It was November. I was an American living in Paris. So, naturally, the patriotic thing to do was to prepare a traditional American Thanksgiving dinner for my new boyfriend and friends.

I told Thierry about my plans. It would have to take place at his apartment, of course. The fact that I had never cooked anything more complicated than boiled eggs and toast was of no concern to me. Besides, Bedis would help me.

I prepared a stack of ten-franc coins and called my mom on the payphone.

“Oh, what a lovely surprise! How are you, dear?”

“Mom, how do I cook a Thanksgiving dinner? I need your recipes.”

“What? You’re hosting Thanksgiving? Where? How?”

“It’s all worked out. I just need to know how to do it. How do I cook the bird? And how do you make your stuffing?”

“Of course, dear. I can pull out my recipe book and write it all down and mail it to you.”

Beep.

“No, no! There’s not enough time to mail it. Just tell me what to do—and fast! I’m running out of coins.”

I dropped two ten-franc coins into the phone slot.

“Honey, are you still there…?”

“Yes, Mom!”

“Okay, well, what size turkey are you getting?”

“How should I know? You tell me. What size do I need?”

“Well, that depends on how many people you’re hosting…”

“I don’t know. What’s the average? What do we do at home?”

“Well, let me see here… normally I get about a twenty-pound frozen turkey when all your cousins from your father’s side are here, but when it’s my side of the family, you know Betty and Tom eat less…”

“Okay, fine, fine, fine. I got it, Mom. Then what?”

“You first have to dress the bird, then…”

Beep.

Two more coins.

“MOM. Just tell me how to cook it!”

“Are you still there, honey? Oh, okay. So set your oven for 350°F and cook it for about six hours.”

“What about stuffing? How do I—”

Beep.

I was out of coins.

Beep. Beep. Beep. Click.

As it turned out, there were no freezers full of prepared, frozen turkeys in France. There was not even an entire turkey to be found. A whole turkey had to be specially ordered from the volailler—a butcher who specializes in poultry. I found one at my neighborhood outdoor market, and so, in my broken French, I managed to order a nine-kilo bird for the astronomical price of 360 francs—about $60, and nearly my monthly rent.

Along with the turkey, there would be the usual stuffing, mashed potatoes and gravy, carrots, broccoli, cranberry sauce, and, of course, pumpkin pie. I had no idea how to make any of it, but it didn’t seem too complicated.

At the famed Fauchon gourmet food shop on the elegant Place de la Madeleine, I dropped another small fortune on imported cans of cranberry sauce and American cooked pumpkin for the pie. It had not occurred to me that I could have bought an actual pumpkin in France for a few francs.

For the stuffing, I returned to my personal volailler—whose new car I had just financed with the turkey—and asked him how to make a farci, a stuffing for the bird. I scribbled notes on my school notebook, too embarrassed to ask him to repeat the parts I didn’t understand. Oddly, the recipe contained poultry sausage, and so naturally, I had to give him even more money.

On the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, I approached Madame Severin after class to inform her that I would have to leave early the following day to prepare our Thanksgiving dinner. Bedis, the favored child, stood beside me for moral support.

That afternoon, I returned to the volailler to collect my golden bird. She was freshly plucked and wrapped in white paper, with her floppy prehistoric-looking head, wattle, and feet still attached. The butcher plopped her into my arms like an oversized baby, which I instinctively clasped to my chest.

Back at my slum room, I discovered that she would not fit into the mini refrigerator unless I removed everything from it, including the shelves, and propped her up inside. The door kept popping open as she slumped against it, so I barricaded it with the desk. Everything else—the vegetables, pie crusts, the holy can of pumpkin—was packed into a large duffle bag.

On Thanksgiving Day, Bedis and I left our Sorbonne class in the early afternoon and took the Metro from Boulevard Raspail to Félix Faure near where I lived. Bedis handled the duffle bag and I collected my bird, whom I held carefully against my chest, à la Baby Bjorn.

With our Thanksgiving cargo, we set off to Thierry’s apartment. Seventeen Metro stops, one transfer, and a fifteen-minute walk later, we had arrived. His roommate Mounir was taking an afternoon nap and we pounded on the door until we annoyed him enough to get up and let us in. He then wandered back to bed.

The kitchen was ours, but it was already after 3:00 p.m. We were running a tad late. I had calculated that the turkey should cook for six hours and dinner would start around 8:30 p.m. So we needed to get on with it. I still had to prepare the stuffing before we could start roasting our bird. Following my notes from the poultry butcher, I cut up the bread and bits of sausage and added the spices. Meanwhile, Bedis opened the precious can of pumpkin and prepared the pies for baking.

