Joyce Carol Oates’s hauntingly grotesque yet ultimately optimistic Thanksgiving

A short story featured in Joyce Carol Oates’s collected Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque, Thanksgiving focuses on a 13-year-old girl who lives in a rural area with her father and mother. As the story unfolds, we learn that there has been some sort of recent disaster but the nature of that calamity is deliberately left vague. It might – or might not – be connected to the mother’s illness.

The father tells the child, “We’ll do the shopping for your mother, the turkey and all. You know she isn’t feeling well.” They are soon in the family truck on the way to the store. Our protagonist is concerned because she and her father do not have the coupons that are so precious to her mother. Our just-barely-teenaged narrator observes: “Mother kept shopping coupons in a kitchen drawer, she’d never go to the A&P without taking a batch of them along in her purse. Claimed she’s saved hundreds of dollars over the years — ! What I’d come to think was, grown-up women liked to fuss clipping coupons out of the newspaper ads or shoving their hands up to the elbows in some giant box of detergent or dog chow to fish out a coupon worth twelve cents.”

Whatever the family’s problems, or those of the larger society around it, this holiday remains vital. The father is described as “grimly, grinning” when he states. “We’ll have Thanksgiving like always. Nothing will change that.”

The store is mysteriously damaged: “most of the bins and counters were bare, and some of them were broken; the aisles were partly blocked by mounds of decaying debris and plywood crates. There were puddles on the floor.” She finds that “the rear of the fresh produce section was blocked off because part of the floor had collapsed.”

Of course, the central point of this visit to the store is to fetch a turkey. This proves no easy feat and in fact takes on a deliberately “grotesque” aspect as it seems shopping has taken on a nightmarish aspect and the search for this emblem of Thanksgiving becomes a singularly odd kind of test of psychological strength. However, father and daughter are equally determined that Thanksgiving should be properly celebrated this year and that determination leads to an ending that is surprisingly optimistic and even uplifting.

If you want something interesting to read that is appropriate to this holiday, you would do well to seek out a copy of Joyce Carol Oates’s Haunted and find the story Thanksgiving.