Wingdings
Sometime before Christmas the mothers made a deal. No more sugar, the mothers said. No more pudding no more lemon cake no more chewing gum no more Coca Cola no more ice cream no more Fruit-by-the-Foot no more raised-glazed no more Pop Tarts no more maple syrup no more Captain Crunch. Decisions were still being made regarding fruit juice. With pulp, only, some mothers said. For the fiber.
We imagined the mothers made this deal around a card table. We imagined them in floral prints and house shoes debating Big Sugar. But in actuality the mothers made this decision via group-text. One of them was driving David to his Mock Trial hearing. The kids are out of control, David’s mother said to David. David wasn’t out of control. David was first chair prosecutor. He was deeply invested in the Washington State Penal Code. He wore, six days a week, his absent father’s pleated Dockers.
Despite his conservative leanings, David came to us with the news. They’re taking it seriously, David said. We were in the basement asphyxiating. My turn, I said to Dougie. I flung my head down between my knees and back up again to get the blood flowing. Dougie was waist-deep in the Love Sac, recovering. MY TURN, I said to Dougie again. Dougie put his hand around my neck reluctantly. What do you think this means? we asked David. For us?
At school we unpacked our lunches. Salami. Two hard boiled eggs. Three-bean salad. A tin of almonds. Bullshit, we said, about the lunch. Not because there was anything we particularly missed. Or because we felt we had been particularly wronged. A lot of protein in that lunch, Steph said. I pinched her upper thigh hard, and she coughed up an almond skin. We had little money of our own, nothing for the vending machine. Show me Belarus on a map, our European History teacher demanded following lunch. We had never in our lives heard of this country. We fiddled around South America, the former Soviet republics, not getting any warmer. Did anything happen there? we wanted to know. Anything worth remembering?
And then only two more weeks of school before the winter holiday, and Friday is called on account of weather. We celebrate. The mothers do not celebrate. Who will stay home? they want to know. The dental office will not close on account of weather and neither will the bank and neither will The Peach and Staple, a tea and stationary shop my mother owns. No sugar, our mothers say as they leave. No sex. No Jerry Springer, no Twister, no booze. Just sit there. Read something, they say. Do your homework.
We drink three bottles of Robitussin and give some hand jobs. When they get home the mothers see the Twister box has been moved and the TV is tuned to Channel 2 and chlamydia is on the rise. We changed the default font on the desktop to Wingdings. Carly drank a fifth of peach schnapps. It could be worse, David says to the mothers, who are now beside themselves. He recounts the highlights of his last mock trial, an invented and didactic patricide. He gives every gory detail. The father, he says, with an ax, in the bathroom. The rest of us lament we have no fathers to kill.
Fix this, the mothers say, about the computer. They are frightened and furious, wondering if we’ve now actually turned them all crazy, not understanding our joke, someone’s joke, however many years ago. Wingdings is a series of dingbats, David tries to explain. This enrages them more. N, my mother tries to type, the start of her name. NNNN. All she gets is a series of black boxes.
Fine, say the mothers. No Christmas. No presents no cookies no tree no lights no stockings no prime rib no eggnog no sweaters no bullshit. We’re sorry, we say. You’re not, they say.
My mother lets me stay sitting beside her even though she’d rather I be in bed. I am not her favorite child, but I am her only child. I’m sorry about Christmas, I tell her. I know she will miss the wrapping and unwrapping of gifts. She will miss the tree and the breads with the dried fruits and the early morning and the fire in the fireplace we make only once a year. This hurts me more than it hurts you, my mother says, and I know she means it.
What is it you would have wanted? she asks me. I tell her I’m not really sure. I hadn’t thought about it. Perhaps this means I have everything I need, that I want for nothing. A hand around my neck, maybe, the blood leaving my brain. But how to explain that?
My mother drowns her coffee in milk, stirs. High above us it begins to snow. She tells me a story about my grandmother, how as a child in London, the Christmas of 1941, she stood in line for an hour waiting for a piece of fruit. The bombs were still going off. And they gave her a lemon. That was all they had. She ate the whole thing, she tells me. Pith and all.
There is a lesson in this, I’m pretty sure, a lesson about gratitude. In understanding what it is I have. When she goes up to bed, I’ll change the font back to Times, put the dishes away. I’ll find and wrap something she already owns, but beneath the tree, in red and gold paper, it will be new again. For now, I go to the kitchen, find a lemon, peel back the rind. No sugar, my mother says, and I bite down hard.
Nini Berndt (@neenjb) is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of Florida. Her work has appeared in Subtropics, The Southhampton Review, Passages North, Blackbird, Adroit, and elsewhere. Her debut novel, There Are Reasons for This, will be published by Tin House in June 2025. Currently she teaches at Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver, where she lives with her wife and son.