Jennafer D’Alvia

One day when you’re sitting at your desk working on your doctoral thesis in linguistics, your mother calls, and she’s hysterical crying and panting. You can hardly understand her. “I don’t know who I am,” she wails. 

You’re more annoyed than worried. The truth is your mother can get a bit overwrought, and when that happens, she leans on you more

“You’re my mom,” you tell her, hoping that’ll ground her and also remind her of her role in your relationship. She’s probably just going through menopause or something. So all of this is pretty crazy, which automatically makes you crazy. 

She doesn’t say anything and your eyes wander to your shelves and find a book on universal grammar, a seminal theory that explains how each part of speech has its own place. Nouns can’t take the place of verbs. It’s something that seems obvious, but is somehow revolutionary when you map it out. An adjective is an adjective and it acts like one, a verb always acts verby. Everything behaves just as it’s supposed to. Isn’t that comforting? And you wish your mother would do that too.

You could create a semantic map, almost like a family tree: 

 slot, acting daughtery. And where exactly does that leave you?

“Okay, Mom,” you say. “I’ll be there this weekend. I’ll drive up on Saturday.” Usually your mother is ecstatic when you say you’re coming. Usually, she offers to pay for the rental car. You wait, but she says nothing. Could this be a serious thing after all? Early onset Alzheimer’s? Mental illness?

In any case, you’re at the end of the conversation, because your mother’s neighbor, Mr. Richard, is at her door and he needs her. “Coming!” you hear her call out before she hangs up.

Apparently, she can pull herself together for Mr. Richard but not for you. On the other hand, if your mom can snap out of it that quickly, she’s probably not demented.

This is not the first time your mother has acted bizarrely. Once when you were a teenager, and your parents were totally broke, she came home euphoric with twenty pairs of shoes, unwrapping each pump from its tissue paper cocoon to show you. They were different colors, and she tried them all on, laughing guiltily and happily. After that, she never wore any of those shoes, not even once. They stayed in their boxes in the back of her closet for years. So maybe the phone call was like that. Maybe your mom was having a moment that would soon be put back in its box.

But then again, maybe not. Your mom has gotten nuttier since your father’s death from cancer. She’s more difficult now, 

 is the word that comes to mind. When he first died, two years ago, she said it felt like part of her body disappeared. It sounded unbearable and romantic. You imagined your mother’s arm turning to ash and blowing away in the wind, mingled with your father’s ashes, gray and curling like burnt paper.

These days, it’s more run of the mill mourning, almost kitsch. Whenever you visit, she talks about your dad’s spirit moving stuff around. You’ve read up on grief, and this is one of the documented coping mechanisms. People engage in fantasies. A griever imagines that the little frog in the garden is their dead loved one, ribbeting the message they most want to hear: 

Or else, a song that happens to come on the radio is a message from the beyond. It’s a way of grasping for something no longer there. Maybe you should understand this, but you don’t. When your father died, there were no talking animals. There was just a sad nothingness.

For your mother, it’s all about spoons. Whenever she can’t find the spoons, she thinks your father has moved them, which is frankly ridiculous. Even if ghosts existed, why would your father’s hang around the house playing stupid pranks on your mother? What could a ghost possibly get out of that? But that was your mother. You’ve always wanted her to be a bit more normal, a bit more stable. Was that too much to ask? So far, yes.

On Saturday, before you start out, you call and leave her a message that you’re on your way. She responds with a text: “See you soon, cherry.” That’s weird. Probably a spell check error, but from what? Usually she calls you Honey, Sweety, or when you’re edgy with her: Tiger. 

In any case, about an hour later you’re at her door. You step just inside, into the foyer, and call out, “Mom?”

A voice with a French accent replies from the kitchen, “Enter, 

and a moment later, a petite lady in a smart little outfit moves towards you. She’s wearing slacks, a purple blouse and a beautiful silk scarf wrapped elegantly around her neck and tied in the front.

You thought your mother needed you when in fact she’s surrounded by friends—or at least 

 friend. You’re more than annoyed. It’s not like you can just take time off from your work and drive up to see your mother any time you want. You have hours of data waiting on your desk. Twenty-seven bilingual first-graders chatted their little hearts out over a six month period. They created thousands of speech acts that need to be analyzed, and put into categories before you can graduate from school and start your life.	

When you get to the kitchen, the table is set for two with your mother’s oversized soup spoons (the very ones your father had “hidden” last time), a basket of sliced French bread, green salad, already tossed, and two water glasses. 

grates on you, but you don’t say anything. You just want to see your mother already. You run upstairs, and maybe it’s the running that dislodges an image from childhood: reaching up towards your mother, who’s squatting down to your kid level, her pink cotton apron suspended between you.

