Poems & Ficton

A Spare Kidney

Patrice was rolling down her socks, which Steve found endearingly quirky.  When the roll reached her ankles, she slipped the sock off.  He’d asked her about it when they first started dating. She laughed and told him he was the first to ever notice. 

            “I’m betting others have noticed, but were afraid to ask,” he said, feeling magnanimous in his acknowledgement of the others who predated him.

            “Could be,” she said.  “My grandmother always took her stockings off this way, back in the time before pantyhose.  When I was a kid, I thought it was something fun to do, but now I do it because it gets me thinking about her.”

            It might have been just then that the words “married” and “Patrice” had coupled themselves in his consciousness.  Here’s a girl who thinks about her granny when she takes off her socks.  How sweet and unexpected.  He was about to make a joke about how they looked like woolly condoms on the floor next to her shoes, but by this time,  he was thinking in an entirely different direction.

            Seven months later, they were planning their wedding and out of the blue, as she set each sock on top of the shoe it had recently occupied, he asked her what she would like as a token of their commitment.  She’d already said no to an engagement ring—waste of money, which he found a mark of a practicality that was nothing short of charming.  This time he pitched an extravagant getaway, a weekend in Paris, but she said that would do for their honeymoon.  Why he kept asking, he had no idea.  He had no heirloom jewelry to offer—his sisters had seen to that—and it was because of those same sisters he didn’t trust himself to simply pick something.  

            She slipped her feet into a pair of slippers with puppy-dog heads on them.

            “Come on,” she said.  “There’s dinner to be made.”

In the kitchen, bumping hips and making a huge, preposterous salad that included chocolate shavings, kalamata olives, and mandarin oranges, he asked again. 

            “A kidney would be nice,” she said, turning her face up to meet his.

            “Pardon?”  For a moment, he thought they were talking about the salad and perhaps tossing in some kidney beans.

            “One of your kidneys,” she said.  “You could donate it.”

            She had round blue eyes that were set with perfect symmetry in her round, pale face.  The effect was that anything she said seemed to be without guile.  She could have just told him she’d like a watch or new shoes. Was this a test of his devotion?  Sarcasm at his provincial offering of a token of his love and commitment?  Then he was shamed by the awful fear that she was dying of some strange or not so strange disease.

            “Are you sick?” he asked with the urgency one would expect although as the words left his mouth, he was now wondering just how much he loved her—enough to part with a kidney?

            “No, you silly egg,” she said.  “Just look at your poor face.”  She set down the pepper mill and cupped his face in her hands.  “I am fine.”

            They ate in silence, Patrice chomping happily on a lamb chop.  Now the words “married” and “Patrice” were precariously perched on the great crevasse of his unknowing, coupled with words like “unstable” and “weird.”  When did one cross from endearingly eccentric to genuinely bizarre?  A kidney!  Politically, she was registered as an Independent, which to him defined indecisive.  She never espoused any causes that he was aware of, never mentioned Greenpeace or PETA.

Steve wished he was an actuary.  Surely there must be stats on this sort of thing.  He thought about his parents.  They met at a party, were married a year later, and had his sister, Meg, a year after that.  They just hit the 35 mark.  How’d they manage that?  His godparents knew each other six weeks before eloping.  They were still married.  How did that work? 

He watched the curious precision with which she ate her dinner.  First a bite of her lamb chop, the bone held delicately between the tips of her fingers, and then, after setting the chop back on the plate and licking the grease from her fingers—sexily, he might add—a forkful of salad.  The first time she plucked a finger from those lips, yeah, definitely a turn on, but she repeated this procedure until her plate was clean. Who eats like that? 

            After dinner and the washing up, they sat down to watch television.  Law & Order.  As the show began, she recited in a basso voice: “In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups: the police, who investigate crime; and the district attorneys, who prosecute the offenders. These are their stories.”  She recited it every time she watched an episode—every single time. 

            Nothing excited Patrice more than the moment when the body is discovered and the coroner gives her diagnosis.  She snuggled in under his arm, her body quivering with excitement. This episode’s body was found on a park bench and far from being the bum they suspected, this one had had surgery recently.  His kidney, the beleaguered medical examiner tells detectives Lenny and Mike, has been surgically removed—within the last twenty-four hours.  What are the odds? 

            He glanced at Patrice, but she gave no sign that the fate of his kidney was still up for discussion.  More disturbing was the fact that he decided he didn’t want to part with it, even if it meant saving her life.  He extracted his arm and thrust his clasped hands between his knees.  How long does it take to really know someone?  Steve realized it could take forever.  And then what?