Beware of Estonians bearing basil *recipe not included*
Peter was only after the blender.
I
was working in the college bookstore, propped
up on a stool behind the register, when he
came in to buy something small, a pack of
gum, a used book, a cassette tape, I don’t
remember. As I passed his change over the
counter, brushed my fingertips across this
stranger's calloused palm, Peter said “I know
you from the newspaper. You told it like it
was.”
A month earlier I was one of five or six
people chosen to answer a question for
The
Elm: what did we think about
the proposed student fee increase? Below my
photograph was the statement “I know nothing
about it. I have no opinion.” Ignorance and
flat honesty prevailed. It was my statement,
my stand on nothing in particular that got me
the boy.
Or maybe it really was
the blender.
After asking my name and relationship status,
Peter went straight to appliance ownership:
if I had the blender, he had the basil. He
knew where to score pine nuts and a fine
wedge of pecorino romano. Peter wanted to
come back to my place, make a little pesto.
The blender sat on the
stained linoleum kitchen counter in the small
college apartment I shared with my roommate
Martha, right beside the coffee percolator
that she filled with Folgers each morning.
Martha bought it with plans for soup-making,
warm vichyssoise in winter, refreshing
gazpacho during the humid summer months, but
in reality we used it make frozen drinks.
After the Piña Colada incident the appliance
went fallow, gathered cooking grease and
flour dust.
Peter's basil source was a
garden across the Chester River, a plot of
rich soil courtesy of his employer, Anthony's
Landscaping. We rode there one sticky June
night, pedaled his tandem through a landscape
defined by moonlight and shadow, moved our
legs in time to the percussion of crickets.
The basil had formed a moat around a pair of
tumbledown beefsteak tomatoes. Rabbits and
groundhogs had ravished the rest. As I
smoothed my fingers over the soft leaves,
pale in the semidarkness, the basil sighed,
let out a breath of spice and earth and warm
sun, a promise of pasta sauce and
anise-tinged kisses.
When you are 18, most of
the world is still a mystery, or it should
be. I already had a boyfriend, and Peter knew
it, but something about his earnestness – his
habit of tossing rocks at my window for
midnight bike rides, the fact that he was as
aimless at 24 as I felt at 18 – made him
irresistible. He was an English major whose
literary mind had been muddled by
deconstructionism, an Estonian-American who
later taught me the best places to go in
Washington, DC for Ethiopian food and the
blues. Peter liked to pass things on. It was
insider information: the slightly off-kilter
notes of Thelonius Monk; the tuneless
pounding and punk bands of d.c. space; the
Biograph movie theater; linguini with pesto
sauce.
His pesto obsession was endearing. And
it was
an obsession.
In circa 1988 Chestertown, Maryland, pine
nuts were an exotic foodstuff. Without a car,
Peter had to finagle his way 75 miles and
back to DC to procure one expensive cupful.
He arrived at our place on the appointed
night, clutching two bouquets of basil, a
greasy paper bag half-filled with pine nuts,
and a crumbling hunk of cheese. Martha and I
had already peeled the garlic, purchased a
good-enough olive oil. We had wiped down the
blender. In the kitchen, I started grating
cheese while Martha opened beers. Peter began
tossing pine nuts and knobs of garlic into
the machine.
The blender turned out to be an inferior
pesto-making tool, or perhaps it was all in
the technique. Crammed in the bottom, the
garlic and pine nuts slowly turned to paste,
while the basil calmly refused to be pulled
into the fray. Peter finally grabbed a wooden
spoon. The high-pitched whine of the blender
was interrupted by a thunk as the bottom of
the spoon splintered against metal blades.
Too late to go back now. He picked out the
shards.
Twenty minutes later, Peter
offered a fingerful of the final product.
Eyebrows raised in anticipation, I kept a
cheerful expression, gazed past the green
film coating his glasses to look directly
into his eyes. The pesto tasted of garlic and
more garlic interrupted by a heady nip of
basil and the punch of sharp cheese. Raw pine
nuts, resinous and rich, just barely kept the
other ingredients in tune. As olive oil ran
down my chin, I carefully deflected a
splinter with my tongue, a little kick from
Peter's secret ingredient.
(First image: Me, Chestertown,
MD, Summer 1988, taken by "Martha." Companion
picture of Martha not included. Second image:
Basil plants, from Vultus Christi.)