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.
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.
But I took to going into town now and then. I would go in to do the shopping and instead of coming straight home I would hang around and maybe have coffee or something like that, or walk around looking in the windows, and I would meet people that way. Boys, I mean. They would generally be boys I had gone to school with so it wasn’t a matter of picking up total strangers but boys I had known and then lost touch with over the years. Some of them would be married and some not. And I would get offered a ride or asked to go to a movie, and I would go.