“Don't get crazy, Moonface,” he says. He looks at me and winks. His scruffy voice matches the stubble on his chin, and I'm in love with his eyes, which sparkle like diamonds even when his eyebrows get in the way.

I always tell him that I think the story could be better, that we could add fireworks, go to parties with roman candles in our pockets and light them up when the questions start flying. Or wear tap shoes and do a little kick-ball-change after every punch line.

“Are you kidding me? What we've got is gold, baby. Gold!” He grabs my face. He kisses me hard on my cheek.

Charlie is the showman. He's got the wit and the delivery. He can play to a crowd without the props or the fancy sets. If we really did have an actâI mean, one that we actually made money off ofâhe'd be the manager, the one calling the shots. And I'd let him. He has a way of telling a story and running with it.

“So, show us the scar you got from the surgery, man,” someone from the audience will ask. The audience is usually our families and our friends. Sometimes strangers at parties.

Charlie lifts his shirt and says, “Surgery? What are you talking about? I got this baby from a shark bite when we were swimming off the deep seas of Palau. See the teeth marks?” He points to the little dots where the doctors had him in staples.

“Nawww!” the crowd calls. Some of them gasp in horror.

“Come on, Charlie, tell 'em the truth,” I interrupt. I furrow my brow and puff out my lips. Me? I'm all facial expressions. Charlie says I can change the mood of a room with just the look on my face. That, and I follow cues really well. “We got shipwrecked on that island and we tried to kill each other for food. See, I've got one, too. He tried to get me first, but I went straight for that white meat, if you know what I mean."

Then, I lift up my shirt to show the crowd my scar, also on my left side. And then we demonstrate what that stabbing might have looked like had we really done it. We take turns pretending to jab a knife into each other's stomach, over and over again.

“Aaaawww!” one of us yells.

“Aaaawww!” the other one yells.

It has our family and friends rolling in their sofa cushions for hours.

At first, we tried to tell everyone our story, all serious and sweet, how I have this disease, how he gave me his kidney, how I was in bad shape. The sacrifice, the pain, yadda, yadda, yadda. But even when we talk to our audience honestly about the transplant, we can't help but crack the jokes, because, as Charlie says, “How else are you supposed to look at life?
Seriously
?”

We have other acts, too, you know, and if I had my way, we'd be touring the cocktail party circuit headlining with my favorite one, the one where we call ourselves the smooth 1970s singing duo
Cocoa and Cream
. Tall, blond white guy and short, mocha-colored gal with dark hair, dark skin, flat chest, but nice ass, if I do say so myself, swaying softly in front of the crowd to the soothing tunes in our head. And just when the crowd thinks they've got us all figured out, Charlie points to his chest and says, “I'm Cocoa. She's Cream.”

The crowd digs it. They laugh. They shake their heads thinking, “They're sly! Aren't they just sly?”

“Oh, Charlie,” I say, smacking my gum and batting my eyelashes. Then he sings our slow, number one R&B hit into a make-believe microphone. “
I have this empty space way down deep inside me / And it's where my kidney used to be / And I can't... hold back... my love
.”

I look out of the corner of my eye for my cue. He gives me a nod, and that's when I know my line comes, “
Ooooh, yeah, my love is soaring / Now, give me all your . . . vital. . . organs . . . yeahhhh . . .
”

See, that's how to win a crowd over. Not with the part about the blood transfusions and the dialysis or the medicine and the infections. Best to keep that stuff way down deep inside where the crowd can't see it, because if you think about that stuff here, you don't have much of a stage presence. In fact, you end up making yourself into a prop. The weeping willow. The bird that always sings the sad song. The crowd doesn't want to cry or to feel your pain. They want to crack the jokes right along with you.

Take Charlie's mother. I mean really, please take Charlie's mother. If she's in the crowd, she'll say something like, “Now after all this, don't you think you should be married by now?” She puts her hands in the air, looks at the audience, and shrugs. They nod their heads. “Yes, yes.”

While it's not usually my M.O. to talk about this stuff in the middle of the act, the crowd gets to me and I say, “Yeah, Charlie. Listen to your mother. Why don't we get hitched?”

Then Charlie makes a long face, one that droops way down to his knees, and he says to the audience, “I give her my kidney, and she still wants my heart. Women!” He sighs.

If my brother's in the audience, he pitches in his two cents, too. “What? My kidney wasn't good enough for you? You still owe me for that, you know. I've got a guitar picked out.”

“Save it, hon!” I say. “That's another story!” You see? Everyone's a comedian. We've learned to look past the hecklers and go on with the show.

“So, I give her my kidney, and she finally gets better and quits whining in my ear about how sick she is.
I'm so sick. I'm so sick
,” Charlie whines in a high-pitched nasal voice that is supposed to resemble mine, but I don't think it's anywhere close. “
Poor me, poor me.
” He pretends to cry, wiping his cheeks free of the tears. And right on cue, I put up my dukes and give him a shot in the arm. I always miss and stumble clumsily to the side, just like a good straight man should.

And that's how it goes.

And the crowd laughs.

And we're at the center of it all, the brightness shining on us like a big operating room light. Only this time, I'm laughing so hard, I don't feel any pain.

The first time I met Charlie was at a party in college. Back then, I was a shy Catholic girl with a pimply face and legs like needles. Charlie was smiling, drunker than a worm at the bottom of a tequila bottle. He was wearing a pair of those gold Elvis sunglasses with fake sideburns attached to them, sauntering up to every coed saying, “It's me, baby. Your hunk-a, hunk-a burnin” love.” All the other girls ignored him, but I couldn't take my eyes off his curled lip and the way he swaggered when he walked, starting way down deep in his knees, and all the way up to his hips.
Boom, boom, step. Boom, boom, step
. When he finally came up to me, he took off his sunglasses, looked me straight in the eyes and said, “Priscilla, that you?”

