” Calla says.

“Yeah,” Rocky says. “People come up and say I read about you . . . “

“In the paper!” Calla says.

She started skating at 4 and moved to Wilmington as a teen-ager to train at Ludington’s school there. Got married at 20, divorced at 23. Exhausted her savings. Took jobs waitressing, bartending, whatever. Took accounting and data-processing classes at Delware Tech. Married Jay Freeman, who coaches skaters and also tends bar to make ends meet.

At 29, successful but unfulfilled, Calla changed partners. She met Rocky, who was in demand from the younger girls. He was 5 feet 9, 165 pounds, with a good upper body. Perfect for flipping and flinging her. His face, though, was hands off. Plastic surgery from the accident.

“I didn’t want his face. I wanted his body!” Calla squeals, grabbing her partner. Then she blushes and says: “Wait a minute! For skating! For skating! You know what I mean! Help!”

“She’ll be OK soon,” Rocky says. “She’ll be back hustling . . . “

“Cheeseburgers and fries!” Calla says.