Chapter 7 #2
Finally, Mebel thinks. She’s had just about enough of Chef Clarke droning on about safety, and she is raring to get to work. She slides the knife out of its holder and grips it firmly. This is her time to shine.
Well, in actuality, the only knife Mebel has held in the past few years was a butter knife at breakfast and a steak knife at dinner, but how hard can chopping vegetables be, anyway?
Chef Clarke points to a large bowl next to him, which is full of potatoes.
“You will be chopping these babies. When you come up here to collect the potatoes, you also need to collect one of these boards.” He picks up a square board on which are differently shaped pieces of wood.
The borders of the board have been marked with measurements, like a ruler.
“This is your chopping guide. Memorize it. Today, we are going to be working on the cube, chop, and dice. That’s these three cubes here.
Your potatoes need to be cut to these precise measurements.
” He points at three different wooden cubes on the board. “Understand?”
There is a chorus of “Yes, Chef.”
“Right, please come up and collect your board and your potatoes. Twenty potatoes a person.”
Mebel struts from behind her workstation to the front of the classroom.
To her irritation, the other students ahead of her aren’t falling over themselves to let her go to the front of the line.
In Chinese culture, young people are taught to always give way to their elders, and it would be unthinkable for someone her age to stand in line behind these twenty-something-year-olds.
Still, she reminds herself, you are no longer in Asia, and as they say, when in Rome, wear Versace.
And so she waits patiently and graciously (which for Mebel means not glaring at the other students and telling them that their ancestors are disappointed in them) until her turn comes.
“Here you are, Mebel,” Chef Clarke says.
Mebel tries not to wince at the use of her first name. Chef Clarke looks like he’s in his fifties, which must mean he’s in his forties, and really, he should be calling her Big Sister at the very least. When in Rome, she reminds herself. God, how she wishes she were in Rome.
Twenty potatoes make for a surprisingly heavy load. Mebel grunts as she lifts her bowl and nearly topples over. The bowl thumps back on the countertop. Heads turn, and once again, she is the subject of everyone’s stare.
Come on, Mebel thinks. Do not let me down now. She does Pilates, for heaven’s sake. But Pilates is different from, well, what can only be described as menial labor. The words “menial labor” very nearly send Mebel over the edge. How far she has fallen!
Chef Clarke peers over the counter, down at her feet, then says, “Er, Mebel, are you wearing high heels?”
Mebel smiles primly. “These are Louboutins.”
“Right. Well, in the kitchen, we wear comfortable footwear. Sneakers. Shoes that allow you to be on your feet for six consecutive hours.”
“Six consecutive hours?” Mebel cries.
“At a minimum. Some places will require you to be on your feet for eight, ten hours. You may end up taking double shifts, which—”
Mebel laughs. “Oh, no. I won’t take double shift. I won’t even take one shift.”
Chef Clarke looks blankly at her.
“I am not going to work in restaurant.”
“Right. Then can I ask why you are here?”
“To win back my husband. I learn to cook white people food for him, and he will see that he make mistake.”
“White people food,” Chef Clarke murmurs, as though in a daze.
“Yes, authentic white people food, taught to me by you. A white person.”
“Er, right. Yes, well, that is me.” He laughs weakly and tugs at his collar. “Uh…well. Might I suggest that even though you don’t have plans of working in a restaurant, you should still consider changing your footwear?”
Mebel looks forlornly at her feet. “I will consider.”
“Good.” He looks over her shoulder at the student behind her, then looks back at her again. “Is there anything else I can help you with, Mebel?”
“Can you carry my potatoes back to my table?”
Chef Clarke frowns. “I’m afraid not. This is part of being a chef. You need to be able to carry heavy loads back and forth from the freezer to the worktop.”
Mebel’s mouth drops open, aghast. “Why you are so disrespectful?” she cries. “First of all, I tell you already, I don’t want to be chef. I am going to be home cook for my husband, so he don’t leave me for our private chef.”
“Er—” Chef Clarke’s eyes roam wildly around the room, as though hoping for someone to come to his rescue. No one does.
“Second of all, I am lady. I am wearing Louboutins. Do you think that when Christian Louboutin design these shoes, he think, ‘Ah, the lady wearing this will be carrying twenty potatoes’? Of course not. I thought you English man are taught to treat women like ladies. Where is the English manners now?”
Chef Clarke’s mouth opens and closes. He looks like a fish drowning on land.
“I’ll help,” Gemma says.
Before Mebel or Chef Clarke can say anything, Gemma picks up the bowl of potatoes and marches to the back of the classroom. She puts the bowl down on Mebel’s workstation and proceeds to the front once more to collect her own bowl of potatoes.
Mebel utters an audible hmph, narrows her eyes at Chef Clarke to let him know that he’s far from being off the hook, and returns to her workstation. When Gemma returns to her spot next to Mebel, Mebel reaches out and catches her attention. “Thank you,” Mebel says.
Gemma smiles. “No problem.” She turns her attention back to her worktop, signaling that the conversation is over.
With a small sigh, Mebel picks up her measuring board.
There are nine pieces of wood stuck to it, all of them in different shapes.
Each shape has been labeled, and Mebel’s eyes swim as she scans them.
These names are ridiculous: Brunoise. Chiffonade.
Julienne. Why don’t they give these cuts more sensible names, like “Thinly sliced” and “Very thinly sliced”?
How is one supposed to remember any of these?
Well, never mind that, she doesn’t have to worry about brunoise and so on today.
She’s supposed to be doing the…what was it again?
Ah. Mebel locates the three cubes on the board.
