Mebel leans back in her chair, feeling as though she’s just been punched in the gut. “Am I expelled?” she says finally.
Chef Clarke’s face softens. “No. We don’t expel students unless there has been a serious breach of conduct. But I am having this talk with you because I think your time could be more productively spent by just watching cooking shows. You don’t have what it takes to be a chef, Mebel.”
Mebel nods glumly. Anyone can see she doesn’t have what it takes to be a chef, even her.
“Think about it?” Chef Clarke says. He doesn’t wait for a reply before standing up. “Have a good weekend.”
They leave the kitchen, and Mebel trudges back up to her room. For a while, she lies down on her bed and stares up at the ceiling. This is such an unfamiliar feeling. To be asked to reconsider her placement in the school because she’s so bad at it? It’s truly baffling.
The thing is, Mebel has always been good at everything she’s tried her hand at. At school, she passed her classes with minimal effort. She graduated from USC with no honors, but shehad perfectly decent grades. Her parents had enrolled her in tennis and golf lessons as a child because they knew that she would one day become a trophy wife, and she rewarded them by being good at both sports, but not so good that it would make any man she was with feel threatened. They didn’t bother with things like cooking or sewing, because what self-respecting trophy wife would have to do those? Mebel had gone through sixty-three years of life applying herself steadfastly to the roles she’d been given—the filial Chinese-Indo daughter, then the pleasing Chinese-Indo trophy wife, and finally, a doting Chinese-Indo mother. And now, she finds herself untethered, lost in a body of water that’s suddenly decided to go wild.
Chef Clarke is right. There is no place here for someone like her. What is she even doing here? Learning how to cook French food to impress Henk? It sounded like a fun idea back in Jakarta, but now, in Cowley, England? It sounds ridiculous. She is ridiculous. She needs to give this all up and take the next flight home to Jakarta. But first, a shower.
As Mebel gets up from the creaky single bed, she catches her reflection in the mirror. She pauses, staring at herself. She has not, ever since she got married to Henk those forty years ago, gone a single day without looking her best. Every morning, even when she had no plans of going out, Mebel would apply her makeup. Her war paint, as she thinks of it. She’s always been so proud of keeping herself looking pristine for Henk. But this week has worn her down to her bones, and now she finds herself gazing at a naked face, and what a sight it is! She looks, for once, like her age. Haggard and forlorn and defeated, the corners of her mouth turned down, her cheeks slack, her eyes dull. She barely even recognizes herself.
“Well, this just won’t do,” she mutters in Indonesian. If she’s going to leave, she’s going to do so looking fabulous.
With that, Mebel hops into the shower, then goes back into her room and applies a snail slime sheet mask on her face. When the mask is done, she rubs the remnants of the slime into her skin and revels in how plump it’s made her skin feel. She smiles into the mirror, then swipes on a layer of tinted lip balm. There. Just those simple steps have refreshed her beautifully. She sits there for a while, tilting her face to one side, studying her reflection. She recalls how she’d always been the queen bee, both at school and afterward, among their friends at the country club. But maybe she’s only ever been the queen bee because she was so good at the things she had to be good at to gain popularity, whether it be schoolwork or golf or tennis. People are attracted to competence. And how difficult can cooking be, really? Mebel’s mouth sets into a thin line. She will leave this place tomorrow, but before that, she is going to master just one skill.
Before Mebel can talk herself out of doing this, she walks out of her room still dressed in her pajamas with a fluffy robe on top of them and marches all the way down into the kitchen. Not wanting to draw unwanted attention, she turns just one of the lights on. This late at night, the ground floor is deserted, as everyone has either gone out to party in town or retired to their bedrooms upstairs, and Mebel revels in the peaceful silence. She goes into the pantry and locates the potatoes. She loads up her bowl with as many potatoes as it can hold, then carries them to her workstation. There, she rolls up her sleeves, sharpens her knives, and begins to work.
