One colossal turkey of a holiday

ITHACA, N.Y., the Patent Office — This is the first Thanksgiving I’m spending alone. Well, not alone alone; I have my daughters here, ages two and four. But my wife is traveling abroad for job interviews (long story) and no way no how am I flying with these two to California to join my mother and siblings. So let’s say this is my first Thanksgiving without grownups, and what that means first and foremost is no damn turkey. We’re having roast pork leg with crackling, and we’re eating with our fingers. Side dishes include French fries and a great deal of gin. The whole thing feels thrilling, the way that driving on the wrong side of the road or telling people what you really think of them can be thrilling.

Thanksgiving is supposed to be the one designated day per year where people know for sure what other people are eating and doing. It’s pretty amazing when you think about it. Such is the motley loneliness of American life that your next-door neighbor of 20 years could be a fugitive or a cannibal and the first you’d hear about it is from the newscasters on your front lawn. “He seemed like a nice guy,” you say to the flashing cameras. “There were odd noises, but I had no idea he’d built a dungeon down there.” On this day each year, however, virtually everyone — from ethnic and religious minorities to rare eccentrics, queer hermits and garden-variety maniacs like your neighbor — tends to fall in line. This is what Philip Roth meant by “the neutral, dereligionized ground of Thanksgiving, when everybody gets to eat the same thing, nobody sneaking off to eat funny stuff,” such as gefilte fish or sausage waffle tacos or human flesh. “Just one colossal turkey for two hundred and fifty million people,” Roth wrote. “It is the American pastoral par excellence, and it lasts twenty-four hours.”

My family always found those hours trying. It wasn’t the specific obligation to “eat bird,” as my Uncle Ira the cattle rancher disdainfully put it, so much as the general pressure to conform. Following an American tradition can be exhilarating for some families, I’m told. Especially families of the sort Roth tends to write about, in which stories of leaving the old country for this one are still fresh and warm; but also at the other end of the spectrum, in Yankee families where the money is old and the blood runs blue. Basically, if the patriarch rises before the first course and recites the Mayflower Compact, you know they’re either 15th-generation Mayflower or second-generation Ellis Island. Everyone in between simply eats bird and goes to the movies.

Then there’s my family, and in particular my mother, for whom most traditions — especially holiday traditions — exist primarily as a pretext for travesty. Easter Sundays she hid uncolored hardboiled eggs and told us to find them “before they start to smell.” For Christmas she would bring home the gnarliest, most miserable-looking tree she could find; if it was too scoliotic to stand she’d attach guy-wires to its crown and have my father nail them to the roof beams. On Christmas morning we’d find our athletic socks hanging over the fireplace, stuffed with lemons, soup cans, my father’s old tennis balls and other domestic miscellany; we opened these “stockings” in disbelief, a kind of mute outrage that welled up in tandem with her laughter, which rose from a low rhythmic rumble to a roar. Then it was time to open presents, which were hastily wrapped up in newspaper and left unlabeled under the tree. “Tear open that big one and we’ll find out who it’s for,” she’d say to whichever confused and disappointed child was sitting closest.

But Thanksgiving elicits in her an uncharacteristic restraint. She sticks fairly closely to the script, in her way. Subversion such as there is tends to be subtle: unpitted green olives tucked into a casserole, or a pie crust made with baking soda in lieu of flour. “See if you can guess what’s interesting and different about these potatoes,” she might say, looking happier than the rest of us with the fun of that game. The mischief at work in these situations is almost subconscious. Tradition is “the democracy of the dead,” as G.K. Chesteron put it, and thus, I think, presents a challenge to my mother’s sense of monarchical rule. So she has to tweak it, show it who’s boss. But one Thanksgiving a little twist of hers almost killed my father. Let me try to explain.

The way my sister Lauren recalls it, she and her husband had just finished a picture-perfect Thanksgiving dinner with her in-laws in Solvang, California, all first- and second-generation Danish immigrants (genuinely thankful types, in short), and had driven down to join us in Ventura. They walked into the house and found it empty. The furniture had been haphazardly rearranged, and a wide path cleared through the clutter from the back of the house to the front door. The only other clues were several answering-machine messages from concerned neighbors mentioning emergency vehicles and a mysterious head-sized hole in the bathroom wall.

My older sister Allyson, who is a doctor, arrived at that moment, clearly distraught, and relayed to Lauren that my brother Arthur had phoned her at home — she lived about two hours south — and said what sounded like, “Dad is dead,” but was too overcome with panic and emotion to say more. Allyson had jumped in the car and driven “like a bat out of hell.” Both sisters headed to the emergency room at the local hospital, where their worst fears were allayed. “He’ll be fine,” the doctor told them. “But just between us, I think you need to talk with your mother about food preparation.”

It turns out Dad had suffered from “extreme food poisoning.” Overcome with nausea, diarrhea and all-body weakness, he had begun shouting in the bathroom for help, but nobody heard him because my brother was playing Elton John songs on the grand piano. At some point he tried to rise and fainted from the stress and dehydration — it’s called a “vasovagal syncope” — and fell over the toilet headfirst into the plaster wall beyond it with considerable momentum. At some point during a game of Scrabble his absence was detected and my brother and I found him there.

After he returned home the next morning, pale and bewildered, talk turned to what had poisoned him. My mother maintained it was the sweet potatoes, but all eyes were on the turkey. Suspicion hardened into conviction that she had done something interesting and different with it.

After some prodding, she confessed that she’d cooked it halfway the day before, then left it on the counter unrefrigerated to finish up on Thanksgiving Day. Apparently doing this allows bacteria to grow by leaps and bounds; and the thigh, which is the last part of the bird to fully cook, was the part served to Dad. The kicker was that she’d cooked it this way simply because the recipe explicitly said not to. “ ‘Why not?’ I thought. ‘Don’t tell me what to do.’”

Tiring of the subject, she announced that we’d go around and each of us say what we were thankful for. She offered gallantly to start. “I’m thankful that we could all be together this Thanksgiving, including Allyson.” Allyson, who had left her husband, her 4-month-old child, and a properly cooked, uneaten Thanksgiving dinner and driven two hours in an unimaginable mental state to join us, looked around with wide, unblinking eyes. My mother then turned to my father.

“Now it’s your turn, Bob. Tell me and the children what you’re thankful for.”

I honestly don’t recall his response.

The weird thing is, all family Thanksgivings since then have sort of paled. I can’t even remember most of them. That’s the canonical one: that’s the one that defined, forever and always, the parameters of the family tradition for us; each one since then is but a faint reprise of that blowout.

But now that I’m a father of two, it’s my turn to make some traditions of my own. The house stinks of crackling and the girls are delirious with anticipation. We’re all in our underwear. My four-year-old is cranking the Ramones from the stereo. Who says roast pork, French fries, and a bottle of gin isn’t Thanksgiving dinner? This is America, baby. I’ll show ’em who’s boss.