She was eighteen and home from college on Thanksgiving break. It was Thanksgiving Day. It was her mother's birthday. John F. Kennedy had just been shot. And her father was being carried out on a stretcher.

"Don't-let-her-see/keep-her-away," she heard her two brothers shush as they lifted the stretcher. She froze. As if by remaining still, they would not see her see him: his arms strapped to his side, his elbows locked; his body bound in a strait jacket, then sunk in a stretcher like a furrow in a field. His eyes, the only part of his body not restrained. They couldn't restrain his eyes: two black dots flickering in the light, darting wildly back and forth, terrorized as if they really had come to take him away, lock him up.

Then he went out the door and her mother followed, pausing in the doorframe. She watched her mother fling a kerchief over her head, then turn, tying a knot under her chin, and ask her would-she-watch-the-turkey.

She nodded Yes, she would watch the turkey, not TV.

A simple request, as if her mother were going on a quick run to the grocery store and would be right back, as if there would be a dinner, a feast, a celebration, as if the turkey would be eaten even.

But above her words, her mother's eyes stared blankly as if the power had been turned off and she couldn't do a thing about it, none of it: Kennedy's death right on TV for all the world to see or her husband's breakdown for our eyes only.

She entered the doorframe and stood still as a still life, listening to the sound of the ambulance taking them away, no siren, the sound of tires rolling down the gravel driveway, fading into the distance.

Then she turned and walked toward the muffled sound of TV in the living room where Kennedy had been shot and turned the sound off and watched images of Kennedy's body being carried into an ambulance played over and over as if no one could believe it.

The house fell silent except for an occasional hiss from the turkey basting away in the oven.

She sat on the gray kitchen linoleum, propped up against a cupboard next to the oven and waited.

She listened.
It grew darker and darker.
The turkey hissed and hissed.
When darkness fell suddenly like a curtain,
she tensed as if lost in the dark,
frightened by the sizzling turkey sounding

closer & closer.
She must stay very still.
Her breathing was too loud.

Then the doorbell rang, sending her into a state of
Who? Who? would come here now.

She hesitated, then decided she had better open up.
Perhaps it was important.

Her friend Bob stood facing her. "What are you doing? I didn't think anyone was home.
Your house was all dark, no car in the drive. Where is everyone?"

"They had to go out," she explained. "They left me to watch the turkey," she added,
keeping him in the doorframe.

He had just come by to tell her that Tommy was coming for Christmas break.

She looked at him blankly. The turkey hissed.

"Tommy, the guy from Maine you spent all summer with." Instead of me, he didn't say.

"Oh, that's nice."

"Nice?"

She nodded blankly. "Look-I've gotta go watch the turkey," she blurted, easing the door
toward him.

"Can I call you later?" "Sure," she replied, shutting the door, leaving him in the dark.

Copyright 2001, Pamela Gay

"Turkey Day" was published without images in the Paterson Literary Review 30, 2000