RITA: And Junie was all alone in this big empty house. We couldn’t leave her like that. I suppose we could have had her move in with us in Dayton, but neither of us ever liked that place anyway. We didn’t make friends there, maybe for lack of trying. I’ve never been good at having a lot of friends. Just a few people that I like and see all the time, and I’d rather have it be family than friends.
GORDON: It was important for Rita to have June close at that time.
RITA: She was all I had left and I blamed myself for not being with Pa toward the end, and I wanted to be with Junie.
GORDON: So I bought the place in town, but instead of looking for a place to live there of course we just moved in here with June. It’s on toward fifteen miles to the store but that’s nothing to drive once or twice a day. And when you get there it’s not the same pressure you have with a store in a city. It’s quiet and you’ll know everybody, you’ll have the same people coming into the store all the time, and it’s a more relaxing way to do business.
Things were a little easier for the two of us, for Rita and me. Part of it came from moving, I guess, but that wasn’t all of it. Also I was running the store myself, which I could do without much trouble, just having Rita come down once or twice a week to help with cleaning and bookkeeping. That gave us some time away from each other, and we needed that. Also I had stopped seeing the waitress some months ago. And it helped having June around.
RITA: Just another person around to talk to made a difference. Before it was either we were together, the two of us, or else I was by myself. Another thing, for me, was that I knew about this waitress although I didn’t know who she was, and I also knew that now he had stopped seeing her, and it seemed to me that we had gotten through something, that we had come through it. Like in a sickness when a fever will come to a peak and then start to go down again, and you know you’ll be all right now. We had come through this and we were still together and it would be better for us.
GORDON: But it wasn’t good.
RITA: No, it wasn’t good.
GORDON: It was more a case of having a bad situation but of getting accustomed to it. You’ll see people who will stay married to each other for thirty or forty or fifty years, and they don’t love each other. Maybe they never loved each other. They don’t some of them even like each other. I know a case of a couple that is together and they haven’t spoken to one another for better than fifteen years.
RITA: Not even to say “Pass the salt.” They leave notes for each other when they have to. Fifteen years and not a word from one of them to the other.
GORDON: And yet they stay together. Now we were nothing like that. We stayed close and we stayed friendly but something had gone out of our lives. We were used to not having a baby and feeling tense about it, and the tension was there all the time like wallpaper in a boarding house, so that you got used to it and didn’t notice how ugly it was. We would have sex and it wasn’t bad and it wasn’t good, either. And we would talk, and it wasn’t as easy as it had been at first but better than it had been for a time. And the way I thought of it, I came to figure that maybe this was as much as you could expect. You know, the honeymoon being over, and that this was what happened when two people got used to each other and grew a little older. I knew I would rather be with Rita than anyone else in the world, and that I was living where I belonged now, and if anything I regretted that we ever went to Dayton in the first place, but of course we had to in order to get the capital to wind up back here.
JUNE: Of course I grieved for Pa. But the second attack was some months coming, and by the time he died it was a release, it was a mercy. He wasn’t himself toward the end and it was a mercy when he finally died.
But beyond mourning him I was just feeling so fine that Rita and Gordon were back again, that we would all live together again. I felt very happy about this, and it was as though something that had been going on in my life just went away and everything was right again. After they were home I would think about the men and boys I had gone with. Now I hadn’t been with any of them for some time. But I thought about them, and about what I had done, and it was as if all of a sudden I couldn’t believe that I had done these things.
I don’t mean that I felt bad about it. Guilty. I don’t think I felt guilty. I don’t think I felt I had done anything really wrong.
But I couldn’t believe it was me who had done it. All those things, using my mouth on them, just doing it with no love or feeling at all.
I couldn’t believe it was me. Somebody else wearing my clothes, wearing my body, but not me.
And then Pa was gone and they were back, Gordon and Rita both, and I wasn’t that person any more.
And I was so happy. It was like I was just seeing how lonely I had been now that I wasn’t lonely anymore. Now we were always sitting around and talking. With Rita during the day and with the both of them at night and sometimes late at night when she couldn’t sleep with Gordon. Rita would get tired early and Gordon and I would stay up drinking coffee and maybe watching television and maybe just talking, and I felt so close to him. I had always felt close to him but now I was really getting to know him and we would talk about everything.
GORDON: I found myself talking to June the way I couldn’t talk to Rita any more. I had been shutting Rita out, we had both been shutting each other out, and now with June it was the way it had been with Rita.
Around this time I guess we both started wanting each other.
JUNE: We always wanted each other, I think, but now we were starting to know it. But it was a confused kind of wanting. We were all so many different things to each other. Gordon was first of all Rita’s husband, but then he was a man I wanted to make love to, and he was, oh, it was like he was my father, taking Pa’s place, and he had come just at the time I lost Pa, and I got that mixed in. And Rita was my sister but she was also like my mother, she had been like a mother ever since Ma died, and now she was my best girlfriend, too, my only girlfriend, the only girl I really opened up and talked to in years, and she was Gordon’s wife, and it was all tangled up together in so many ways.
JWW: This observation of confusion of familial roles cropped up frequently in June’s conversation, and was echoed occasionally by Gordon and Rita as well.
RITA: You would have thought I might have noticed what was going on. To look back on it there was something in the air like right before an electric storm. That kind of feeling. But all I thought was how good it was that they got along so well, and that I had my whole family together, my sister and my husband.
GORDON: The current was in the air a long time before anything came of it.
RITA: Oh, I know it.
JUNE: I don’t know when it was that I knew just what I wanted with Gordon. I think when I learned how they were trying to have children and couldn’t. They both told me that. Not together. Rita told me one day, and then a few nights later Gordon brought it up, and I didn’t let on that Rita had already told me.
And I found myself thinking, well, I wish I could give him a child.
RITA: Looks as though you’re finally going to, doesn’t it?
GORDON: Or else she swallowed a watermelon seed.
JUNE: But I thought, oh, I don’t know. I had this idea that maybe Rita would agree to let me do it with Gordon once just to get pregnant, and then when I had the baby I would give it to her to bring up, and it would be their baby, it would be Gordon’s child and their baby to raise. It was just a crazy thought and it came to me that I must be crazy to think it.