Pinch grip

The instructor is called Bree and she's about thirty and she's just told a room of twelve adults that we're all holding our knives wrong. I'm forty-five. I've been cooking for myself since I was nineteen, and for two other people for the last sixteen years, and for myself again since March. I signed up for this because a mate said "you should do something," which is what mates say, and this was on a Tuesday, and Tuesdays are long now. "Pinch grip," says Bree. "Thumb and forefinger on the blade. Not the handle. The blade." I try it. It feels wrong. It feels like holding a pen the way a teacher wanted you to. "Better," she says, walking past. She doesn't stop. She has eleven other people holding it wrong. We start with an onion. I know how to cut an onion. I've cut, conservatively, six thousand onions. Bree shows us a way that involves not cutting through the root, and making horizontal cuts first, and the woman next to me, who is maybe sixty, says "oh, that's clever" under her breath, and I want to be superior about it and then I do it and it is clever, and my onion falls apart into pieces that are all the same size for the first time in my life. "Huh," I say. "Yeah," says the woman. "Huh." Her name's Judith. She's here because her husband did all the cooking and he died in January. She says it plainly, the way you'd say he did all the driving. I tell her mine's not dead, just in Perth, and she laughs, and then says sorry, and I say it's fine, it's a bit funny. Carrots. Bree wants them in batons the size of a matchstick. Mine are the size of several matchsticks. Judith's are worse. Bree comes past and says "you're rushing" to me and "you're not rushing enough" to Judith and keeps walking, and we look at each other. "She's good," says Judith. "She's terrifying." "That's what good looks like." The last thing is herbs. Parsley, a big bunch, and the trick is to roll it tight and cut across it in one movement with the tip of the knife never leaving the board. Rock, not chop. Bree does it and it sounds like rain. I do it and it sounds like a fight. Judith does it and it sounds like rain. "How?" "I don't know," she says, genuinely surprised. "I just did what she said." I've got a bag of perfectly diced onion and some bad carrots and a plan to make something with them tonight, on a Tuesday, at a table for one, with a pinch grip. Bree said next week is fish. Judith said she'd be here. I said I would too, and I found that I meant it.