3 is not a Crowd

RITA: I think I always knew Gordon and I would get married. All the time we were going together, I knew it. We were just right for each other from the beginning. Once I was through school and spending all my time here with Pa and June, I never really saw anybody. I dated some in high school but not so much, you know, and except for Gordon I scarcely saw anybody once I started seeing him. Once in a while I would meet a boy and we might go to a movie, but then either he wouldn’t call again or I wouldn’t want to see him, so I never really went with anybody but Gordon, and I knew it was just a question of when he would be in a position to marry me, with his mother and getting a start in business and all of the rest of it.

As for Junie, I never thought about her and Gordon that way. I was just glad they liked each other, they got along so well together. But Gordon got on well with my Pa, and it was the same way to me, and I thought about it the same way and was glad the same way, that he was like one of the family to them.

GORDON: Rita and I commenced having intercourse just under a year before we got married. This was something that was a long time coming. I had had some experience but not very much of it. It was mostly with girls that were that way, that they would do it for anyone, and you went out with them once and had it with them and that was all there was to it. There were other girls that I would go out with regularly before I met Rita, but I had never had intercourse with any of them, only with what you might call the tramps, the easy girls. There were, I guess, seven of those, and twice with prostitutes when I was in the service, and that was about the whole extent of it. Of course with the girls I dated we would park and pet, but there was a big difference between parking and petting and having the whole thing. I don’t know why it should be that way, thinking about it now, but there was always a great distinction between going all the way and not.

When Rita and I finally got to having intercourse, as I said it had been a long time coming, and by this time we had gotten in the habit of parking for years, you know, or petting in this very house when June and her Pa were asleep. So eventually there was this one night when we had both had a couple of beers and we were feeling pretty good, and instead of stopping we didn’t stop. So, after that we talked a great deal, and talked about getting married, and all things being equal we would have gotten married immediately. But at the time my own mother was very sick and it was just a question of time before she was going to die, and it seemed to us that it would be for the best to wait until this happened. Anything that would be a shock, anything in the way of a change, wouldn’t be good for my Ma, so we waited until nature had taken its course, and then when she did die we waited another two months and then we were married.

RITA: During this time we were continuing to have intercourse. I wouldn’t have felt right about this except that I knew we were going to get married and it was just a matter of time. I felt that we were already married in every way but the official way and that it was right for us to be together.

GORDON: Actually it was foolish of us to wait as long as we did.

RITA: Yes, but that’s looking back on it, only it didn’t seem that way at the time. As far as bringing up my own children nowadays, well, Prescott is too young now to tell him anything but to do his business in the toilet and not in his pants, which he still has his trouble remembering—

JUNE: Oh, he’s not so bad.

RITA: —but when the time comes I would tell him to do what he wants if it’s someone he loves, that it’s nothing but foolishness to wait for no particular reason at all. And I would say the same thing to a daughter. A lot of people will say that to a son, but I would say it to a daughter as well. And I would rather have a son of mine have sex with a girl he likes and respects than with a girl he has no feeling for — in the way Gordon did when he was younger. I think that must be awful, to do it for someone when there’s no other feeling.

After we started having it regularly, you know, even then it came to me that we were fools for waiting so long, And I can say that I never felt guilty or anything of the sort. Now I would have felt guilty if I were a girl at the time, I suppose, but you have to remember that I was twenty-five years old at the time. You could say I was an old maid at the time the way they usually figure those things.

GORDON: Oh, the hell you were an old maid.

RITA: But that’s how it’s usually figured. Twenty-five and never married is an old maid. Whether I was an old maid or not, what I certainly wasn’t was a child, you know, and so I couldn’t feel I was doing anything wrong having sexual intercourse with Gordon. The only thing that bothered me was Junie or Pa finding out about it, and not knowing how they would feel about it.