Spit Take

“Abracadabra!”

“Woosh!”

“No, not like that, like this.” Lacey Saris spit on the ground, and, then, a foot above her head, she heard her mom twist the key in the lock.

“See?” Lacey said as the door swung open. “What you were doing wasn’t real magic.”

“Lacey —” said her mother warningly, but, rather than hurt, Lacey’s friends were now quiet with awe.

“You do have a magic door,” whispered Ellie. Robert nodded, his eyes wide.

“I told you,” Lacey smiled furtively and led the way in across the threshold, head held high.

— — — — 

“Oh my god, it’s not magic, Lace,” her brother, Freddie, had laughed when she recounted her triumphs later that evening.

“Of course it is.” Benjamin, the eldest, shot a look at his brother. “Of course it is.” He said it to Lacey this time, with less bite in his voice.

“Oh, come on, we’re all too old for this now.” Freddie pushed messy brown hair back from his forehead with all the conviction and confidence he could now conjure at ten years old. True, Lacey was two years younger, but he had discovered the truth about the spitting when he was seven and a half. He went along with it for his sister — and for his parents too — but he was getting tired of spitting (though he was about the only boy his age who was; rather, that’s just when spitting was getting good for most of his peers). At age ten, Freddie felt had seen the world in the two-block radius he was allowed to roam — and none of those houses or his friends’ across town had this spitting rule. 

At first, he thought their door might just be special — like Lacey, he had been proud of it, but, then, worried it was weird enough to attract labels and inspire his own social alienation in his classmates, he had tried to hide it. Only his best friends, Roofus and George, knew.

He had dealt with this inner turmoil for a few months until he had decided to go looking for answers on the school computer during library block. After some unsuccessful searches for “magic door,” he had tried various forms of “spitting + door” and found, at last, an odd website using an excitingly peculiar font that detailed an old Celtic tradition: spit tairsi.

Finally, a satisfying answer for the young boy. An ancient tradition and a foreign language seemed solid ground to stand on, And it meant their door could probably open just fine without spit like regular doors. What a relief it had been. 

But now, having opened their door without spitting in secret many times since then, it just seemed silly. For his part, Freddie was ready to move on.

But when Freddie had proudly and with middle-sibling nonchalance divulged his findings, Benjamin interjected plainly and in his best eldest-sibling tone. “Freddie,” he held up a hand to slow his brother’s role, eyebrows raised with modest incredulity. “We’re not Irish, Freddie.” There was a beat of silence wherein the two brothers held each other’s gaze, each pair of eyes looking for signs of mischief in the other. But both were sincere — but Benjamin’s convictions stood rooted more firmly in things other than questionable websites. Freddie finally conceded this Battle Royale.

“We’re not?” he said. Freddie’s eyebrows had fallen from skeptical to calculating and frustrated.

“No,” Benjamin shook his head with his eyebrows skeptically high. “I have no idea where you got that from. You really shouldn’t be doing your own research without supervision —” he laughed, “ that’s probably not even a real Irish tradition.”

Freddie looked defeated. Out with the window flew his newfound knowledge as well as his research credentials. “So, what,” he said to his shoes, “it’s, like, actually magic then?”

“Of course not… it’s… well, it’s a sanitation thing I think,” Benjamin tried to remember what his father had said when he had asked. He couldn’t really remember the details, and he wasn’t even really sure his father hadn’t been kidding, but Benjamin had felt really important that he had been told this information that he didn’t really understand before any of his siblings. It was an adult responsibility with adult complexity and adult discrepancy as well. 

“Oh!” Benjamin had forgotten. Lacey was still in the room — he had been trying to keep up the magic schtick for her (he knew Freddie had given up on that long ago, but it was only today that he learned what for…). He turned to see her face. Far from the tearful facial expression he realized he had been expecting there, he found Lacey with her arms crossed, squinting intimidatingly as an eight-year-old could.

“Okay,” she said, “it’s not magic and we’re not Irish, so… what’s up exactly?” With a little pang of guilt, Benjamin read her unsaid words: and why have you been lying to me?

“Well, Dad said something about —”

“Sanitation,” Freddie and Lacey said together.

“Yeah… he said, well, that we’re kids and that, when he was a kid, he played outside a lot and he used to come in really dirty from all the mud and everything.” Benjamin strained to put pieces together in his head. “Oh! And that he sneezed a lot…” He knew this was important but he couldn’t remember why.

Freddie had now joined Lacey in crossing his arms. Benjamin tried again.

“So, one day, he was coming home from church and —”

“Church?” Said Freddie. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“You’ll see — just shhh. Ugh. Okay. Oh! Yeah, so, church, and then, his mom —”

“Grams!” Exclaimed Lacey.

“Yeah, Grams — she said that if he didn’t spit before he came in the house, he would carry all that dirt from the outside in inside his soul.”

“Inside his soul?” Lacey and Freddie repeated.

“Yeah, so, the spitting was to clean their souls, I think. Dad called in ‘sanitation.’” Nobody said anything then. Benjamin, all a-fluster from trying to explain himself, and then embarrassed at having been all a-fluster, tried to regain his typical sincerity. “Dad said it was very important.” He gave a nod and his story was over.

“Sanitation,” Repeated Freddie.

“Sanitation,” Repeated Lacey.

“It means cleanliness,” Said Benjamin.

“I know what it means!” Lacey and Freddie both exclaimed, lying completely through their little teeth. But now they did know — and they both privately and silently reasoned that having said they knew after Benjamin had told them what it meant, meant they really hadn’t been lying. Though neither of them were too overwhelmingly burdened by their conscience, they felt pleasantly assured by this conclusion.

— — — — — 

That Sunday, the Saris family was coming home from church. The kids piled out of the car with skewed bowties, wrinkles, and only slightly ripped petticoats. “Home again!” said their mother, brightly, as they reached the front door. Spit! And in she went. Spit! And in went Mr. Saris. Lacey was next but she stopped short.

“Mom? Dad?” she called out.

“Lacey?” They turned.

“Your turn, Lace!” said Mr. Saris.

“Yeah, come on,” whispered Freddie behind her. “We have to sanitatiate.”

“Dad, why do we spit?” asked Lacey. After that day of tall and strange tales from her brothers, and a resultantly long and confusing week afterward, she was tired of all the guessing and decided to go to the source.

“Well, it comes from my side of the family — ” Both Mr. and Ms. Saris began and then stopped.

“It’s from my family, George.”

“Sasha — it was my mother’s thing, she —”

“No, no, it was my sister’s game, don’t you remember?”

Freddie and Lacey turned to look back at Benjamin, who, bewildered, was following his parent’s conversation like a game of ping pong. He shook his head. “I don’t know,” he mouthed to his siblings, shrugging.

After a few moments, under the hum of their parents’ frantic discussion — too diplomatic in nature to be an argument, the kids observed — Freddie stepped apart from the group about a block down the road. He cupped his hands around his mouth. “I’m going to Max’s!” He yelled. The adults didn’t seem to hear. Then, he leaned toward his siblings. “You don’t have to spit by the door over there,” he said.

“What about sanitation?” asked Lacey.

Freddie shrugged. “It seems pretty clean. And they have a white couch.” Freddie and Lacey looked to their older brother. Satisfied with the news of a clean white couch — the Saris’ white couch had been green for several years — Benjamin gave the ‘O.K.’

“We’re going to Max’s!” they yelled. Finally, they got a distracted thumbs up from their mother. They turned on their heels and went skipping down the street, the “spitting” discussion fading from ear shot.