Three ways of looking at a grilled cheese sandwich

1. Toy box

I am three years old and sitting on my toy box against the wall where the kitchen becomes the living room. I am eating a grilled cheese sandwich. The air is golden but also filled with the sound of my parents arguing.

I am sitting placidly, eating my sandwich. They are yelling. I remember this, but it’s possible that none of it is true.

I am supposed to have told my mother at one point that the separation was her fault, because she was the one who yelled. I don’t remember saying that, but it’s possible that I did.

The toy box has holes drilled into the back, each the size of a silver dollar. My father drilled these holes in case I get into the box and can’t get out. It will be years before I understand that he knows what it’s like to be trapped in a box where breath is no longer possible. He doesn’t want that for me.

2. Melt

As I walk up the stairs to my boyfriend’s apartment I can smell something burning. Like toast, but with an acrid undertone. I find him in his kitchen with a bemused expression, staring through the glass door of his toaster oven.

“It’s not melting,” he says.

“What?” I ask.

He points at the door. “The cheese.”

I open the toaster oven and pull the grilled cheese sandwich onto a plate. The bread is burnt, but the cheese, which should be dripping past the bottom slice, is holding still. I take off the top slice of bread and give the cheese a poke, watching as it slides into transparency where I poked it and then reforms a second after I take my finger away.

“You didn’t take the plastic off,” I tell him. His expression deepens from bemused to bewildered, as he pulls his fingers nervously through his silken blond hair.

“Are you sure?” he asks.

“Don’t eat this,” I say.

He is studying to be an astrophysicist, and he will be good at it. It’s the earthly problems that elude him. The physics of cheese.

3. Upside

A few years into our marriage my husband proposes a new way to make a grilled cheese sandwich. “What if,” he says, “we butter the top side of the top slice?”

The idea is revolutionary. Up until now we have been treating our grilled cheese sandwiches like regular cheese sandwiches, only toasted: with the buttered sides of the bread on the inside, facing the cheese. This kind of sandwich doesn’t have any grease on the outside, and is easy to hold.

My husband tells me years later that his mother used to butter both sides of the bread before sliding the sandwich into the pan. The result would be a grilled cheese sandwich that was greasy in the hands but golden, crispy.

Sitting at the ancient kitchen table we lick our fingers before wiping our hands. We do not know it then, but we have a lifetime of such moments ahead of us: innovations, small changes, course corrections. These are the grilled cheese moments that make our life together what it is: glorious, messy, delicious.