Eventually it was time for the much-dreaded beheading, but there was hardly a knife in the kitchen up to the task. I settled on a dull steak knife. With significant emotional support from Bedis, I hacked through my bird child’s long neck and attempted to saw off her feet, which required some twisting and cracking. Then I opened her cavernous abdomen and shoved inside the mounds of bread and sausage I had just prepared.

Bedis scoured the bachelor kitchen for a pan large enough to hold her and finally proposed a blackened metal platter likely more intended for serving drinks. We set our stuffed bird child on it and closed the oven door. I turned the temperature knob to 170 degrees Celsius—the precise temperature I had converted from Fahrenheit.

I peered inside the oven, but nothing seemed to be happening. I turned to Bedis for help.

“Oh, it just needs time to warm up,” she said.

I waited a few minutes, then opened the oven door and put my hand inside above the bird.

“Strange. It’s not very warm…”

I reset the knob from zero to 170. We waited a little longer. I placed my hand inside again.

“Hm. Nothing’s happening…very strange…”

I left the kitchen in search of Mounir. He was back in his bedroom. I knocked on the door.

“Mounir, c’est Kathleen. Excuse-moi, mais comment je marche le ‘oven’?”—Mounir, it’s Kathleen. Excuse me but how do I work the oven?

I knocked again, louder.

“Mounir!”

I heard a loud sigh, and he lumbered over to the door.

“Qu’est-ce qu’il y a?” What’s wrong?

“Regarde,” I told him. Look.

He followed me to the kitchen. I pointed to the oven with the bird inside.

“Oh, ça? Le four? Il ne marche pas.” Oh, that? The oven? It doesn’t work.

“QUOI?” WHAT?

“Non, on ne se sert pas du four.” No, we don’t use the oven.

“Oh my God!” I turned to Bedis. “What will we do?”

There was no way to reach Thierry at work, and he wouldn’t be home until after 6:00 p.m. We had to act fast.

Within minutes the bird was swaddled in her white paper gown and strapped to my chest. Everything else was packed back into the duffle bag, except for the pies, which now had liquid pumpkin filling poured into the pre-prepared shells. We wrapped them in plastic wrap to minimize the spillage as Bedis carried them.

Onward to Bedis’ apartment. Back on the Metro, rush hour had begun. There was barely any standing room, and we had sixteen stops to go with a transfer at Châtelet—Paris’s biggest station.

As the train lurched, Bedis struggled to balance the pies, which were dripping orange goo all over her outstretched arms. The duffle bag was slung over her shoulder.

I leaned against the center support poles, afraid to grasp hold with my hand for fear of dropping my precious cargo or let her stuffing fall out.

The train jerked forward and I was thrown against a gray-haired woman, the bird taking the fall.

She glared at the paper-covered ball of flesh that had just pressed into her.

“Mon Dieu!” My God!

Nearly an hour later we were at Bedis’ place. We turned on the oven and shoved the bird inside, along with what was left of the pumpkin pies, then started peeling the potatoes in a frenzy.

Thierry called me on Bedis’ telephone line.

“I just got home. What happened to Thanksgiving?” he said.

“Your oven doesn’t work!”

“Yes, it works,” he replied, puzzled.

“But I couldn’t get it started, and Mounir said it doesn’t work.”

“Mounir doesn’t know anything. Of course it works.”

“Oh no! Now what do we do? I had to get the turkey started or we would never eat tonight…”

“I’ll drive over to pick you up. You can finish cooking here.”

In the worst of rush-hour traffic, while good Americans on the other side of the world were eating turkey stuffing and watching football, Thierry set out for the other side of Paris where we were stranded in the 8th arrondissement. Meanwhile, the bird cooked during the one hour it took him to arrive. So did the pumpkin pies.

“Whoops,” said Bedis, studying the dried-out, sunken pumpkin center surrounded by a ring of black, burnt crust.

“Never mind. We’ll cut off the crusts,” I reasoned, piling the vegetables and the peeled potatoes back into the duffle bag to wait for Thierry. Finally, he appeared at the door, breathless.

“There’s no place to park,” he said, referring to the car horns blasting from the street below.

