Before Sam and I were married, before we even lived together, there was a night I have never quite let him live down, which involved a chicken, a smoke detector, and a fire extinguisher that, thankfully, we never actually had to use, though we did take it down off the wall, which in hindsight was its own kind of confession.
We had been dating for about four months, long enough that I wanted to impress him, not long enough that I fully understood what a disaster he was in a kitchen. He had told me, with total confidence, that he “cooked all the time,” which turned out to mean he was extremely good at making cereal and occasionally toast.
The plan was roast chicken, something simple, something I could have made alone in forty minutes without incident. But Sam wanted to help, and I loved him, and love makes you say yes to things you will regret. I handed him the task of trussing the chicken while I dealt with the vegetables, and when I turned back around he had used, and I am not exaggerating this number, an entire roll of kitchen twine, wrapped so many times around that bird it looked less like dinner and more like a hostage situation.
I untied it. He looked wounded. I explained, as gently as I could manage while laughing, that you do not need forty feet of string to close a chicken’s legs. He said he was “just being thorough.” I said thoroughness was not the issue, the issue was that our chicken now resembled a piece of avant garde art.
The real trouble started with the oven. I asked him to preheat it while I finished the vegetables. What I did not know, and what he did not think to mention, was that he had, at some point in the last five minutes, decided the oven “smelled a little off” and had opened it to investigate, found nothing, and simply closed it again without turning it back on. So when I went to put the chicken in forty minutes later, expecting a hot oven, I found a cold one, a very confused expression on Sam’s face, and a growing sense that dinner was not going to happen on schedule.
We turned it on. We waited. About twenty minutes in, something started smoking, and it took us an embarrassingly long time to realize the smoke was coming from a stray piece of twine, one of the forty feet, that had fallen onto the bottom of the oven and was now cheerfully burning away. The smoke detector, which I have never once forgiven for its timing, chose that exact moment to go off at a volume that could have been heard from the street.
Sam, to his credit, did not panic. He grabbed a dish towel and started fanning the smoke detector like he was trying to put out an actual fire with air alone, while I opened every window in the apartment and apologized to it out loud, as though it could hear me. The chicken survived. It was, against all odds, slightly overdone but genuinely delicious, and we ate it sitting on the kitchen floor because every window was open and it was the middle of winter and the living room had become, briefly, uninhabitable.
I remember looking at him that night, twine still on the counter, smoke detector finally silent, both of us wrapped in blankets eating chicken off paper plates on the floor, and thinking, with total clarity, that I wanted to keep doing exactly this, badly, with him, for a very long time.
We have gotten better since then. Mostly. He still uses too much twine. I have simply stopped questioning it, because some fights are not worth having, and because somewhere in that ridiculous, smoky, overcooked evening, I fell in love with a man who fans a smoke detector with a dish towel like it’s a reasonable plan, and means it completely.
