My First Day

My street pants were loose and sat low on my hips, so when I unzipped them, they fell easily down to my feet.  I felt momentarily sensual but quickly stepped out of them, leaving them in a pile on the floor.  I stepped into the black and white checked pants and pulled them up around my natural waist, over my navel.  The elastic snapped at my skin.  I peeled off the white athletic socks and kicked them over to my pants.  I pulled on a pair of black socks and black leather slip-on shoes.  Without high heels I am short, so the bottoms of the pants caught on the backs of my shoes.  I made a mental note to buy thread and fix them.  I left my navy blue t-shirt on and I shrugged into my school-issued jacket.  I buttoned it all the way down, running my hand over my embroidered name on the right-hand side.  ”Rochelle Bilow.”  How funny.  The hem reached the middle of my thighs.  I picked up the white apron and folded it over itself, sizing it to my stature.  I tied it around my waist, the bow over my stomach.  I nestled a white and green striped towel in its folds. I yanked my hair into a hasty bun, pushing it all under the white skull cap.  I felt to make sure it was secure.  My ears stuck out.  Had they always been so big?

I took a step to the right and studied my appearance in the mirror for as long as I could without drawing attention from the other women in the locker room.  I seemed shapeless, androgynous, clean.  My face had a weird shape that I hadn’t noticed hiding behind a fringe of bangs.  I didn’t particularly like the way I looked, but I tried to remember what Mary had told me when I tried on the uniform for her the night before.  ”You’re still cute,” she said.  ”I mean, you can tell you’re little underneath it, not fat.”
Okay.  I was ready.  
As we waited for further instruction, my classmates and I talked quietly.  We poked fun at one another’s appearances.  We laughed because none of our ID cards were working on the labyrinth of locked doors.  I didn’t like my picture, so I hid it in my pocket, along with my key and a tube of lip balm.
And then we were walking, behind our chef-instructor, to the kitchen.  He was intimidating and we were frightened.  Our bright smiles quickly fell to stolid facades, and I even found my hands meeting each other behind my back.
Everything was – and will be, for the remainder of my schooling – “Yes, Chef” and “No, Chef.”  When he took attendance, one student responded with a “Yeah.”  Another raised his hand and waved it a bit, saying “Right here.”  My stomach lurched both times; I was afraid for them and incredulous at their brashness.  Chef paused for a moment with each disregard, but chose not to acknowledge it.  
To my surprise, he then asked us to write our names, as well as our reason for attending the school, on a piece of paper.  I used the pink pen I’d tucked in the jacket pocket and talked about becoming a better food writer and restaurant critic.  Later in the evening, as we stood stooped over our work stations, mindlessly eating our school-issued meal of roasted chicken, vegetables and salad, Chef reviewed our answers.  ”Matthew?  Where are you?  Angela?  Patrick?”  As each student meekly raised his or her hand, Chef nodded knowingly, making a mental note to like, or dislike each one.  
“Oh, Rochelle,” he said when he got to my paper.  ”We all have to be nice to her – she’s a food writer.”  He was joking – but was that a bit of a sneer I heard?  
The second chef in the room turned to me. “You are?  Currently?  Already?”
“Yes, Chef,” I responded.  ”I write a column for a Syracuse paper.  And I do have a blog.”
The first chef rolled his eyes.  ”A blog!  The blog!  Everyone has this.”  I laughed nervously.
We were all given a bag with three zippers.  Each pocket contained the kitchen tools we’d eventually learn to use properly.  My favorite was the first pouch, with the fish spatula and tongs, but I suspect most of my classmates preferred the third; it contained long, silver, sharp knives.  As the second chef-instructor called out each piece of equipment, we held it high in the air to show him we had it.  When I picked up the chef’s knife, my hand shot in the air and immediately drooped.  I wasn’t expecting it to be so heavy.
Chef had an accent and incorrect syntax; he was not a native speaker.  It was hard to understand him, and I was struggling to keep up even without a language barrier.  So when he asked me to hand him a sautoir, I froze like a rabbit being pursued by a fox.  Sautoir?  Or had he said sauteuse?  Maybe I was imagining things, but was it possible he said russe?  Or rondeau?  I’d studied all of this the night prior, highlighting each definition in my book, but I couldn’t call to mind one single image.  Chef turned away to answer a classmate’s question, giving me time to run to the shelves and fetch his sautoir.  Sautoir, sauteuse, fuck!  It didn’t matter if I’d understood him or not – I couldn’t remember what the hell either pan looked like.  I picked out a round, shallow pan with straight sides and a long handle on one side.
