Mulberry Wine

Mia stared up at the first few stars emerging with dusk. She had always been able to appreciate the cold white pin pricks of light, but their beauty was clouded by the dull shadow of nervousness that seemed to arrive every evening. She shivered just as Wendy stepped onto the porch, carrying a selection of snacks and three glasses of dark liquid on a small wooden tray.

“Thank goodness I made so much of this in December! Who would have known we would really need it now,” Wendy’s voice rang clear through the cooling air. She closed the door with her hip and placed the tray onto the large white outdoor table.

“Is that … the wine?” Mia was sitting cross legged on one of the chairs.

“Yep. It’s been fermenting for five months now, so it should be perfect.”

Wendy was always knee-deep in a new project. That December, she had rediscovered her aunt’s recipe for mulberry wine and had spent hours concocting big batches of the stuff, attending to it with great dedication and leaving purple stains all over the counter in the process. Then she had poured it into pretty glass bottles, which she hid away in the pantry, before moving onto her next exploit (figuring out how to make tofu from scratch).

“So after all that mess, we don’t even get to drink it?” Mia had rolled her eyes.

“Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.” Wendy had replied in a pompous accent, lips turned down and nose in the air. It was one of their grandmother’s favourite quotes.

Now Mia was happy they had waited.

“You’re my hero, Wends.” She beamed, closing her laptop and grabbing a cracker smothered in cream cheese, “I could seriously do with a glass of wine right now.”

Since the national lockdown began, Mia had been spending most of her time outside, walking anxious loops around the garden or working at the patio table until evening, when the sky cooled to a dark lavender. When her sister finally arrived, she brought with her the sense of safety she always seemed to carry. They would laze in the amniotic autumn air, faces tilted towards the sun, giggling at old memories, shielded from what was going on in the world outside the high grey walls.

“Let’s hope it does the trick.” Wendy handed a glass to Mia and took one for herself before collapsing into the chair across from her sister and lifting her legs up onto the table. Mia had always admired how easy is seemed for Wendy to take up space, with her loud dramatic movements. She would fling her arms about when telling a story and throw her head back with laughter when amused, forever refusing to shrink

 “Cheers! To finally having alcohol again.”            

They leant across the table towards each other and relished the clink of crystal as their glasses kissed.

The wine tasted like summer in Queenstown, where the girls had grown up. They would spend the lazy, stretched-out December days outside, at the furthest end of the big garden, only returning to the cool dark house when the stars began to poke through the sky above and the thunder of their father’s voice threatened. In the garden, hidden from the rest of the world were three old mulberry trees. They would climb them and shake the grey wrinkled branches until the ripest, sunned berries at the top would fall - with a pleasant pitter patter - onto the newspaper pages they had laid on the ground. Wendy ate them with cream she stole from the kitchen and Mia liked them as they were, placing them one-by-one in her mouth and savouring the warm sweet ‘pop’ as juice burst through the flesh of the fruit. Every summer, their mother’s sister would make wine from the plump dark berries. They would run, barefoot, to her house two streets down, carrying Tupperware’s full of the best ones they could find. She reminded them of a wizard with her unruly hair and big silver pot of boiling purple liquid. They would help her mash berries and measure sugar, pretending they were her apprentices. Whenever they visited throughout the year, they would check on the magical bottles and watch the pink bubbles forming. The girls were only allowed little sips of the wine, but they loved how each batch tasted different. They imagined that in each bottle was a different potion. One bottle could make you fall in love, one could cause you to shrink to the size of an ant and one could even kill you, but only if your heart was bad.

They had been collecting berries for another batch of wine when their mom, distressed, had called them in that day. They had stood awkwardly by their father’s bed, mud streaked and mulberry stained.

“Bye, Pa.” Mia had said, as though he was leaving for work in the morning.

Wendy had stayed silent. There was a gentleness to the frail, confused man beneath the covers. Surely this was not her father, who, just three weeks before, had grabbed her favourite glass dolphin from her hands and slammed it against the wall with terrifying force, sending glistening blue shards across the floor of the room.  She had half expected the wall to crumble into a mass of dusty rubble and was surprised that it was just the dolphin that broke.