You get to her bedroom. No mother. And not the same bedroom either. The shape remains intact, but everything else has changed. Your mom has wallpapered the walls. It’s a light-yellow paper with green vines all through it. And there’s a new bed, or maybe just a new headboard, with a wrought-iron twisty, viney pattern, which goes just perfectly with the paper. Since when did your mother get style? It makes you a little bit angry. You thought your mother was living out the remainder of the life she shared with your father, and that she would continue and remember. She wasn’t supposed to fix things up for a brand new future. Your own bedroom in your apartment back in the city has only a few posters on white walls. After seeing your mother’s improvements, you realize that you’re more or less living in a warehouse, a waiting area for the rest of your life.

You check the bathroom, which is also newly wallpapered, though this time, it’s just a little strip around the top part of the walls. Absolutely lovely. And the bathtub has been replaced by one with claw feet. The bidet’s still there. An odd little addition your mother put in right after your father died. You didn’t say anything at the time, considering the state she was in back then.

It’s a wonder your mother’s had time to call you complaining with all the renovating she’s been up to. Yes, it looks better. But it’s no longer the exact same place where you grew up, and you don’t know where your memories should live.

You glance into your old bedroom. Nothing changed there, which is a relief, but also, somehow, a disappointment. She’s spruced up 

 areas of the house, but she hasn’t bothered with yours. The search is done. Your mother’s not up here.

?” the woman calls out from downstairs and you head back down to the kitchen.

“Where’s my mother?” you ask her. “And, who are you?” The woman looks at you wide-eyed, as if you’ve caught her and she doesn’t know what to say. Then she gestures to your jacket, which you’ve been carrying around.

“Oh! Just put that in the closet.” She points down the hallway. She seems a little frantic and that’s what tips you off that something might be seriously wrong. You imagine the worst: an accident, a heart attack. Maybe that’s what your mother meant about changing, that her health had changed. You’re afraid to ask, so you go down the hall and put your coat in the closet, but when you get back, you whisper-blurt, “Is my mother dead?”

The woman snorts, “Don’t say stupid things.”

Stupid things? An image of your father in his coffin comes to you. He looked so small and light, almost like a child.

When she sees your sad expression, the woman softens. “No, 

Everything is fine, absolutely fine. . . And everything is ready,” she adds. “Sit.” You lower into a seat. You should have come sooner. You could have seen your mother. You could have helped. Snap out of it, you tell yourself. She’s probably just napping. Your mother loves a good nap. It’s one of her special luxuries. It’s always seemed boring, but now it’s endearing. Any second now, she’ll step from her gorgeous bedroom, her soft face wrinkled from the pillow case. But you went to her room. She wasn’t there.

Then, the woman says, “O, your father, he hide the ladle again! He always move the spoons when you come!” You thought only your mother believed in ghosts who displaced spoons. Apparently this French woman shares that idiosyncrasy.

The woman smiles to herself as she searches the kitchen, just as your mother has always done. She looks in all the cabinets, even in the oven.

This is ridiculous. “Where’s my mother?” you demand.

The woman turns to you. She hesitates, acting coy, almost flirtatious when she points to her two shoulders and displays herself. “Right here,” she says. 

Your mother had high cheekbones; this woman’s face is rounder. Seeing your confusion, she begins to laugh and the chuckling is

familiar. There is nothing of your mother’s physicality in that lithe form. Your mother is thick and soft and American. This woman is slender, tiny and French. “Mom?”

?” the woman says innocently, drawing out her words. Now, she’s gazing at you, waiting for you to figure things out just like she used to when you were a kid and she was helping you with your fraction homework.

“Mom? Is it you?” You squint at the woman, but you can’t locate your mother’s round shape in the body of this tiny chic woman.

“But, of course,” comes the reply. The woman smiles. “You remember, I tell you I change.” She’s speaking in accented English, and she looks nothing like your mother, but somehow you know it’s her. Oh yes, 

She turns and opens the fridge. “Oh, here eez zee ladle! Your father eez so crazy! He put it in the fridge! Give me your bowl.” You stare at her, so she steps over and takes the bowl herself. A moment later, two lukewarm (as your mother prefers) bowls of soup sit before you on the table. “Eat, 

, before it freezes,” she says. Again, one of her customary phrases delivered in heavily accented speech.

.” She says without accent and she shrugs. You eat mechanically. The conversation turns to your mother’s garden and how she’s planning a new color scheme. You imagine opening the woman, splitting her down the front, so that your mother who’s crouching somewhere inside this slim form, can pop out and laugh. Laugh if you want, Mom, just come back. But your mother keeps talking and eating her soup just like on any other visit you’ve had. Except that there is something different about the soup, some new taste that has never been there before.

