3 is not a Crowd

I also did the same thing with other boys. A lot of them couldn’t believe that a girl would want to do this. I guess at one point some of them started talking about me, and I was getting a reputation around town, but fortunately I realized this in time and put a stop to it. When boys I didn’t know asked for a date, and they had this look in their eye, I would refuse to go out with them. Or I would go out with them but not do a thing, not even let them kiss me, and that got rid of that rumor fast enough. This was another thing about men who were married. I didn’t have to worry about what they would say, because of course they were crazy to keep the whole thing a secret. So for the majority of the time there were four or five married men that I would see now and then, and occasionally a date with a single man that I wouldn’t do anything with to speak of, and that was about the extent of it for the greater part of the time between Gordon and Rita getting married and Pa’s passing away.

Now this was a period of between three and four years, and when I think about it all there seems to be is sex, and yet I would go into town two days a week at the most, and the rest of the time I was out here watching television or cooking or cleaning or taking care of the chickens or the garden or any of the things I would do around here. I think about that time and in my mind I was just one giant mouth sucking men constantly, pardon the expression, and of course it was nothing of the sort at all. Nothing of the sort. And the last couple of months after Pa had his first heart attack and before the second one, which was the one that killed him, I hardly ever saw a man. So it was maybe three years, and there weren’t that many boys involved or that many times.

After Pa died, and after Rita and Gordon moved back, I was never with another man until this day, and won’t ever be.

RITA: From the beginning, from as soon as we were married, I wanted to have a baby. Now at first we couldn’t afford to do this, with trying to save money so that Gordon could open his own store. It didn’t make sense to rush and have a baby right away. He said there would be plenty of time for that later, and I knew he was right, but even so it pained me to wait. I wanted to get pregnant first thing and never stopped wanting to, even though we took precautions.

GORDON: Of course there would be times like waking up in the middle of the night when we wouldn’t bother with the precautions, and whenever that happened I would think, well, that’s the sort of chance a person has to take, and if we’re meant to have a baby we’ll have it, and I wouldn’t worry much about it. We would use the rubbers when we could, but if something happened during one of those other times, well, a baby is something you can always afford to have, when you come right down to it, so we wouldn’t have gone and had a fit if we had found out that Rita was pregnant.

RITA: But I never was.

GORDON: To think of the money we wasted on those rubbers, and for no good reason at all.

RITA: After about a year we had managed to save quite a bit of money, and Gordon saw about buying a store right in Dayton, but that deal fell through, so he said we would just bide our time and buy a store in another year, when he knew we would have more than enough money saved, and that we could start a family in the meantime. And we tried. We would make love just about all the time, and month after month I would get the curse just like clockwork.

And this just went on and on. I got so that I couldn’t stand it, any of it. We would come down here for the weekend or just a Sunday and Pa would start riding us about hurrying up and having a grandson for him, and I had all I could do to keep from crying or shouting or I don’t know what. I just felt so bad about it that it was preying on my mind night and day. I wanted to go to a doctor but I was scared to go, and I wanted for Gordon to go but couldn’t even bring myself to ask him, and neither of us went for the longest time, and every month as sure as there were dates on the calendar I would get the curse again, and I was always fretful and miserable at that time of the month anyway—

GORDON: You still are.

RITA: Not the way I used to be.

GORDON: No.

RITA: And never as bad as I was then, because I had the disappointment on top of everything else. I didn’t know whether it was my fault or Gordon’s fault and I wanted to know but I didn’t want to know. I didn’t know whether it meant we could never have children or what. I wanted to know one way or the other but at the same time I was afraid to find out. Afraid of knowing.

JUNE: I would have found out one way or the other.

RITA: You say so, but how do you know what you would have done? You can never know something like that until it happens to you.

JUNE: Well, I know what I think I would have done.