3 is not a Crowd

GORDON: I found myself talking to June the way I couldn’t talk to Rita any more. I had been shutting Rita out, we had both been shutting each other out, and now with June it was the way it had been with Rita.

Around this time I guess we both started wanting each other.

JUNE: We always wanted each other, I think, but now we were starting to know it. But it was a confused kind of wanting. We were all so many different things to each other. Gordon was first of all Rita’s husband, but then he was a man I wanted to make love to, and he was, oh, it was like he was my father, taking Pa’s place, and he had come just at the time I lost Pa, and I got that mixed in. And Rita was my sister but she was also like my mother, she had been like a mother ever since Ma died, and now she was my best girlfriend, too, my only girlfriend, the only girl I really opened up and talked to in years, and she was Gordon’s wife, and it was all tangled up together in so many ways.

JWW: This observation of confusion of familial roles cropped up frequently in June’s conversation, and was echoed occasionally by Gordon and Rita as well.

RITA: You would have thought I might have noticed what was going on. To look back on it there was something in the air like right before an electric storm. That kind of feeling. But all I thought was how good it was that they got along so well, and that I had my whole family together, my sister and my husband.

GORDON: The current was in the air a long time before anything came of it.

RITA: Oh, I know it.

JUNE: I don’t know when it was that I knew just what I wanted with Gordon. I think when I learned how they were trying to have children and couldn’t. They both told me that. Not together. Rita told me one day, and then a few nights later Gordon brought it up, and I didn’t let on that Rita had already told me.

And I found myself thinking, well, I wish I could give him a child.

RITA: Looks as though you’re finally going to, doesn’t it?

GORDON: Or else she swallowed a watermelon seed.

JUNE: But I thought, oh, I don’t know. I had this idea that maybe Rita would agree to let me do it with Gordon once just to get pregnant, and then when I had the baby I would give it to her to bring up, and it would be their baby, it would be Gordon’s child and their baby to raise. It was just a crazy thought and it came to me that I must be crazy to think it.

GORDON: I had had the same thought, but I don’t think it came from a desire for a baby. I was beginning to want to go to bed with June and looking for a reason for it. I couldn’t just let myself think that wanting her was reason enough. I had to make up something else.

RITA: Oh, now, as far as that goes I had the thought before either of you. In Dayton, even, before there was anything in the air at all. I would get depressed and think, well, if I can’t bear him a child, well, every man needs to be a father, and maybe he could have it with June.

JUNE: But once I started with that thought, I knew what it was that I wanted, and that was that I wanted to have sexual intercourse with Gordon. And when I faced the thought I knew it was something I had wanted all my life. Then it came to me that I was very glad that I was a virgin. That I had never given myself to anyone, because now I knew that I had saved myself for a purpose. That I had all along been saving myself for Gordon so that he could be my lover.

The night it happened. It was this warm summer night with all the humidity in the air, and that afternoon Rita had gotten the curse. She was more depressed when it happened than I ever saw her before. She was really feeling terrible about it, all down in the mouth and miserable.

RITA: I thought I might be pregnant. Every month I would have the hope, and somehow this time I really thought I was, and then it turned out I wasn’t.

JUNE: Rita went upstairs early, and Gordon went up with her and came down a little while later with a face like an old hound dog. My heart just went out to him. I was so sad for him, and I felt so much for him.

We got to talking. I said how I knew Rita had the curse, and we talked about that, and about not being able to have children, and he asked me something about when was I going to get married and have a mess of kids. And I said I wanted to have kids maybe someday but I wasn’t looking to get married. He asked why not, and I said I couldn’t find a man I wanted, and he said maybe I wasn’t looking in the right places.

And then I just knew he felt the same way about me that I did about him. It wasn’t what he said or even the way he said it. Maybe it was the spaces in the conversation. I don’t know what it was but I looked at him and I knew.

I told him how I was a virgin. He didn’t even seem surprised. He just nodded as if everything was the way it should be.