Clutching the hour-cooked bird and duffle bag, we raced down Rue de Lévis to where Thierry’s car was blocking a long line of increasingly pissed-off drivers. Into the trunk went the bird and the duffle bag, while Esra and Bedis, each carrying a black pumpkin pie, climbed into the back. We raced into the night and across Paris.

Back at Thierry’s apartment, his roommates were home, and their girlfriends were starting to arrive for dinner. We quickly unloaded the goods in the kitchen. Then Thierry pressed a small switch on the side of the oven, and it immediately lit up. The bird went inside. There was a collective sigh of relief.

In the living room, Thierry pulled out an assortment of bottles and instructed everyone to help themselves to an apéritif. “That will keep them occupied,” he said.

I unloaded the duffle-bagged vegetables for the third time, and we were back in food-preparation mode, with piles of carrots, broccoli, and potatoes spread out before us on the Formica counter.

“I think we should just dump them all in water…” I told Bedis, with zero conviction.

“But we must at least clean them first, no?” Twenty years later, Bedis would become the renowned author of the first Western-style cookbook in Turkey.

Bedis and I washed and chopped the mounds of vegetables while Esra watched and then moved on to the living room for apéritifs.

“We will have to cook them one at a time,” Bedis observed, holding out two small pots—the only cookware to be found in the kitchen.

“But how will we make the mashed potatoes in that?” I exclaimed, envisioning my mom’s enormous vat of softly whipped potatoes on the stove.

“How’s the turkey?”

I looked up at the familiar voice. Dan was standing in the kitchen doorway.

“Oh, Dan, where do I even begin?”

He walked over and peeked into the oven.

“Stop! Don’t open it!” I cried. “She’s only just starting to cook!”

It was nearly 8:30 p.m. and the bird was still mostly raw.

We piled the peeled potatoes into the two small pots and decided to do the vegetables later, when the turkey was ready. Once the potatoes had boiled, we dumped them into a large plastic salad bowl and tried to mash them with various pieces of cutlery. The best we could do was turn them into large chunks.

“Let’s try adding the cream,” I decided.

I dumped a container of crème fraîche over the broken pieces of potato, and we tried to mash them again. The chunks just slid around the plastic bowl in the melting cream. We set the potatoes aside, figuring we would reheat them when the turkey was ready.

Outside the kitchen, the party was in full swing with a very international crowd. The music was on, and the apéritifs were flowing. Thierry’s other roommates—Guy and François—had invited their French girlfriends. Mounir, who was from Algeria, had his German girlfriend. Esra, Dan, and Cecilia were circulating around the room, talking to everyone.

At 9:30 p.m., Thierry put out a bowl of peanuts. They were immediately consumed.

By 10:30 p.m., Dan returned to the kitchen. “Everyone’s drunk and starving. How much longer?”

“Dan, the turkey has only cooked for a total of three and a half hours—counting both sides of Paris.”

“Okay, fine. I get it. Salmonella poisoning would not be ideal. What else can I take to feed the masses?”

Dan picked up the salad bowl with the cream-covered chunks of boiled potatoes.

“I’ll take this.” He grabbed a spoon and walked out into the living room.

“But what about the gravy?” I shouted after him. “I still need to…”

Bedis chimed in, “Why don’t we cook the rest of the vegetables?”

By 11:00, the boiled broccoli, carrots, and bread had all been consumed. Even the cranberry sauce was gone. Someone had dipped their bread into the mysterious sour sauce, and everyone followed. In my concern for the bird, I had forgotten to put out plates or cutlery, but the peckish crowd around the table didn’t seem to care. It was all finger food for them.

People were preparing to go home when we finally pulled the turkey out of the oven and placed her gloriously on display on the living room table. As he was the only other American in the kitchen, I asked Dan to do the sacred honor of carving our golden bird. He was genuinely touched and raised his glass to proclaim, “To all we hold sacred—the precious traditions of our uniquely American holiday. Happy Thanksgiving.”

He then grabbed the cutting board and steak knife and headed off to the table—only to return a minute later with a look of horror.

“My God, don’t look. You’ll never unsee this,” he gasped.

I stepped into the living room to see Esra poised at the head of the table, fork and butter knife flying high, gouging and hacking away at my bird child as chunks of white turkey flesh and sausage stuffing flew onto the table and into the outstretched hands of the famished.

It was probably quite unlike the Thanksgiving dinner my family was having back home in Sandwich. But somehow, surrounded by my new Algerian, French, Turkish, German, Swedish, and American friends, I felt like I belonged.