3 is not a Crowd

JUNE: Didn’t you worry about getting pregnant?

GORDON: I did, somewhat. But what you do, you take precautions and let it go at that. Worrying about that isn’t enough to leave off doing it.

RITA: Now this is funny, but I can’t really say I worried about that at all, about being pregnant. For one thing I knew Gordon was taking precautions, and I guess I was naive in that I thought if you took precautions that was all there was to it, that you were perfectly safe. What he used was rubbers, and of course I realize now that you can get pregnant through a rubber, that it can break or whatever happens, but at the time I thought they were a hundred percent. Another thing is that I wouldn’t have been that upset if I was pregnant. All it would mean is that we would have gotten married a little sooner than we figured, but that’s all, and if a girl is a little bit pregnant when she gets married, well, nobody’s particularly surprised or shocked at something like that.

GORDON: The saying is that first babies take five or six months to be born, but all the ones after that take nine.

RITA: And people just take that much for granted. And I wasn’t so much concerned that Pa or June would know we were having relations but that it would be thrown in their faces. Like if they were to walk in on us, because we would often do it on this very couch when they were upstairs, and you can get carried away and not notice somebody coming downstairs, and they could have walked in right while we were doing it, and that used to worry me. Sometimes I would get to thinking of that and it would keep me from letting go and enjoying myself completely—

GORDON: But not often.

RITA: No, I don’t guess. Or I thought we might be careless and leave one of those rubber things lying around, or something of that sort. But I don’t think Pa ever knew.

JUNE: I did, though.

RITA: You did, but not by anything you saw or heard, I don’t think.

JUNE: No. I don’t know how I knew, but I guess I just did, that’s all.

RITA: Well, that’s not the same as walking in on us.

JUNE: Oh, I never would have come downstairs like that. I guess because I knew what I might walk in on.

GORDON: And maybe your Pa never came downstairs for about the same reason.

RITA: That could be. I suppose that could be.

JUNE: I was hit hard when they got married. I didn’t know how or why but I was. Here I had been looking forward to the wedding and all. I was maid of honor and had it all figured out in my mind that I would have a romance with Gordon’s brother, Roy, who came in to be the best man. I was dreaming about this, and thinking how Roy and I would be married and everything just like Gordon and Rita, and as it turned out Roy was nothing like Gordon at all. He’s a lot older and hardly talks at all, or at least he didn’t have more than two words to say to me. So the wedding itself didn’t go the way I had it in mind for it to go.

After the wedding they went off for a week to Chicago, and then they came back for a visit, and then they moved to an apartment in Dayton so that Gordon could be near his work, and then all of a sudden I just felt so alone. Rita just about brought me up, and I was so glad she was marrying Gordon so that he could really be part of the family, and now all of a sudden they were both gone. Oh, we would see them most weekends, but it wasn’t the same. Now it was just me and Pa living out here by ourselves.

What happened to me at this point, although it didn’t happen right away or all at once, was that I guess I got a little bit sex-happy. I guess it was part of being lonely and part of being jealous of Rita. Jealous that she had Gordon and jealous that she had a life of her own to live. I don’t know that I thought of it that way at the time. I just felt left out of things and figured that I needed to have a man of my own. I suppose it was the same thing that led me to make a big thing out of Roy, and then to be so disappointed when he was nothing at all like his brother.

I had sort of lost interest in boys when Gordon and Rita started going together and he would be over to the house so much. The boys I had gone with before were younger, they were about my age, and they just seemed like kids compared to Gordon, and I got so I more or less stopped going out with them. And staying around the house night and day, and being out in the country, I didn’t meet anybody.

What I wanted to do was get some kind of job in town, but I couldn’t do this because of having to keep house for Pa. Not that he said it in so many words because I never even asked him or said anything about it. It was just something I knew, that I had to do this, so I never did more than have thoughts about a job in town.