Page 23 of Guy's Girl
Second: halve.
Third: chop.
She digs her fingernails under the onion skin and starts to pull.
If she’s being honest, Ginny is out of practice. Though she cooked extravagant meals for her friends every week in college, when she moved to Minnesota, all she did was scramble eggs and roast vegetables. She saw no point in deboning a chicken for one.
In Minnesota, Ginny spent the empty hours after work writing. It was her link to sanity, the only way to make it to bedtime. She had an endless stream of ideas. Dialogue popped into her head as she stared out the office window at the snow falling in thick drifts. It played on a loop, like the words to a song. She wrote them down: on a Word document, in her phone, on the back of a draft for an instruction manual. One story spread across a half-dozen documents, with her journal open, too, to record the thoughts she had about her own life. Thoughts from the journal often made it into the imagined story—blurred lines, reality bleeding into fiction.
Onions peeled, Ginny picks up the chef’s knife and slices the first onion in half.
Growing up, Ginny often cooked for her family. It’s not that her mother didn’t like to cook; it’s just that Ginny liked it more. She loved to see the look on her brothers’ faces when she pulled out a tray of freshly baked cookies, homemade pizza puffs, or pretzel bites with a cheesy dipping sauce. The boys would spill into the kitchen, falling over one another to get a bite while it was still hot.
Heather, of course, would roll her eyes and say she didn’t like cookies, pizza puffs, or whatever Ginny was serving. But when Ginny woke up the next day, a cookie was always missing.
At Harvard, cooking steadied her. Took her mind off the pressure of midterms, finals, social life, romance—or lack thereof. She loved the heft of a big knife in her hand. Loved the concentration it takes to properly mince garlic or chop cilantro. Loved the gratitude in her roommates’ eyes when she presented them with a heaping bowl of guacamole.
This is all I want to do, she would think as she watched the boys dig in, as they shoutedthank youthrough full mouths.This is all I will ever want to do.
So, after freshman year, when most of her peers were interning at banks and start-ups and consulting firms, Ginny went to culinary school.
Onions halved, she lines their flat bottoms up on the chopping block, presses the point of her knife into the chopping block, and starts cutting rapidly down the onion, watching the little crescent moons spill over onto the wood.
The first rule she learned in culinary school: always keep your knife sharp. It’s the key to cooking well. The sharper your knife, the easier flesh and bone give way. When Chef set up for demonstration each day, he took out an enormous black briefcase—heavy, oblong, protected by a tiny silver padlock—and splayed it open on the counter before them. Its pockets rolled open, extending to twice the briefcase’s length, a magazine’s centerfold.
Then he started to sharpen.
Now Ginny uses the back of the knife to scrape the onions into a frying pan.
Culinary school is where she lost most of her weight. It’s a paradox, she knows—when she came back to campus, every girl who saw her exclaimed, “Damn, girl. You’re the only person I know who could go to cooking school andloseweight.”
In truth, losing weight wasn’t difficult. Ginny walked two miles to the local cooking school in Sault Ste. Marie every day that summer, then stood on her feet in the practice kitchen for almost six hours. They weren’t allowed to eat anything they made; when they tried, Chef shouted, “This isn’t a restaurant.”
Lunch was a half hour. Hardly enough time to eat the salads she packed. Ginny wasn’t a coffee drinker before, but at CIA, she started pounding espresso shots like water. It was the only thing getting her through the day.
By the end of week one, she understood why so many chefs do cocaine.
Ginny barely noticed the slimming of her body. When she did, it was only to admire. She liked to think that, as she sharpened her knife skills, she sharpened her body, too.
Inside the frying pan now: onions, baby corn, snow peas, garlic.
When Ginny arrived back on campus, she felt invincible. For the first time in her life, after existing firmly in the middle of a sea of children, firmly in the middle of the sea of popularity, firmly in the middle of the sea of academics at Harvard, Ginny had an identity. She was the Food Girl.And who doesn’t want to be the one who makes the best food? Who doesn’t want to spend all afternoon cooking for her best friends, making them three-course gourmet meals served on paper plates in a dorm room with no coffee table, insisting that they eat it all, every course, never taking a bite herself?
Ginny reminds herself of the vow she made on the plane ride here:throw down your walls. Eat bread and rice and candy and all the other foods you haven’t allowed yourself to touch in years.She can do that. Tonight, she’ll even have rice with her stir-fry.
She’ll just throw it up afterward.
***
When she finishes cooking, there’s enough food to feed a family of seven.
“Whoa,” Finch says, setting down his guitar. “Are we expecting company?”
“No. I just made too much dinner.”
He cranes his neck to peer into the kitchenette. “No kidding.”
“Anyway.” Ginny ladles a few scoops of stir-fry into a bowl, then turns around to take it into her bedroom. “Enjoy.”