Peeling is just as boring a task as ever, but this time, Mebelknows to expect the ache, so it doesn’t catch her off guard like it did on that first day. Plus, she has righteous indignation fueling her, and there is no emotion quite as powerful as pettiness. She finishes peeling them in no time, then she moves on to the chopping. Her first few attempts come out wonky, but instead of getting frustrated, Mebel takes her phone out and opens up YouTube. Chef Clarke suggested it in a somewhat patronizing way, and now she is going to take his advice to heart and utilize the app, though perhaps not quite in the way he was thinking. He wanted her to use social media to find fun little recipes to cook for Henk. She’s going to use it to find videos on how to correctly cube a fucking potato, damn it.
The next thirty minutes are spent hyperfocusing to get the potatoes into uniformly sized cubes. At first, Mebel obsesses over each cube, painstakingly pushing it up against the measuring board to make sure all its sides are the appropriate length. It’s a mind-meltingly boring, arduous task, and several times, Mebel is tempted to throw her knife down in the most dramatic fashion and call it a day. But somehow, she keeps going, fueled by an inner flame that she hasn’t felt in decades. In fact, she can’t quite remember the last time she’d applied herself so wholly to a singular task, and she’s surprised to find that part of her is kind of enjoying itself.
It isn’t long before she’s managing consistent cubes. She goes to a state that’s somewhere between conscious and subconscious, a beautiful flow where she is able to watch herself wield the knife, nowhere near expertly, but somewhere close to comfortably, at least. And before she knows it, there is a small mountain of cubes next to her. Mebel steps back and marvels at her work.She picks up one piece and measures it, then another, and another, and they’re all the correct size. Joy flows throughout her body, effervescent, and she does a quick hop and goes, “Woo!”
There is a gasp from the doorway. Mebel’s heart stops. She swings round, all of her senses screaming—oh my god, she is definitely going to get kicked out now, for sure. But it isn’t Chef Clarke at the door; it’s Gemma.
“Sorry,” Gemma says, and is about to close the door when Mebel calls out to her.
“Wait!”
Gemma hesitates. Why does she look so guilty? Then again, Mebel probably looks guilty as hell too. For a moment, the two of them stare at each other, each woman trying her hardest to not look like she’s up to no good.
Finally, Mebel decides that instead of asking Gemma what she’s doing in the kitchen, she should offer up a piece of information as a show of goodwill. So she says, “I’m practicing my knife skills.” She holds up a cubed potato.
“Oh!” Gemma’s shoulders lower ever so slightly. She looks a little less like a hamster who’s just sensed an eagle overhead and more like a hamster who thinks there might be an eagle overhead but isn’t too sure about it.
“I don’t know if it’s allowed, technically,” Mebel says with a shrug. She gives Gemma a cunning glance. “And why you are here?”
Gemma grimaces. “Um, I was kind of hoping to get in a bit of practice too.”
“I don’t remember you have trouble cubing potatoes,” Mebel says.
“No, I don’t have trouble with that. I just wanted to—uh…”
As Gemma’s voice trails away, Mebel notices the large bag she’s carrying. “What is that?”
Gemma shies away, as though to hide the bag from Mebel, but then she pauses, taking a breath, and says, “Oh god, I feel so stupid, this is the first time I’m doing this, truly, I—”
“As long as not someone’s severed head inside, I think you are fine,” Mebel says.
Gemma’s mouth closes abruptly. Then she laughs out loud. “Thank you for that. No, it isn’t someone’s severed head, though I feel like it would almost be less mortifying if it was.” With a sigh, she unzips the bag and shows Mebel the contents. “It’s ingredients to cook with, plus this.” She takes out a foldable tripod and camera ring light with an embarrassed smile.
“Ooh. Are you one of them—wait, I hear this from my friend who recently find out her grandson goes to this horrible pornographic website—I think it’s called Only Vans? You know, I always wonder why the name, but then I realize it makes sense, because only shady people own vans. So—”
“No, oh my god, Mebel!” Gemma cries. “No, this isn’t for OnlyFans.” She pauses. “How would this even work with OnlyFans?”
