I learned from my mother that back in the U.S. my aunt Donna was dying. Like Amanda’s godfather she had some horrific lung disease, idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, in which tissue slowly but inexorably decayed; she had maxed her oxygen tank out but just kept deteriorating. But she had, said Mom, an e-mail address now, and would surely like to hear from me.
Even before I got in touch, I had e-mails from other family members describing Donna as “difficult”; Aunt Carrie had visited Donna in Nashville and kept track of Donna’s impossible demands on Uncle Joe with one eye on her watch. I pictured Donna on her deathbed, surrounded by treacherous siblings.
She died heroically, e-mailing me every few days until she couldn’t anymore—about two weeks before her funeral, which she told me not to bother attending. When her father-in-law, my grandfather, died, I was twelve. She spotted me looking glum at his funeral reception, crossed the room, put an arm around me, and told me to get used to it. One of her last injunctions to me was to miss her a little, but not for long.
We didn’t correspond much about her condition, aside from the panic attacks she had, despite the morphine, every time she levered herself off the portable toilet and back onto the sofa in the living room. I had slept on that sofa many times growing up. It was at least eight, maybe nine feet long.
We corresponded instead about me. The cost of living in Prague, she wrote, must be very attractive, but one day, perhaps soon, we’d want more space. Had I popped the question? Get Amanda to tell me the colors in your apartment, she wrote. These things interest women, Elliott. We must be having fine adventures in a place she could never have gone and could never go, she wrote. Make the most of it. But make plans, too.
She gossiped generously about the extended family, material that was particularly surreal to read in Prague. I had cousins I couldn’t pick out of a perp walk, but I knew for a while which of them was getting a driver’s license and who was off to Southern Methodist that fall. If there was one thing on God’s green earth Donna couldn’t see the point of it was a magnolia tree. For two weeks a year it just litters, and the rest of the time it blocks your view of the neighbors. She was lobbying my dad to chop his down. My mother, wrote Donna, seemed to have a new admirer in the shape of an Episcopalian priest. But she seemed to expect him to have God’s own patience, too. Donna was pleased that once she was gone, Uncle Joe would have the sympathy and support of his sister Carrie. Donna told me she knew Joe was hers on the day he began taking milk in his coffee.
The sense of space and time and order implicit in her communication was utterly alien to a Prague dweller; nobody near Graceland had a garden, let alone a tree. Czech youth did not age; they went to sleep as children and woke up as adults sometime near the age of eleven or twelve. There were no priests. Taking Czech coffee black was unthinkable.
Donna sent, among other things, colorful Southern U.S. expressions for me to share with my students: “slicker than snot on a glass doorknob,” “madder than a boiled owl,” and my favorite, “I feel like I been et by a wolf and shit off a cliff.”
My students appreciated the new phrases, though none of them could keep each one straight. Vlasta wanted to know more about the woman who supplied them. Since Uncle Joe was my mother’s brother, Donna had married into the family, and therefore, said Vlasta, it was okay if I had a crush on her. Donna had decades of practice peering over her bifocals at entitled Nashville school brats to make a point; to this day anyone peering over glasses at me seems to be admonishing me. She was five foot one and built like an insect, with a middle Tennessee drawl that turned every utterance into a musical composition.