The Crunch and its Aftermath

by Emma Lichtenstein

When I was twelve, I started fasting on Yom Kippur. That was the year I had my Bat Mitzvah and the year I became a Jewish woman. In the few years before I turned twelve, I ate sparingly on that holiest day - no junk food, no breakfast. And in the years before that, I ate whatever I wanted. My mom too. She's not Jewish - she just happened to marry my Jewish dad. My dad always fasted. He'd go to Temple in the morning, and we'd go with him - me, my sister, and my mom. My sister was a baby, and I sat on the floor and colored my coloring books on the metal chair I was supposed to be sitting in, which pleased my parents because I didn't make noise. At one or so, we'd leave Temple and drive home. The car windows would be rolled up tight, locking in the rays of the early afternoon sun, and I would bask, free and alive, dressed up and soaking in the sun's light. The sunshine really does look different in the very middle of the day. When we got home, my mom would make me a snack, and I'd go off and play or something. I don't really remember. My dad would nap, or read. I do remember that. He was no fun on Yom Kippur. A few years later, I think I must have been about nine. We got home from Temple, and the kitchen was lit by that hot and yellow midday sunshine. Our striped curtains hung eagerly. My dad lay down on the living room couch and picked up his book, and my mom flipped through some papers on the kitchen table. Or maybe she was downstairs. It doesn't matter. I opened the refrigerator and pulled out the fruit drawer at the bottom. There were four granny smiths lying in wait. I picked the best one and rinsed it in the sink. It was the biggest, the roundest, the firmest. The grassiest green. It promised to be the juiciest. I grabbed the towel from the oven door and dried it. I slid on my socks across the kitchen floor and into the living room and bit down, hard. It was a huge bite. A huge cruncher! That bite echoed around the whole house - into the bedrooms and into the bathrooms; it attacked my dad on the couch, and probably even rocketed the neighbors. "Mmmm MMM!" I shrieked, and danced a little onto my toes, and shook my head in delight. Boy, was it ever a juicer! I even slurped to keep it in, slurp and chew at the same time, but lots of the juice still trickled onto my chin, and was sticky on my hand, and then sticky on my shirt when I tried to wipe it off. But the sticky meant sweetness, and the sticky meant juicy. The sticky meant happiness and freedom and sunshine and early afternoons and I loved the sticky! My dad did not. My dad looked up from the couch. His eyes were angry, weary. "Emma - " he protested, and I'd never heard my name so saturated with annoyance, "Could you please go anywhere else to eat that thing?" Then he turned back to his book. He was hungry, and he was alone on the couch, and he loved apples. He had nothing more to say to me - how could he? I had just ruined his day. I didn't want the apple anymore. I rushed from the living room - into my room, I think - just somewhere away from my dad. It was at that moment - the moment after that monumental crunch - that I realized that my dad was a person. He wanted an apple and he couldn't have it. He actually wanted something. I had that thing that he wanted, and I was no longer merely his daughter. I was another human being, and I could do things wrong to him. I could hurt his feelings, and I could be insensitive, and it actually affected him. We were suddenly real players in the real world; we interacted and we reacted. And for the first time ever, my dad wasn't the calm one. This time, he had feelings of his own, and he showed them. He was fallible. I have no memory of eating the rest of the apple. I have no memory of the rest of that day, or the rest of my thoughts about my dad's expulsion from the world of superheroes and entrance into personhood. I'm not even sure what else happened in that year, that last year that I really ate on Yom Kippur.