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.
RITA: It’s not the same. The things that would go through my mind. I was thinking that if we couldn’t have children it was the end of our marriage. And it was almost the end of our marriage anyway the way it ate at us all the time. We got so we didn’t talk about it at all. About having children. And Gordon was working late more often than not, and coming home exhausted, and he couldn’t have felt much like having sex relations, but if it was the right time of the month we would have them anyway, feel like it or not, and every month the curse, and God, I wonder now how we stayed together through all of it.
GORDON: I didn’t know what to think, whose fault it might be. I got so I would put the whole thing out of my mind entirely. It was more what it was doing to Rita that bothered me. As far as I was concerned, we could have adopted children or put off having them for awhile. I wanted a family, but I didn’t want it the same way Rita did. She had to be a mother or die in the attempt, it was the way she was.
But what it was doing to our marriage, that was impossible all around. We loved each other and were easy with each other all the time we knew each other, and now this thing was pushing us apart.
It was finally me who said we ought to go to a doctor. I wound up having to talk her into it. We both of us went, and they ran all these tests, and it turned out that there was no reason the doctors could discover why we shouldn’t be having children. We were both perfectly normal and healthy, except Rita being run down from all this worrying and all, but they gave her vitamin shots and pills for that and said she was fine, she should be having a child every year, and we should just relax and be patient.
RITA: Of course the last thing I was about to do was relax. Something about it made it all worse than ever. There was nothing wrong with us but just the same I was getting the curse every month no matter how much we had sex or what we did or anything. So we went home and tried twice as hard as ever, and it drove us both crazy.
GORDON: I guess you could say that we were both of us impossible to live with. And the thing of it was that by this time we couldn’t get any time away from each other, because I had bought the store and Rita quit her job and came to work for me so that we could make a go of it. This meant we were seeing each other for close to twenty-four hours a day. We would take our lunch separately, or I would go off now and then to attend an auction if there was a store in bankruptcy that I might pick up something below wholesale. Except for that we were with each other every minute of the day. Before this I at least had the hours I was working to be by myself and get our problems out of my mind. But now I didn’t.
The thing is, I had always dreamed of how perfect it would be, our own store, the two of us working together side by side. I had always thought that this would be about the most perfect way to go through life, two people working together for something they both wanted. And instead of heaven it was sheer hell and nothing else.
RITA: It was my fault more than Gordon’s, and I knew it at the time, but there was nothing I could do about it. I would start crying for no reason at all, right out of the blue I would start crying. I might be waiting on a customer and I would get a lump in my throat and feel the tears welling up in my eyes, and I would hurry to finish waiting on him and then go in the back of the store and start crying. And I knew this was just tearing Gordon apart but there wasn’t a thing I could do about it, not a thing in the world.
I didn’t know what would be the outcome of it all. There were times when I ached to leave him and the store and the apartment and every damn thing and go back home to Pa and June. But I never did this. I never even came close to doing it, but I would think about it.
Of course we got ultimately to the point where we had no sex life to speak of. There was just no way for us to stand up to that kind of pressure, day after day after day. We got so that weeks would go by without us making love at all. He would say he was tired or I would say I had a headache, and we could do this without having an argument because we would both of us be relieved that we didn’t have to go through with it again.
I knew it was just a question of time until Gordon had an affair, and I made up my mind in advance to look the other way and keep from knowing it. But I guess I knew about it from the beginning. He was acting different, and I knew the most likely reason for him to be acting different was that he was seeing another woman, and God knows he had every right in the world to be in the mood to see another woman, so I guessed that had to be it.
GORDON: In a way the last thing I wanted was an affair, but that seems as if it’s the way a man is put together. Throw something at him that he can’t handle and he’s going to feel that the answer is another woman, that if he can just have some other woman he can put himself back together again. I got to thinking about it more and more and I suppose I knew the same as Rita, meaning that it was just a question of time before it happened...