No-one had really explained his death to them. They had decided that it was the anger that killed him – that it had boiled and boiled until it hardened, like bitter candy in his swollen stomach. It took up all the space, so that there was no room for vegetables, or cool water or medicine. They had wept with their mother because they felt they ought to and because the sight of his empty slippers by the bathroom door caused strange aches in their chests. Then auntie Jackie had moved in and locked away all of his stuff. She had spent a week washing linen and scrubbing all the surfaces in the house, as though the bleach would wipe clean the memory of him.

“It’s Delicious, Wendy! Well worth the wait.”

“Doesn’t it remind you of him?”

“Who? Dad? I guess it kind of does…”

“Don’t you remember how much he loved this stuff? He would hide bottles from the rest of us in his office.” Wendy had a distracted look on her face.

The sisters rarely mentioned their father and when one of them did it was the unspoken responsibility of the other to veer the conversation away. 

“Seriously though, this is good,” Mia said, lifting her glass, “You could totally sell it! It’s still a long time till alcohol restrictions are lifted and people are desperate.” Wendy laughed at the image of herself sneaking around, distributing wine to the nervous neighbourhood women.

The sisters sipped wine for a while in silence, caught for a while in the liminal space between their childhood and their ‘now’.  Any residue afternoon gold had dissipated, but the colours around them seemed more awake than before. The bougainvillea at the end of the garden waved its pink ‘hello’ as evening shadows shifted in the garden. Occasionally an acorn would fall from the pin oak and bounce off the tin roof of the shed with a loud ‘ting’. All around them there seemed to be movement.

“Thank you for staying here this week, Wends. I really appreciate it.” Mia was always unconsciously playing with the ring on her finger, sliding it up over her knuckle and back down, as if testing its fit. Sometimes she would only notice she was doing it when her skin was red and sensitive from the friction.

“I only wish I’d come sooner.”

There was warmth and a unique intimacy among the women of the family, but the things unsaid hung like icicles in the air above them, forever threatening to fall.

“Tensions are high, you know? With him and I locked up at home… Usually he’s out for most of the day and that makes things more manageable,” Mia attempted to explain, shifting in her chair.

Wendy zoned in on the bee that had just landed on the thin rim of the third, untouched wine glass. As it enthusiastically swallowed the dark sticky liquid, its abdomen bounced up and down in what looked like a little dance of thanks

“Also, the lockdown has really impacted business so he’s in quite a bad space,” Mia continued.

“It’s past your bed-time little bee!” Wendy cooed at the insect, ignoring her sister’s comment and the subtle pleading tone in her voice. She had made up her mind.

The patio door swung open, startling both women.

“Sorry ladies, that Zoom meeting went on much longer than expected.” Richard walked out onto the porch. His footsteps, in his pointed leather shoes, were too loud, reverberating across the wood and disrupting the late afternoon silence. Wendy suddenly realised that she had never seen him without shoes on. She almost laughed out loud trying to imagine him in socked feet or slippers.

“Richard!” Mia exclaimed, too brightly, “At least you’re done for the day.”

“It’s been a long one” he responded. He walked over to where his fiancé was sitting and placed his hands on her shoulders.

Mia shrunk at his touch. It would have been imperceptible to most, but not to Wendy.

Wendy’s heart rate quickened. She tried to focus on the bee again. He was on his back now, next to the wine glass, his tiny legs thrashing in panic and his wings trembling. Soon he would be paralysed.

“What’s this?” Richard asked, lifting his eyebrows at the glasses of wine on the table.

“Wendy’s mulberry wine is finally ready,” Mia informed Richard. “It’s so delicious!”

“Homemade Wine! You keep this up and we’ll have to ask you to stay forever, Wendy,” he smiled, fooling no-one. Wendy matched his blue stare. “Nonsense, I owe you guys for letting me stay in your lovely home!” She imagined prying his hands off of her sister.

“Come sit next to me” Mia said, turning slightly and looking up at Richard. Some of her long hair fell behind her shoulder as she moved, revealing part of the constellation of bruises that stretched across her chest.

Richard pulled out a chair and sat down, leaning back and spreading his legs out. He placed his arm on the back of Mia’s chair, staring intently at Wendy.

“I poured a special glass just for you, Rich!” Wendy chirped, moving the third glass of wine towards him.

Mia’s eyes fell on the bee just before her sister swiped it off the table with the back of her hand. His little body was stiff and still sticky with mulberry wine. She closed her eyes and looked up at the stars, much brighter now, throbbing with light in the heavy, dark sky. For what felt like the first time in years, she breathed out.