Daniel Rose - Larry's Kidney, Being the True Story of How I Found Myself in China

“Larry, you like so many food! Lunch and every day dinner, many!”

“I even eat the soup you got me, despite the floaters.”

Mary is proud of herself. “I order! Me!” But mostly she is proud of her beau, beaming over him like a mother panda at her cub. “Big appletite!”

Larry chuffs on orange soda going down the wrong way. “You should have known me in my prime, Mary. I could walk into any McDonald’s in Florida and eat two helpings of their apple pie.”

“Two?”

“Two!”

They smile and take each other’s hands, smiling happily.

“She’s also opening up about her family,” Larry reports. “Mary, tell Dan what you told me this morning about your son’s girlfriend.”

“Morning.”

“Tell Dan. What you told me. About the girlfriend.”

Mary wears her getting-ready-to-spit-out-pig’s-knuckles expression. Then her face brightens unexpectedly. “I-ah like my son girlfriend. She has degree in ah engineer. But I not ready. Ah. To be. Grandmutha!”

“Hear that?” Larry says proudly. “She’s even picking up my speech impediment!”

Great: a new generation of Chinese speaking Larryspeak. Like a new generation of Chinese dancers dancin’ the Dan.

“Good for you, Mary,” Larry says. “Tell Dan the other thing you told me this morning. About fate.”

“Fit?”

“Fate, remember Mary?”

Blank face, hard-to-describe mouth expression.

“Any case,” Larry says, “this morning Mary tells me, ‘Fate make us together.’ Isn’t that nice? I thought that was a very thoughtful concept.”

But it’s not as simple as that. Mary’s also learning enough language to express her discontent about certain issues. “Ah, ah,” she begins, marshaling her English, “I wish to do for Larry,” she says. “Do more.”

“I know you do, and that’s nice, but no,” Larry says. “Enough is enough. There are some things that are just too intimate.”

“What does she want to do, Larry, you don’t mind my asking?”

Larry looks discomfited, like he’s just been told he’s wearing someone else’s jockstrap by mistake. “Sing to me.”

“And why won’t you let her, exactly?”

The jockstrap is chafing. “My mutha sang to me, she’s the only one.”

Well, this is personal. I stay out of it, looking down at the pistachio shells in the corner.

“I want please you. I study…hard!” Mary tries again, her voice breaking. “Now I want sing!”

“And I appreciate that,” Larry says, squeezing her hand.

“I go back my home if no let me sing you.”

I lift my head. This is not the statement of someone who’s entirely out for her own aims.

Larry studies the proposition on the table so starkly before him.

“You win,” he says.

“You do it?” Mary asks. “You let me?”

“I said you win. I’ll win the next battle.”

“Yay-yay,” Mary mouths silently, ardently. She turns Larry’s hand in hers, lifts and kisses it with her eyes closed. And it’s like a snapshot that makes history the instant it’s taken. In that simple gesture, my heart warms to her at last. Click. Open and shut. Case closed.

“That was easy,” I say to him.

“I don’t have any fight left in me,” Larry says. “I just shut up and do what everyone tells me.”

“That’s the best news I’ve heard all month.”

“Surrender is becoming second nature.”

Me, too, I think, carrying his kidney-shaped bedpan to the toilet without cringing-though I don’t say such a thing aloud. Couldn’t if I tried. He’s off and running again, not letting anyone get a word in edge-wise. “I even feel like accepting myself more, too-and note please that I’m saying this before my surgery, so it’s not like I’m getting some mystical infusion of wisdom from the donor’s kidney-”

“Shhh,” I say, hushing him so we can hear what’s beginning to happen: Mary singing a little country tune, standing still in the middle of our cave, almost too big for her bowl.

And Larry listens from his bed with his eyes closed, in pain or pleasure, it’s impossible to tell, but just maybe it’s not pain.

“You know, Dan,” he says, signaling me to come closer and keeping his voice low, “in my earliest phone conversations with Mary, two years ago, she was so ashamed she couldn’t speak English that she would try to sing to me. I would cut her off at the pass, of course, but she did manage to get in an occasional note here and there.”

I look at Mary’s face as she warbles, the muscles of her throat working with so much sincerity it’s almost frightening. “Why didn’t you tell me that detail at the get-go?” I ask. “I would have softened to her then and there.”

“That’s why,” he says. “I needed you to stay objective.”

“Not too dumb, Feldman.”

“And I still do, Dan,” he says. “I still need you to keep your eyes open. It’s not over till the fat lady sings.”

Well, perhaps not the best image for him to use right here. The fact is, the fat lady is singing, and it’s putting another lump in my throat. Must be something in the air…

Meanwhile my voice. My Chinese accent is coming along nicely. “Damn dim bulb!” has become my all-purpose curse phrase of choice. Hot water running out? “Damn dim bulb.” Phone on the blink? “Damn dim bulb.” Also, when I find myself wading through a gang of card sharks playing Chinese blackjack on the sidewalk, I provide my own running commentary so they don’t have to: “Oh, look you at the crazyheart American Cowboy! He wear socks! Isn’t that beyond the humor? Instead of normal ankle stockings. And look, he drink water from a bottle he carry slung around shoulder. What a crack-up and hot card! What madcap business of monkeys will him think of next? No wonder we giggle on top of giggle as he pass. He may as well be of clown hat! But look you, now him writes in pad with characters that are not Chinese! Is there no tomfoolery this screwballs will not perform to keep us up-stitched?”

Funny thing is, they seem to grasp my self-parody instinctively. They get what I’m doing and clap me on the back as I walk through.

But whether the Disapproving Docs appreciate what I’m up to is more questionable. When I get a fresh e-mail from the Docs (“once again we must remind you that we are not willing to clean up any mess of your devising, if such a situation presents itself”), I use the opportunity of a return e-mail to perfect my Chinese accent.

“Greeting to you, dear doctors! Hello and hope this mail meet you in a perfect condition. I am happy to inform about our receive a winning organ for our dear relative Larry. Presently we locate in ASIA CHINA for transplant project of our own effort. But we do not forget your past help despite that it failed somehow. Even offer to clean mess of our devising! But no mess, sank you very much. In fact, because he is lucky number xxx transplant of season, Larry has win lottery bigtime, and we want include you in total sum payout. Please contact our secretary name MR MARY so he send you million-dollar Cheque to cover all you concern, however failed. And remember alway, the Cheque she in the mail.”

As for other accents, the Chinese people continue to sound more like Larry and he like them. Or maybe he sounds more like Ali Baba un-reeling his narratives from dusk till dawn, or dawn till dusk, whichever applies. It all evens out. Who’s keeping score? For that matter, I continue to lose any ability to see a difference in the way people look. The Chinese look American, the Americans look Chinese, together we all look Arabian. And why not? Why should we be just us and they be just them? We are invincibly interchangeable. Artie the KFC delivery-man, who now spends his off-duty hours sitting on the foot of Larry’s bed listening to the lullaby of Larry’s Ali Baba tales, has come to look so much like my old pal Miles back home that one time I feel like saying, “C’mon, Miles, are you putting me on? Have you just applied a little Chinese makeup and snuck over here to check out what’s happening?” Another time I’m watching Chinese TV and an interview comes on with Jackie Chan, and I say to myself, “Wow, nice to see an American face once in a while.”