Glenda’s Wedding

Glenda stood in line at the post office at 9:32 in the morning. It was a Tuesday. She was sixty-eight years old, but looked like she could be well into her eighties. Her skin was like old, thin paper. She wasn’t very tall and had grown sort of crooked in her old age. Her smile was still very sweet, but there was something almost sinister about it if she kept at it for too long. Almost as if she were mocking you. Today she was wearing a black sweater over a buttoned shirt that seemed to come straight out of a time machine. She’d been able to take good care of her clothes, but that didn’t make them any younger. In fact, her newest shirt must be about ten years old. Of course, her daughter and her sons had given her newer clothes over the years; Christmases, birthdays, mother’s days, but she hardly ever wore any of them. She liked the things that reminded her of her past. She clung to them like a sailor in a storm.

As the line moved forward ever so slowly, she scoffed in her head at her children and their internet. If everyone was using it, why was the post office so full this morning? Why was the line so impossibly long? She’d never acknowledge a thing like the fact that almost everyone in the line was older than her, that there was only one person receiving their packages where there used to be four, and that most of her line buddies paid in exact change and stories of their grandchildren. Some of them were in a hurry. Some didn’t want to fool around and were exasperated by the more senile among their contemporaries. They still didn’t have a choice; they were stuck in line just like the rest of them. Glenda understood though: it wasn’t that they were really senile or anything, they were just terribly lonely. She’d been lonely most her life.

She glanced down at the wedding invitations in her hands. There must be almost a hundred there, and it was still a pretty small wedding. Her daughter had lightened up so hard when she’d told her. Glenda had returned a warm big smile and told her daughter that the first marriage was always the most memorable. Her fiancé had taken terrible offense at this. Left the room in a huff, in fact. Only hours later was Glenda’s daughter able to convince him that her mother’s remark hadn’t been cynical at all, but rather a reflection of her own experience. See, Glenda had been married thirteen times in her life, producing seven children with six different men. Glenda had a habit of collecting men, the way some people might collect stamps or model airplanes. As soon as she got one “in the bag”, within the first three months she’d start to get bored of him. It wasn’t anything personal, and most of the time she still cared deeply for them. In her youth it had been much easier to jump from one man’s arms to the next; she’d been very beautiful and didn’t have any children to worry about. Sometimes the divorce was the hard part. Some men just didn’t want to let her go. She’d make their lives miserable or cheat on them until she was free to bag another ring for her collection. It wasn’t about money, not really. She usually didn’t mind prenups, separation of property or any of those things. The only men she took money from were those who owed her child support, and even that she didn’t press for. When it came, it came. The one time she’d inherited money (her sixth husband had been the only one to leave her a widow) she’d given most of it back to the children he’d had before meeting her. Her extended family was enormous and she was well liked and loved in many households. Sure, seven children is not a small number, but the amount of adults that called her mom was even greater.

As Glenda stood in line, she thought of her last divorce a couple of months ago. While getting men to marry her had been easy in her youth, her eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth husbands had been quite a different story. She’d already had all her children by then, and was halfway through her fifties. She’d promised her children, and her herself, that that was it. Thirteeen was enough. In fact, it was an enormous number. Most people would think even half to be an outrageously large number. And still, as she finally got to the counter to mail her daughter’s invitations, she thought of her own first wedding. How lovely, how white, how pristine. And everyone told you how beautiful you looked, and everyone wished you well, and for one day, everyone loved you.

She winked at the old man behind the counter. Maybe fourteen was to be her lucky number.