Upper Crust

It’s only the crust, I think.

Only the crust?! Yitzy can eat it soon with peanut butter. At two-and-a-half, he isn’t picky. At least not yet. Yeah — but it’ll have to sit on the table or counter until then. And I want the place clean.

I can break it up into little pieces and chuck it. A wisp of a memory tickles at the far recesses of my gray matter.

Mrs. Brisk back in fifth grade, her navy cable knit sweater firmly closed with three brown wooden buttons, her sheitel hairs standing stiff and straight, as daunted in her presence as we are. I’m lunch monitor together with Chevy Braunstein, and there are oodles of half-eaten slices of bread strewn all over the table, thanks to the mandatory wash-for-hamotzi school rule that had every student either really washing and stuffing the requisite k’zayis down her throat, or mock washing-eating-bentshing (with successful improvisations instead of sheim Hashem). Apparently, eating bread was out of style back then.

“It’s not kavod to throw out bread. It’s best to divide it into little pieces and then dispose of it, in order not to shame the bread,” Mrs. Brisk had said. Chevy and I stood in Bnos Esther’s pink-tiled lunchroom near the giant garbage bin, very slowly tearing the bread apart into teeny crumbs, because girls on lunch duty got a late pass for English class.