Pesto
by Selen Ozturk

I’m mashing garlic, lemon, pine nuts, salt, pepper, parmesan, olive oil and basil because my husband is going toothless and this is something he can eat, earthy paste. And the backyard is a cramped lot tufted here and there with basil, and weeds in the years since he stopped remembering to water. My husband is not only losing his teeth but his memory, but he can gum at pesto.

He’s faltering in the yard, hunched, weeding, huffing. He’s good as an old man can be. He’s gathering basil while I mince the garlic. He knows I’ve tried many times to find a younger man I liked, and didn’t. When I try to imagine my husband in ten years, still weeding basil, gone in the head, I have no trouble. He’s still handsome, in a looser-skinned way, and he still gives me pleasure, less often. I’m all he needs, which isn’t as much as it could be or will. And there is no misunderstanding between us as to the physical.

Here’s how I take care of it. A short flight or long drive. I meet a man and we trade attempts at pleasure again and again, one night or many. I’ve taken care of it in Chicago, Denver, New Orleans, Boise, Bend, and San Francisco. After the flesh I have no desire for children or money so then what. And there’s the way they look like boys when they want you. My husband has never said anything about taking care of it. He has no need that way, but I try there too. Do you understand? I’m peeling crushed wet cloves of garlic, one by one, while my toothless husband paws at weeds, and this is my life at 40, my heart panged by that. 

A heart-pang is enough to stay because I’ve only ever tried to feel good. I’d worsen all the time for a feeling like that. But there is the matter of the day-to-day, and now of him slipping from himself. What he did concerning women the early times I did things concerning men, he never said, but now he’s slipped past the point. I pour olive oil in a large clean bowl. I squeeze half a lemon in the oily nut-mush. Sometimes I want to shake my husband by the ears and tell him something like: 

They say the best olive oil in the country comes from Santa Barbara, and once, two shaky times with a man, there, seaside, meaning I’m not cornered! I’ve been alone in the dull free world and touched all over, again and again, and here we are! meaning Have you used up my unlonely years, old dog? Will you remember that you have? You have—will you remember that?—and I wish you would forever.

Meaning that nothing concerning men feels good as unsleazable things like making pesto for my husband, so I’ve mellowed into this untouched domestic feeling. But now my husband is gliding down the pocked arthritic down-slope of his life. He’s pulling basil, slowly, leaf by leaf, hands unsteady, even in the heat.

It’s late summer. The days will just get darker until whenever day the light, darkening now, will, slowly, stretch, again. What, in five years, ten, my husband in the yard still, and me hobbling, wheeling, crawling him across the—not that world, but our kitchen, at least, for a little pesto, or whatever he can think to gum at then? Me? Well, yes. Why not? Out in the darkening light somewhere, two fists mangling at fresh leaves. Darkening sweet reek of old skin and peppery green. All this will be taken from me and I need it all now.

Taking it, now. My hands are of a woman who could help, small, ruddy, nails blunt where the meat starts, grating tough cheese, cracking salt, squeezing and releasing as long as I still can. I think of my husband’s hands sprouting wiry white tufts down the knuckles, spotting, ashening. I think of taking basil from these hands in the darkening light forever. I think of loneliness, then of something under it, cutting it, mashing the grit. 

Selen Ozturk is a San Francisco-based writer. Her work appears in Necessary Fiction, Hobart, minor literature[s], Evergreen Review, Expat Press, the San Francisco Chronicle, and SFGATE.

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