Peck: A Book - Chapter 1 - In Which Peck Becomes a Woman

His third wife came after Mama, when he was nearing his fortieth year.  Had Daddy learned anything at all from his first two marriages – both to women barely out of high school and, truth be told, barely women – he might have known what he was getting into with the third.  But Daddy readily admitted he wasn’t a terribly smart man and a poor student of history.

“Let’s just say that – just because a roller coaster makes you puke, it don’t make the ride any less fun,” he said, of his reasons to try a third marriage.  “And who knows, maybe this time I won’t puke.”

Given he’d managed to find three wives before the age of 40, it was safe to assume Daddy might one day have matched Mother at four marriages – which in Mother’s view wouldn’t be matching her at all.  Fate, though, could be cruel and took him to an early grave before he could make another mistake.

Because neither of her parents seemed terribly interested in long-term commitments Peck always worried her destiny was to follow in their footsteps, that she too would leave behind a string of failed relationships on the slow march towards death.  Sometimes, she liked to imagine she was different from them, that she could rise above her humble beginnings in some sort of “Up by the bootstraps” victory story, but the truth was she was her parent’s child and could not outrun her birth, no matter how hard she tried.

But that reality would come much later and as a child, not even the hardest heart could begrudge her some hope.

***

Mother might’ve meant it as an insult – her observation about younger men, that is – but Peck found younger men not half as embarrassing as Mother’s rather cavalier attitude when it came to the idea of commitment, and especially marriage.

Audrey was Mother’s name, but unlike Peck, she never went by anything but Audrey.  She thought the name was lovely, musical, and never thought herself saddled with it the way Peck did with her own – Cecilia.

As a woman, Audrey was much as she was as a child – a naïve dreamer, in love with the idea of love, which was hardly the same as being in love itself.  All told, love carried her into three marriages – four, by some counts, the number always in dispute because, while there were four rings, four husbands and four ceremonies, Audrey counted just three.

“You know I had one annulled,” she said of the discrepancy, as if having just three husbands somehow saved her from the stigma of being labeled damaged goods, a label sure to be applied should she have four.  “An annulment means one never happened.  Legally, it never happened.”

“A technicality,” Peck said.  “But that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.”

“Yes it does,” Mom said.  “If the law says it didn’t happen, it didn’t happen, whether you like it or not.  And that’s that.”

It was a loophole, but Mama lived in loopholes and when she was younger Peck accepted the harebrained accounting – because she was young, things that didn’t make sense to others made sense to her.  The older she grew, though, and the more well-formed her brain became, Mama’s insistence sounded ever-sillier.  And pathetic.

 “White?  That’s a bold choice, isn’t it?” Peck asked, when Mom was on the verge of her fourth husband and was hunting out yet another gown.  “For a woman married three times, I’d think you’d pick something less of a…lie.”

"Two!” she said.  “I’ve only been married the two times.”

“It’s three by my count.”