And what if… what if I were to fall apart like her? She doesn’t dare ask. You wouldn’t leave even then? You wouldn’t walk away from the rubble and start a new life?

Tovi

"I hope he’ll be nice,” I said to Ima, swiping my finger along the edge of the mixing bowl while her back was turned.

“Who?” she asked, carefully pulling two shallow trays of cake out of the oven, one dark and one light. She works in the evening, after the little ones are in bed.

“The boy who’ll want to marry me.”

“Oy, Tovi!” Ima laid the cakes down on the counter and gave me a hug. “Of course he’ll be nice. We’d never agree to a shidduch for you with anyone who’s not nice.”

She took out a new, fancy-shaped cookie cutter she’d just bought, and started cutting the cakes to make petit-fours. She was going to layer the two colors with cream in the middle and then decorate them.

“Are there any middles for me?” I asked hopefully. “Middles” is what we call the leftover bits of cake or dough between the cut-out shapes.

“I get the middles,” Chaimke announced from the living room. “I’m the bechor in this house.”

“Ima! Why don’t you send Chaimke to a yeshivah out of town?” I shot back at him.

“Because then I wouldn’t get my middles every night,” he said in an annoyingly calm voice, coming over to claim his portion. “Hey,” he said. “What happened to all the middles?”

Ah… that was the special thing about Ima’s new cookie cutter. It cut out bird shapes so precisely that between every two horizontal rows of birds, there were more birds in vertical rows. They fit together exactly, without any leftover cake at all.

Ima was delighted. “Isn’t that fabulous?” she said, not noticing our crushed expressions. “Not a single crumb wasted.”

It was disappointing not to get any middles, but it was also interesting. “How does that work?” I asked. “I thought that could only happen if you cut squares or rectangles. Or maybe triangles, too….”

Ima told us how the lady in the baking-goods store had explained it to her. There’s a thing in geometry called tessellation. Mathematicians figure out all sorts of shapes that fit together perfectly without any middles (they have some scientific word for “middles,” of course). It’s used for tiling floors and walls with fancy designs, and these new cookie cutters are made according to the same principle.

“Wow,” I said. I liked the idea.