The kitchen was where I first began to grasp the meaning of the word wife. Here we were, a pair of twenty-four-year-olds: one day we’re a graduate student and a working artist, the next day we’re a wife and a husband. Before, we had always put the rude meals we ate on the table together. Now, suddenly, Stefan was in his studio each evening drawing or reading, and I was in the kitchen struggling to prepare and serve a meal we both thought should be proper. I remember taking an hour and a half to prepare some god-awful casserole dish out of a woman’s magazine, the two of us wolfing it down in ten minutes, then me taking an hour to clean up the mess, staring into the sink thinking, Is this it for the next forty years?