,” she says confidentially. “It makes all things taste better.”  She shrugs in her old way, and adds, “No?” It takes you a moment to realize that the soup actually 

 better than before. The improvement gives you pause. Things aren’t supposed to ameliorate with age–unless they’re fermented things. Humans aren’t meant to improve after their maturation. There’s middle age and then it’s all downhill. That’s the way you’ve always understood it anyway. You were supposed to be your mother’s hope for the future, fulfilling her dreams of academia. She’d wanted to be an archeologist, but had given it up to have you. And somehow it was understood that you were to be her consolation prize. She’d never pushed you exactly. It was always your dream to do linguistics, but her wishes were there, an undertow, never mentioned.

You take a piece of bread and begin to butter it thoughtfully.

It’s been so long since you and your mom have spoken outside the prescribed routines: your dissertation, her garden, books she’s read. But now you need to get real, you decide. You need to ask your mother how this has happened, how she has transformed herself . . .

“How’s Mr. Richard?” comes out of your mouth instead. 

Your mother’s neighbor became a widower in the last year and your mom has been looking out for him.

“Actually,” your mother says. “I think he’s here.” And right on cue, you can hear the door opening and footsteps into the hallway. There’s a pause while Mr. Richard puts his coat in the closet.

“He doesn’t knock?” you ask pointedly.

“Oh, I never lock it,” your mom replies, waving her hand to the side. She stands up to set a third place. 

“Zack?” your mother calls down the hallway.

Mr. Richard is the same height your mother used to be. As things are currently though, he’s a head taller than your mother the French woman. He squeezes her shoulder lightly, before turning to you.

“Hi, Mr. Richard,” you say. You grew up with him and his wife as your neighbors, and it’s always been hard not to say Mr. Richard

 when you greet him. You have to think about it and stop yourself from saying the final ’s’. And maybe that’s why you’ve never felt completely comfortable with him.

“So good of you to come.” He takes your hand in both of his.  

 her daughter.” You remove your hand from his grasp.

“Her daughter Jeannie,” he says, as if she’s got a horde of daughters and he needs to name you.

He takes a seat. “How are things down in old New York?” he asks, like it’s a far-off place, even though he commuted to the City for years and years. He used to be a lawyer in a big firm.

“It’s pretty much the same,” you say. 

Your mom’s up by the stove again, heating the soup. “Zack like it hot!” she exclaims. 

“Yeah, who doesn’t?” you say under your breath and no one responds.	

“So,” Mr. Richard says, “You’re working on your PhD.” 

“EdD.” Usually, you let people say PhD; a doctorate is a doctorate. But you want to correct things here, edit and amend this situation. You want your mother back the way she was. And Mr. Richard seems to be part of the problem somehow.

“So, how are you getting along,” you say, “since your . . .”  you stop, disbelieving how low you’d stoop.

“My wife’s death?” he inquires lightly. Your mother sets a bowl of steaming soup in front of him and Mr. Richard takes her hand. “Your mother is an angel for me.” And she looks like she’s about to grow wings, and start hovering above him. She and Mr. Richard smile at each other. And you realize that you’re feeling a bit nauseous. Maybe the herbs from the soup have upset your stomach.

“How close are you to finishing your dissertation, Jeannie?” Mr. Richard asks, changing the subject.

Does he want you to get on with your life, so he can claim all of your mother’s attention? Does he sense what you sense: once you’re out of grad school, your childhood will be over? You see yourself through his eyes, a twenty-seven-year-old woman, prolonging her adolescence and hanging on to her mother’s attention beyond what’s natural. 

“It’s coming along,” you say, crisply.

,” your mother pipes in. “That will give you more op-”

“—portunity,” Mr. Richard says, finishing her word. He smiles at your mother, with the faintest of eye-closing. You remember something your mother said about Mr. Richard just after his wife died. How he seemed to have lost the ability to smile. Your mother had handled grief differently. She’d made jokes the day of your father’s burial, and all through the months after his death there had been a little smile on her face, as if she and your father were sharing a secret joke. Their relationship had always been filled with humor, making fun of short-comings, instead of criticizing head-on. Even in death, your father’s spirit was moving objects around to tease the woman. Where was your father when you needed him? Maybe he could yank Mr. Richard’s chair out from under him. The idea of Mr. Richard falling on his tailbone gives you a moment of pleasure. Maybe your father could even give you back your mother’s soft American body. Maybe he knows where she’s stowed it, in a closet or up in the attic, perhaps. And what about her comforting, lilting voice? Where’s that hiding, in a jar in the cupboard? A tupperware in the fridge? That’s when you think about the bidet. How she got that right after he died, like your father’s death cleared the way for her Frenchification. Like she was just waiting for your father to go, so she could start her personal 

“Do you like to dance?” Mr. Richard asks you.

Before you can respond, your mother starts clapping, “Yes! Yes! We muss show Jeannie!” She takes your hand. “Zack, he teash me salsa.” Her face is glowing with childish excitement. 

