so you don’t have to

I drink my brother’s spit unwillingly. 

I’m thirteen, grabbing a cup off the counter, off the table, because I’m thirsty. 

I lift the cup to my lips, tilt it back, pour the clear liquid into my throat. I take big gulps, hurried swallows, thinking it’s water. 

I don’t realize until my mouth is coated in the slimy liquid, my tongue oily, my teeth shocked by the unexpected warmth, that I’m drinking my brother’s saliva. I gag, scream with closed lips, rush to the sink where I spit out my brother’s spit.  

I’m thirteen with braces on my teeth and acne dotting my face. I have breasts beginning to form, am beginning to feel the first tingles of sexuality, and decide to take a pair of scissors to my T-shirts. I cut a slit in front, which does nothing because my breasts aren’t big enough for cleavage. But it makes me feel better, more womanly. No one says anything even though it looks terrible. It’s the kind of thing a mother should deal with. But my mother is preoccupied.

She is watching my anorexic younger brother lean his body forward, hunching over a cup pressed between his hands like rosary beads. The cup is white, green, blue—the color of the cup doesn’t matter at this point. 

Eventually, my mother will buy red cups made of hard plastic for my brother to use. Cups that will outlast his anorexia, our house, my parent’s marriage. Cups that I will drink out of ten years later, at twenty-two, on an unimportant June day. I’ll be in a blue bikini, and the memory of the cup will hit me unexpectedly, after years of careful forgetting, and I’ll let the cup clatter to the floor. I’ll sink to my knees and mop up the spilt water with slow strokes. I’ll stay on the floor, fingernails pressed into my thighs, and lose the rest of the warm day. 

Now, I watch a ten-year-old boy curl his body around a cup, trying to block out the world and keep this prayer of his out of sight. A slow string of saliva falls from his mouth into the cup. I hold my breath, waiting to hear the soft plop of it reaching the bottom. It hits. I exhale. We keep living.

Kenneth wipes at his mouth and slowly straightens his spine until he’s upright once again, cup repositioned in his lap. His gaze is forward, never acknowledging my stare even though it’s blatant, my eyes roaming over his sharp bony shoulders, deep set eyes, collarbone trying to poke its way out of his skin. 

I wonder if he knows those are supposed to be my snappable bones, my transparent skin. If he knows I’m supposed to wither away for the sake of being pretty, because anorexia isn’t supposed to be for fifth-grade boys who want to be better at little league football. And I’m not sure if I’m angrier at my brother or at myself for not starving my own body, leaving it for my little brother to do first.  

Slowly, Kenneth places the cup on the nearest surface. The kitchen table or counter, end tables with lamps, the stairs, an old suitcase my mother has given legs and transformed into the living room coffee table. Kenneth places his cup down, gives us all a minute where we can pretend he’s done with it. 

He’s not. We all know that. Every few minutes, there’s the furling and unfurling of my brother’s body around a cup, a new deposit of spit. Every few minutes, a reminder of what this ten-year-old boy has done to himself. His desire to be invisible drives my father to drink, drives my mother into Jesus’ arms, and drives me into silence.  

The doctors say not to fight it as long as he’s eating. It doesn’t matter that it still takes three hours of pleading for Kenneth to eat seven bites of corn at dinner. So long as he’s eating, the spitting is allowed to go on, unquestioned. The cups are allowed to cover the house, settle like a cloud of dust, eyes in every corner. My brother isn’t in danger of dying anymore. 

So I’m not allowed to be upset about the cups. 

But I am. Because my brother’s various colored cups hide among the others on the counters, next to my father’s filled with wine, behind my mother’s with diet coke, and mine filled with water. Because every few days I pick up his cup by mistake. 

I drink this bit of my brother’s body he doesn’t want, can’t consume, too afraid of the calories it might hold. It slides into me and mingles with the liquids of my own body, the juices of my stomach, the saliva that allows me to scream. 

And I do scream at him. This ten-year-old boy whose brain got stuck. Can’t unstick. But I’m thirteen. I only care about what his illness is doing to me. Robbing me of my mother’s attention, leaving me alone, drinking saliva and checking to make sure my tears aren’t gooey reincarnated saliva spilling out of me. I stay shut away in my room. 

Even after the red cups arrive, red cups to warn me of what’s inside, I still forget, still drink from them. I never stop being horrified. But I learn to stop resisting, to just swallow this bit of my brother. Put the cup in the sink. Walk away. Tell no one what I’ve done. 

I drink my brother unwillingly. But I drink, learn to consume those calories for him, join in his pain, let it enter my body, make it mine.

Notter is a graduate of Chatham University's MFA program and her work has been featured in IDK Magazine and on WUMW Milwaukee Public Radio. While at Beloit College, she won the David & Marion Stocking Prize for Best Creative Nonfiction.