3 is not a Crowd

JWW: Gordon and Rita Parris live on a thirty-eight acre farm in southern Ohio not far from the Kentucky line. They do not work the farm. Gordon owns and operates a hardware and plumbing supply business in a town about fifteen miles from their home. While the business is prosperous, their life style does not reflect this. The old house is simply furnished. A color television console and a new station wagon are the sole marks of affluence. Gordon and Rita share the house with several dogs and cats, their three-year-old son, and Rita’s sister, June.

Gordon is tall, balding, thirty-eight, with rugged mountaineer features and a warm but infrequent smile. Rita, thirty-four is dark and although slender, her body remains soft and feminine. Her manner is withdrawn and introspective. June, thirty-one, bears a strong resemblance to her older sister but appears more than three years Rita’s junior. Her face is open where Rita’s is reserved, and there is more warmth and vitality in her conversation.

At the time of the interview June, the sister, was several months pregnant, and just beginning to show.

GORDON: Something like this, now, you tend to look back off it and try to say just how it started. Rita and I will be married eight years next spring, and it’s just over four years that it all got started with June. But sometimes it seems as if it was going on long before that, see, because the desire was always there. Even before we were married, when Rita and I were first seeing each other, of course June would be around a lot, and I always liked her. We always cared for each other.

Of course I never thought of all of this in terms of going to bed. Of having sex. Not that I didn’t think, well, it would be nice to go to bed with that girl. You take a normal man and put a good-looking girl in front of him and he’s going to have that sort of thought whether it’s in his mind to do anything about it or not. It’s just in the nature of a thought. Like I might have the thought, now, if that wasn’t Rita’s sister, or if I weren’t seeing Rita, now, I might want to do something about that. But at the time it never went any further than that, not even in my mind. It was the same as you’re driving along the street and you see a girl walking down the street and you have the thought that she’s attractive, that you wouldn’t mind getting next to her, but it’s no more than a thought and you don’t even hit the horn, you don’t even slow down, you just keep driving along to get wherever it is that you’re going.

Rita and I didn’t get married right off. We were seeing each other for about three years. I was working for a man outside of Dayton, he had a hardware business there, and I wasn’t making much money and out of that I had to support my mother. I have a brother in the Merchant Marine and he would send money when he could but even so I wasn’t fixed well enough to get married, especially with trying to put money aside for a business of my own. I would drive on down here after work and than we would go for a ride or see a movie or just sit and have coffee with June and their Pa, and then I would have to drive on home.

We would be seeing each other quite regular, and then not so much for a while, and then regular again. Sometimes I would see other girls in between, but it never stuck. I would be all the time trying to think of something to say to them, whereas with Rita I would just relax and be myself. I never felt uncomfortable. Even if it was just a matter of sitting in front of the television and neither of us saying much at all, I always felt at ease with Rita, and I guess I knew a long time before we talked about getting married that sooner or later I would marry Rita.

I was always easy with June, too, as far as that goes. It was much the same in some ways, although of course it was Rita I was going with and June was her sister, her kid sister. And June being younger she did seem like a kid in certain ways. She was a kid to Rita, and their Ma being dead for so many years, Rita tended to be the mother of the family and to be always looking out for June.

Now and then when things weren’t going right with Rita and myself it would cross my mind that if Rita went and married somebody else I might think about getting something started with June. But that was just in the back of my mind once in a while and nothing more than that.