It is Thanksgiving, and I'm in a posh butcher shop with my brother, trying to buy a turkey, while my wife waits in the car. There is one other person in the shop, an American woman. She is buying a turkey, too. I know her vaguely, and because no one else is around I feel obliged to say something.
"Hello," I say. She appraises me with an expression of bemused distaste, and nods. She clearly doesn't recognise me as someone she knows. I tell her my name, but that doesn't help. I say her name, but I get it slightly wrong. I list a few mutual acquaintances in an attempt to prove some connection, but I can tell by her face that she is not convinced we've ever met.
"I see you're buying a turkey," I say. "I'm buying a turkey."
"Did you reserve one?" she says.
"Um, no," I say. I don't usually bother with Thanksgiving, because my wife doesn't regard it as a real holiday, but this year my brother and his girlfriend are visiting, and Adam, a high school friend I haven't seen in 25 years, is in London with his partner, Michael.
"Don't worry, I've got turkeys," the butcher says when the woman leaves. He offers me a choice of two weights, and I opt for the heavier one without really listening to the numbers. My wife enters the shop.
"What are you doing?" she says.
"They have turkeys set aside for people like me," I say.
"For stupid Americans," she says.
"Exactly," my brother says.
"That'll be £53, please," says the butcher.
"Ha! They saw you coming!" my wife says.
When it comes time to prepare the Thanksgiving meal, I find myself alone; the children are at school, my wife is at work and my brother and his girlfriend are out somewhere. This is not a holiday, I think. This is just me in the kitchen staring at a turkey worth more than my oven.
Eventually, though, I get on top of the cooking, and my wife comes home. She has so far treated this Thanksgiving as a midweek dinner party she's only reluctantly agreed to attend, but now she sets about laying the table with care. Everyone arrives and we all sit down, with the children assigned to the chairs most likely to collapse. An air of fragile conviviality permeates the conversation.
"Are there any actual Americans here?" my wife asks. I see what she is getting at. Adam's partner is half Lebanese, and my brother's girlfriend is Italian. She is trying to de-legitimise my Thanksgiving.
"I am American," I say.
"You've lived in London for 20 years," she says.
"I have a passport," I say.
"I bet I'm more American than any of you," my wife says.
It is true that one of her grandmothers was American, but otherwise this is a dubious claim.
"It's not really a genetic distinction," I say. "It's more of a..."
"I'm going to show you something," she says, rising from the table. She leaves the room and returns with a strip of 44-cent postage stamps featuring past members of the US Supreme Court. She points to one, a man in spectacles from whom she is descended. "Have any of you got relatives on a stamp?" she says. There is a brief silence. It's clear no one at the table has been asked this before.
"I'm on a stamp," Michael says.
"No, you're not," says my wife.
"I am," he says. He says that in the US you can – as indeed you can in the UK – now have postage stamps created to your own specifications, and that for his birthday he got a set of stamps with his face on them.
"That's not the same thing at all," my wife says.
"Yes, it is," I say. "It is exactly the same thing."