I walked to the front of the room and held it up close to my body, not yet offering it to him.  ”Is this correct, Chef?”
He looked at me harshly.  ”I don’t know, I asked for sautoir.  Is this sautoir?”
I didn’t say anything; just held the pan out to him and then, changing my mind, yanked it back.  I made a small, uncomfortable noise and clenched my teeth together.
“Ah, the weight of the world,” he said, slightly amused.
I squeezed my eyes shut and handed off the pan.  He took it from me.  ”Good choice.” 
I walked back to my station, feeling as though I’d just run a marathon, or aged ten years.  My feet were starting to hurt.
A fellow student walked past me on his way to rinse a leek in the sink; we were preparing to practice cutting vegetables.  ”I poked you with my fork when you walked past me at dinner,” he said, leaning his head into mine.
“Excuse me?”  My eyes flicked up to meet his. 
“You took way too long at the station.  So I poked you.”  I hadn’t realized I monopolized the area – it was just so difficult to balance my plate and silverware while serving myself salad without tongs!  
“Well that’s not very nice of you,” I said, focusing my attention back on placing three silver bowls in a trianglular pattern at my station.
“Just don’t let it happen again.”  He was smiling.
“Duly noted.  I won’t.” I said, raising my right eyebrow and curling the left part of my mouth into a smile.  I could see a bit of his hair wisping out underneath his cap.  It looked full and thick.
As he walked away I cocked my head to the side.  He had poked me?  I hadn’t felt a thing.  Had I acquired a sheen of polar bear fat, or was I really just wearing that many layers of clothing?
I didn’t have time to ponder the thought, though, because Chef was barking at us to make the proper cuts in our vegetables.  I did, peeling an onion and slicing it in half.  I cut the first piece into thin arcs – emincer.  I repeated the cuts on the second half, then turned it sideways and sliced again.  Ciseler.
By the time I got to the carrots, I was feeling confident about my brunoise.  The cubes of orange were just about 2 millimeters, and they were … somewhat … regularly shaped.  For my first day, I thought it to be quite acceptable.
“How are we doing over here?” Chef asked my partner and me, walking up to our side of the island.
“Not bad, Chef,” I responded.
He picked up the carrots and let them fall through his fingers in a waterfall.  ”No!  These are terrible!”  He strode off. 
I picked up the second half of my carrot and did it again.
After we finished peeling and slicing our vegetables, we cleaned our stations – working together in teams to accomplish the task – and gathered around the head table for a demonstration.  Chef was to teach us the technique for cooking vegetables a l’anglaise and a l’étuvée.  He brought a pot of water to an angry boil and poured salt into it.  ”Salt, a lot of salt, the French love salt,” he said, sticking his finger into the water and then his mouth.  ”Taste it.  It is of the sea.”  We crowded around the pot, tentatively at first, taking turns plunging our index fingers into the bubbling, salty water and sticking them in our mouths.  
“No double-dipping!” a classmate joked, and we all laughed, including Chef.  We laughed because the water’s temperature would obviously kill any germs present and, honestly, isn’t it sad that some people might not know that?
The class ended eventually, of course.  At 11 that night, after showing us how to re-light the pilot on the oven, Chef dismissed us.  I dragged myself back to the locker room and wiggled out of my uniform.  I folded it carefully and placed it in my duffel, along with my notecards and textbook.  I changed back into my street clothes, descended the three flights of stairs that dumped me on the street, and walked to the subway.
Between my duffel bag and knives, I took up three seats.  The train was almost empty, though, and I was thankful that I had the space to curl my knees into my chest and hug my ankles.  When I reached my stop, I collected my luggage and shuffled off the train.
I walked to my apartment with my bag slung over my right shoulder, my knives over my left.  They crossed over my stomach and bumped my thighs with each step.  ”There’s got to be an easier way to do this,” I thought, wiping the back of my neck with my hand.  I felt like I was moving very slowly.
An easier way.  As I sat on the floor of my bedroom with a glass of wine, though, unpacking my uniform, I realized that even if there was – I didn’t want to explore it.  
«Go Back