"Peaches" is, at its core, a story about memory. The narrator says as much in the first few lines: “I know all too well that memory cannot be trusted, and I have surely heard this said by others. But I am constantly being shocked anew at how wildly deceptive memory can be. It beguiles us at every turn. I was taken by surprise again not too long ago" (1).
This memory that recently took him by surprise is the subject of the story. The memory is this: the narrator remembers himself as a young boy accompanying his mother down a long, dark road between their town and the next, pushing a pram full of peaches on a cold winter's night. This memory was a frequent one in the narrator's memory before he realizes its inherent contradictions: why were they transporting peaches in winter?
From this point on, the narrator explores memories from his youth, attempting to reconcile the various distinctions in the memory in question. He contemplates scenes with his mother most of all; as the second character in the memory, she is important, and it seems that she was the most important figure in his childhood as well. He remembers her telling him stories: most of the stories he relates, however, end unhappily in death or isolation, such as the story of her relative, a young nun, who was falsely accused of theft and drowned herself.
Some of the most central memories revolve around both his mother and peaches. There was a man who visited his mother, bringing vegetables and doing chores for her. He was the son of the landowner from whom the narrator's family acquired their land, although he is of the mother's generation. He is an extroverted, charismatic, and bombastic man who has a reputation for debauchery. The duty of planting and caring for the peach trees fell solely to him, so he becomes associated with the presence and even the smell of peaches throughout the story. It seems to be hinted that the narrator's mother commits some sort of infidelity with him; after a vulgar conversation between them, the smell of peaches becomes noticeably overpowering in the house, and it is mentioned that the boy's father would be able to notice the overpowering aroma of the rotting fruit before he even entered the house. This "rotting" could also symbolically refer to his mother's eroding fidelity to her absent husband, although this is purely speculation (which is, in fact, a theme of the story).
By the end, the narrator has realized that no amount of retrospection will ever be able to illumine the circumstances or even the veracity of this memory. All the various elements that contribute to forming a memory are personally dependent, biased, and easily subconsciously manipulated, so it is nearly impossible to glean objective facts from them. Rather than continuing his futile reminiscence, the narrator gives up, noting that the only thing to come of his effort is the image of himself as a boy pushing himself as an infant in a pram, symbolizing the self-dependent and deceptively ambiguous nature of memory.