“No!” you say too loudly, but you have to take control, before this goes any further. “Sit down,” you tell Mr. Richard, and he looks miffed, but he does as you say. “I want to talk to Dad,” you tell your mother the French woman. And she looks so sad, her face morphs into a crease. You’re sorry about that, but you’ve got a plan now.

 Already, things are looking up). “Your father, he is dead.”

“I’m aware of that. Where’s the Ouija board?”

She looks horrified and Mr. Richard says, “That’s not a good —” But you give him a look and he doesn’t finish.

You turn to your mother, “I don’t want to communicate through kitchen utensils.”

“Spoons and ladles, Mom? Really? I want to know what Dad thinks of all this. You wave your arms around the kitchen, as if 

 is everything but her. “I want to hear it in his own words. I want it spelled out for me.”

Her cheeks have deep red splotches, almost a violet color, like she’s smeared her face with rouge.

“It’s in the closet in your bedroom,” she pouts and it sounds like she’s scolding you, as if you should know where the board is.

You head up to retrieve the boardgame, and when you hit the second floor, you almost expect to see your father standing in the hallway waiting for you. He always liked to play with the Ouija board when you were little. He would spell out things for you like, 

But no, no father. Just the long hallway and the hardwood floors. You push on. In your bedroom, there’s that light green comforter on the bed, wrapped tightly around the mattress, the same one that’s been there since you were a child. You slide the closet door open, and look up on the shelf. A bunch of games, Pictionary, Boggle, Clue, a couple of jigsaw puzzles, but no Ouija board. You’re at a loss, because that was your big idea, and you don’t know how you can go back downstairs and face your new French mom and Mr. Richard empty-handed. You turn to sit on your bed, to regroup, and that’s when you see it: The Ouija board. It’s resting in the middle of the green comforter. It wasn’t there before, you’re sure of it. So, there’s only one explanation: 

You grab the game quickly because you don’t really want to think this through, not how the boardgame got there, and not what you’re about to do with it. Some action must be taken, this is your best idea so far, and you’ve learned in grad school to test a thesis. Even a crappy idea is better than no idea.When you get back to the kitchen, your mom and Mr. Richard are holding both of each other’s hands, as if to double their bond.

You clear the table while they sit there looking worried. They say nothing. You set up the board.

“Place your fingers on the planchette,” you tell them.

“The heart-shaped thing,” you say impatiently. Has he never done this before? 

They both extend their fingers towards the board and you do the same. And then you’re not sure where to begin. You look at them, but they’ve got their eyes firmly on the planchette. You have no idea why they’re even going along with this, but you feel you’d better get started.

“Dad, are you here?” you ask. The question sounds ridiculous. The planchette slides slowly to the 

“Why is Mom doing this?” you ask, glancing at your mother, who’s pursing her lips and concentrating on the board. The planchette starts moving. It stops and pauses over the 

You feel kind of sick. Your mother’s expression is completely blank.

Mr. Richard has got his energy back. “Okay,” he says. “You have your answer.”

 okay.” You were going to take more time, build your way up to it, but now you just blurt it out. “Dad, can you change Mom back?” Mr. Richard and your mother exchange worried glances, but the planchette repeats 

and again, you wonder what exactly the point of a ghost is. How are they helping with anything?

“Why is your spirit hanging around, if all you’re going to do is move spoons around and shrug?” you blurt.

“Jeannie!” your mother says but the board is on the move again, and the three of you attend to it, like morse code operators, noting each letter, and trying to make sense of it.

“Why don’t you accept your mother?” Mr. Richard says, anticipating, but that’s not it. The planchette whips from letter to letter, back and forth across the board like a squirrel running from a car.

w…h…y…d…o…n…t…y…o…u…f…i…n…i…s…h…y…o…u…r…

You watch helplessly, as the embarrassing question becomes clear.

d…i…s…s…e…r…t…a…t…i…o…n

You want to run back to New York City, back to the comfort of your desk in the tiny studio with all your things around you, supporting you like water in a swimming pool.

y…o…u…r…e…w…a…s…t…i…n…g…

You yank your hands away. Your mother and Mr. Richard remove their hands from the planchette and put them in their laps. They look away from you as your cheeks burn. You can’t believe your father would just turn on you. He was always so restrained in life, but now, disembodied, it seems he’s freer to say what he feels. It’s true that you could have finished your dissertation already. You’ve been taking your time. Your advisor calls you 

, and maybe that’s part of it. Another part is that you’re worried about finishing. It’s not about defending; you’re confident there. It’s that you’ve been in school for so long the idea of leaving the institution feels like being blown out into space.

And now with your mother’s transformation, you won’t have a home base either.

Your mother gets up and starts wiping down the counter. 

Jennafer D’Alvia

Jennafer D’Alvia

Fiction

Summer 2024

The Same Old Mom