When Thanksgiving approached, I was going through a contentious break-up so I didn’t make my usual trip to Long Island to feast with my in-laws. Thankfully, I’d miss my husband bloviating about the evils of the US government while his mother gave him the cold shoulder, his sister bragged about her big-name politician boss, and his dad quietly smoked his pipe.

At the time I was teaching at a small, super progressive college in New England, where I’d begun an affair with a student— (taboo today but not so back in the 1970’s). He’d never been in my classes and was older than most undergraduates, which meant nearly my own age. Blond, muscular, sweet tempered, Nathaniel meditated, smoked weed and seemed unconcerned about his post graduate future. Being with him was far more relaxing than hanging around my highly critical mate and his coterie of adoring students. After Nathaniel and I practiced yoga together, he invited me to his family home for Thanksgiving.

I drove to a vast estate in an unnamed mountain town. The brown Tudor hilltop house towering over its neighbors had seen better days. With its peeling paint and broken shutters, it could have been a ghost story setting. Nathaniel led me up a back stairway to a room in the servant’s quarters. He explained that his mother was in an upstairs bedroom with his dying grandmother, and his eighty-year-old dad was playing ice hockey with the neighboring teenagers. His older brother lived in a cabin way back in the woods and rarely came out, but his sister would arrive by train from Manhattan in time for Thanksgiving dinner.

When I noticed a familiar looking painting on the stairwell, he told me it was by Whistler, who was a distant relative. His grandmother may have posed for him, but he couldn’t remember if that was true or a family myth. The long kitchen table was covered with piles of magazines, newspapers, and vitamin bottles making it difficult to find a space for lunch. Nathaniel found his family’s idiosyncrasies very amusing. Rather than trying to explain them, he just laughed. Did his parents know that I was a teacher at his school? I wondered. He shrugged. “I doubt they noticed you.” Later that night he joined me in the servant’s room single bed.

When dinner time rolled around on Thanksgiving Day, there was no turkey. A few slices of chicken rested on a platter. Nathaniel’s mom sat at the head of the table waiting for a timer to signal that her lobster had boiled, but she urged us to go ahead. Nathaniel’s brother, whose hair almost reached his waste, took his plate back to the cabin. Nobody asked about Grandma. Nathaniel’s sister Fern arrived in the middle of the meal as her train was late.  Nathaniel explained that her black lover had been invited but he’d declined. After we each got a small taste of the red, crustacean, we (meaning Nathaniel., Fern, father, and I), sat around the piano and sang Christmas carols, as if this were any normal, American family.

I continued to see Nathaniel throughout the winter. When I went to California during term break, he met me there. Together we soaked in a hot tub overlooking the Pacific. On the way back east, I drove so he could meditate. In Nebraska, I was stopped for speeding and had to hand over cash on the spot. Nathaniel left me off in Michigan where my ailing father urged me to give my marriage another chance.  I told him it was hopeless.

Back at college, the complications of my break-up increased: arguments over the house, and who was at fault; on and on it went. When Nathaniel visited me in my borrowed apartment, he would park his car a block away and sneak upstairs because the landlady, who lived below with a pack of peek-a-poos, didn’t allow overnight visitors. On our last night together, Nathaniel confessed, “I feel in over my head.”  That spring, he graduated; I got divorced. I’ve never again had lobster on Thanksgiving.