I bet after that he thought it would be happily ever after, all jokes and silliness. All kissy face and googly eyes. I bet he didn't think he had a sick puppy on his hands. Early on, I tried not to bring it up. Instead, I let him buy me drinks. I laughed at all his jokes. I was afraid to tell him about my kidney disease and about the first transplant I got from my brother when I was eighteen. But he didn't seem to mind it. In a crowded bar, he held his chin up with one hand, and reached across the table to touch my arm with the other.

“I have three kidneys,” I came clean.

“So what, I have a Spock ear.”

“I mean, I take like nine medicines,” I said.

“I get sunburned through skylights,” he challenged.

“High blood pressure.”

“Osgood-Schlatter.”

“I have a big scar that runs from one side of my belly down to my bikini line,” I confessed.

“I have ... to see it!” he said.

Later that night, he did see my scar. He put his lips to it, flush against my distorted skin. He kissed me there and then all over.

Still, I didn't want Charlie to look at me and only see my medical history. I stuffed my blood-pressure cuff in a closet before he came over, and I stashed my medicines away in an inconspicuous basket over the microwave. But while standing in the kitchen of my college apartment drinking a beer one night, he leaned up against the counter and reached for one of the plastic orange pharmacy bottles and started reading the label out loud.

“Caution: May cause increased appetite and fat deposits. May cause acne, hair growth, weight gain, and a moon-face complexion,” he read.

From a barstool, I looked down and focused on the tiles on the floor. I could feel the heat rise up against the sides of my face like a rapidly developing sunburn. He had picked up a bottle of Prednisone, one of my anti-rejection drugs with the ugliest side effect. It bloated my cheeks and rounded the shape of my face. I was a cartoon head atop a human body. This drug made it clear for everyone who saw me that I wasn't just a regular girl; it marked me as transplanted.

Charlie held the bottle and combed the stubble on his chin with his fingers. Then he said, “Moon-face ... That almost sounds pretty, huh?”

I bet he thought that's all he”d have to do. Make me laugh, fetch me a blanket when I got cold, drive me to the doctor's office when I needed it, say “there, there” every now and again. I bet he didn't think that after six years together, I would get sick again, and he would be the one to give me his kidney.

Now, after the surgery, everyone calls him the “hero.” I am the one he saved. My mother introduces my brother and Charlie by saying, “This is my Hero #1, and this is my Hero #2.” I look at it that way, too. But you know what throws me for a loop? Even now, Charlie calls me his Super Woman. “You and your amazing powers. They turn me on.
Grrrrrrrrr
,” he says, grabbing at the air with his hand as if it were a paw.

“What are you talking about?” I say. “I'm as weak as a baby.”

“Nah, come on. You know what I mean.” I think he means the risk we took. We were playing Russian roulette with this transplant, betting everything on our lucky number. My body could figure out that this kidney isn't really my own and start trying to get rid of it tomorrow. And while that risk is out there, it's much easier to suspend the belief that these things could happen, that Charlie's kidney is more like a superkidney, the exact remedy I need, and that with it, I may never be sick again. But even Charlie, often dupable and often a big suspender-of-belief himself, still thinks more practically when it comes to things like that. Like when he comes home and finds me throwing up into the toilet bowl.

“You okay?” he says, standing against the bathroom door. “Moonface, how can I help you? What can I get?” He looks like an angel to me, his blond curly hair against the hall light. I want to tell him that I'm fine, that as long as he's standing there, I'm going to be all right.
Just don't leave
.

“A minute, Charlie,” I say, holding him off with my hand until I can regain my strength. “I already called the doctor. Probably something I ate. No fever. No pain. Nothing to worry about.”

When I'm back in bed, he makes me tea and rubs my feet. “How's a skinny little thing like you get to be so tough?”

I have to fight for it
, I think. There are moments when I see myself running with all my strength through some grand landscape of wildflowers. Or where I am flying off to some deserted island without first stopping to think where the nearest hospital is. There are moments when I picture myself as someone other than the person contained in this body. But there is always something that jolts me back to reality. A cold, an infection. My daydreams don't last. When it gets to be too much, my eyes well up and I say, in a voice that's weaker than I'd like, “Oh, no, Charlie, here come the faucets.”

“Pretend I'm the sink!”

He comes closer to me. “Let it out, Moonface. Don't worry. You're stronger than you think. Really. You're like The Great Wall of China . . . The Rock of Gibraltar . . . Hercules . . . Mount Everest . . . The Acropolis . . . The Golden Gate Bridge . . . The Statue of Liberty . . .”

“Yeah, yeah, okay,” I tell him. Sometimes he doesn't stop talking. My eyelids get heavy. I wipe tears off with my shirt. I just want to sleep, crash in this bed, and wake up somewhere else.

“And, Moonface, we're in this show together, for better or worse. I'm counting on you.” Charlie says. He lays his head on my arm. His voice gets slow and soft, like he's getting tired, too. “You're my honeybee . . . my sugar pop . . . my ragamuffin . . . my special girl . . . my Asian orchid . . . my sweet cheeks . . . my apple dumpling . . .”

“Asian orchid?”

“Yeah, that's what I said, my Asian orchid . . . my Cleopatra . my brown sugar . . . my buttermilk biscuit . . . my raspberry scone . . .”

He starts to fade.

“My june bug . . . my pet Chihuahua . . .”

And I fall asleep, dreaming of him still calling me names.

BOOK: Moonface

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