His Kitchen and Mine

I live in a big apartment with a very small kitchen. The apartment is something like 900 square feet, and the kitchen feels something like ten. The other day I found a light bulb lying in the back of my oven and wondered how I hadn’t noticed it in the three years I’ve lived here. Erik said that I should remove it before it exploded in my face, and when I did I found out it was already broken.

Erik’s kitchen is a little bigger, and his oven is fantastic. First of all, it’s gas, and it’s very big. You could bake a turkey in his oven. In mine, you might roast a chicken if you only used the bottom rack. His oven has a timer and a clock.

“Why don’t you ever use the timer?” he asked me once while I read a novel at his kitchen table, lost in novel-time, as if I were just waiting, in real-time, for the roasting potatoes to catch fire.

“Because I’ve never had one before,” I said, which wasn’t true, exactly. I think my mom has a timer on her stove, but I’ve never really cooked on her stove, and she’s never used the timer, as far as I know.

Erik laughs at my silverware, since none of it matches. That’s what he says. A few pieces match, I tell him. I bought the silverware at Goodwill when I first moved here, and I have four matching forks, moderately heavy forks with a nice sort of geometric-floral engraving. It gives me great joy to use my favorite spoon, too, the one with floral etchings. I feel like it’s a treasure, the only spoon like it in the whole world.

Only a few of my plates match, and I love them, big heavy plates in harvest gold with pseudo-Mexican flowers. Erik’s plates are soothing, though I wonder if the colors are warm enough. They’re powder blue and pure white. He bought them at Target, with matching bowls and mugs.

Erik loves the ocean. I love dirt. He loves blue, and I love brown. I love orange and pink and have pink and orange cloths tacked to my walls. Erik’s walls are covered with shelves of hundreds of books. His bedroom walls are painted a light ocean blue, and his white down bedspread seems to float in the middle of the room like a cloud.

When we were just getting to know each other, Erik told me that the birds woke him up every morning. It was nearly spring, and a flock of them had settled outside his bedroom window, chirping with the frosty sunrise.

“I want birds to wake me up,” I said. I had, at that time, spent many lonely hours by the window at my desk, using my grandma’s Field Guide to the Birds of North America to identify the same birds over and over: song sparrow, rock dove, Northern cardinal, American crow.

I can sleep through any kind of noise, though. Only sunlight wakes me up, and the thought of breakfast. Last week I asked Erik to buy more cinnamon. “You’re running out,” I said. He didn’t know I’d used it up cooking for him; he hadn’t bought new spices since he moved into his house. He’d never bought onions or garlic before I put them in his shopping cart.

My cabinets are full of grains and beans I’ve meant to cook for months or years: amaranth, yellow lentils, bulgur, barley, split peas. But I’m hesitant to cook things I don’t know much about. Anything I cook now should be good enough for two. Half of my Tupperware is gone, and half of the Tupperware in my kitchen doesn’t belong to me.

Advertisement