The chop, cube, and dice. Again, she glowers at the board.
Why didn’t they just name them the “small cube,” the “medium cube,” and “the large cube”?
With the potatoes distributed among the students, Chef Clarke asks for their attention once more and demonstrates how to first do the “cube.”
“After peeling the potatoes, you want to slice them like so—we are looking for one-centimeter cubes today, and you really want every side to be as even as possible. Notice how I’m holding the chef’s knife.
” He holds up his knife before bringing it back down.
“Tip of the knife, then down, like this. Use the measurements on your board to guide you. Understand?”
The class says, “Yes, Chef.”
Mebel begins to peel a potato, which starts out as a peaceful task but quickly turns into a boring chore.
By the fifth potato, Mebel’s wrist and left hand are killing her.
Every few seconds, she has to put the potato down and clench her hand into a fist, open it, clench, rotate the wrist, and so on in an effort to get feeling back into her hand.
She gives up after the sixth potato and decides to start chopping first. Maybe the difference in hand movements will ease the throbbing ache.
I’m pretty good at this, Mebel thinks as she makes quick work of her first potato. These are good cubes, and Mebel is pleased with her efforts. But when Chef Clarke gets to her table, he frowns down at her handiwork.
“I cube the potato,” Mebel says with pride.
Chef Clarke picks out one of the cubes and puts it next to the wooden cube on the measuring board.
Mebel’s smile slips. Before, she’d thought her cubes were decent.
But when compared side by side to the wooden cube, her cube looks pathetic.
It’s wonky, for one, the angles all haphazard instead of right angles.
And for another, it doesn’t even look like a cube.
More like a trapezoid with four different lengths.
And it’s almost twice as big as the wooden cube.
My goodness, she thinks. How could I have been so off?
The answer is obvious, of course. She’s off because she’s never had to do anything that requires hand-eye coordination and the kind of motor skills needed to handle a chef’s knife to chop a root vegetable up into precise shapes.
Her fine motor skills have been devoted to things like applying makeup meticulously (in fact, Mebel thinks, put her in a painting class, and she’ll probably knock their socks off) or penning handwritten thank-you cards to send to her guests after one of her dinner parties (once more, if only this were a painting class, she would be painting circles around everyone).
“These are not adequate, I’m afraid,” Chef Clarke says, and even though he is a soft-spoken man, Mebel knows that every pair of ears in the class is pricked, everyone secretly listening in as they pretend to be hyperfocused on their potatoes.
“These are so badly cut that I won’t be using them in the dish we are making.
These can go into the mashed potato bowl. ”
The mashed potato bowl? None of these four words, used in isolation, can be accused of being a slur, but put together in this context, somehow they have become the most offensive thing Mebel has ever had spoken to her.
Tears prick the backs of her eyes, and she can’t trust herself to speak.
She merely nods and keeps her eyes on her knife and reminds herself that if she were to stab Chef Clarke with it, she would only have herself to blame for getting her custom-made Hermès uniform bloody.
“This way, Mebel,” Chef Clarke is saying, and Mebel struggles to pay attention to the way he holds the knife and how he slices into the potato. “Understand?” he says.
She nods again, trying to swallow the lump of humiliation in her throat.
She breathes a sigh of relief when Chef Clarke leaves her station and goes to the next one.
The rest of the time, she struggles to follow his instruction, but really, her mind is alternating between going from: I’m too pretty to be chopping potatoes into cubes to Waaah, I want to go home!
She gives it her best shot over the course of the next few potatoes, but by her fifth potato, her arms are hurting so badly that there is no longer any point in attempting to be precise.
She can barely keep her hand from shaking as she holds the knife.
Her brain packs up its bags and leaves the building, and her chops become haphazard, more hack and slash than an intentional slice.
In fact, Mebel is so exhausted that she doesn’t feel the knife slicing into her index finger.
The first thing to register in her mind is the sound the blade makes being different to the sound it’s been making as it bites into the potato.
She looks down and sees a pale white line appear along the side of her finger, then as she watches, the line turns from white to red, and now all of a sudden blood is flowing, not spurting—thank god—but a definite drip.
It dribbles down her fingertip and splashes onto the (badly chopped) potatoes.
For a moment, Mebel doesn’t move. She still has yet to feel any pain. In fact, the one who notices is Gemma, who goes, “Oh my god. Chef? Chef! We need help!”
Chef Clarke appears at Mebel’s side, and a towel is wrapped around her finger, and as Chef Clarke squeezes down, the pain finally makes its entrance.
And, boy, what an entrance it is, explosive and flamboyant, demanding all of Mebel’s attention into laser-sharp focus.
She gasps out loud, her senses screaming back into focus. “Is my finger gone?” she cries.
Chef Clarke gives her a flat expression. “No, Mebel. It’s not a very deep cut. I’ve had much worse.” He holds up his left hand, which is marked with not just knife scars but also burn scars. “But let’s get you to the doctor in case you need stitches.”
“Stitches?” Mebel gasps. “But I’m wearing Cartier,” she says weakly.
Instead of being understanding, Chef Clarke gives her a stern look and says, “You really should have taken all those rings off. We went over this in the food sanitation lecture. Right, come on. And put pressure on that cut.”
And, in a daze, her right hand clamped around her left, Mebel totters after him.
Everyone watches her leave. Mebel has always believed in the power of a good exit, which requires (a) everyone’s attention, and (b) memorable parting words.
And so as she steps out of the kitchen, she pauses, turns around, and says, “Maybe don’t put my potatoes in the mashed potato bowl.
There is blood on them.” With that, she turns and leaves the school.