I am a simple man. Always have been. I put my pants on one leg at a time. I wear a hat when it’s cold. I eat a well-balanced diet and I don’t play contact sports. I lived with my mom until I was thirty-five, when my wife and I got together. We got married in my uncle’s backyard beneath the big old weeping willow six months after we first met.
One day, I was working at the Winn Dixie in
“That’ll be $4.53,” I said, handing her the bag.
She smiled and pulled the money out of her pocket. It was two one-dollar bills and a big pile of change. After dropping it on my counter she began ruffling through it, looking puzzled. I pulled out the quarters first, then the dimes and nickels, and brought us up to $4.40, but when I counted out the pennies there were only eleven.
“Two cents short,” I told her, pushing the change off the counter and into my hand.
She looked around the store a bit shyly and leaned into me real close. I could smell the coconut shampoo in her hair, and the mint of her chewing gum.
“Well, that seems to be all I got,” she said, twirling her hair on her finger.
“Any chance you might wanna lend me two pennies, I sure would be grateful,” she smiled.
I smiled back at her, suddenly feeling warm and even more nervous. Well I certainly could see that this pretty lady was in need of those Tampax, and I sure would have hated to be the one that denied her, so I told her it was no problemo, I sure could throw in a couple of spare cents for her.
Before I could say anything she threw her lean legs over the counter and was standing behind the register with me. She wrapped her arms around me, and I would be lying if I told you that with those round bosoms pushed against my chest I didn’t feel a bit of excitement down below. She asked me my name, and when I told her it was Joe Lewis she seemed pleased.
“Well Joe Lewis, I am gonna marry you,” she whispered, “What do you think about that?” I just never found a compelling reason to tell her no.
So, Marly Jo and I got married under that big old weeping willow in my Uncle Charlie’s yard and then she took me back to her parents place to consummate the event. They were out of town visiting her brother, so we had the place to ourselves. I’m telling you, she did things to me that afternoon changed my life. After Marly Jo and I got together I realized that there was something more for me and I stopped working at Winn Dixie.
Marly Jo and I bought a little trailer and moved down to the trailer park. She didn’t want to stay there, she wanted a proper house, but for a time it was all we could afford. She bought tulips to plant out front, and I found a new job at the sperm bank. It wasn’t the most glamorous job, but it was interesting, and it paid much better than Winn Dixie.
Marly Jo wasn’t excited about me working down at the sperm bank. She worried that the lonely wives would flirt with me while their husbands were out back trying to make a squirt, but when she saw how big my paycheck was she decided it was all right. Soon Marly Jo and I were going strong, we expanded our trailer, and it looked like a proper ranch home. We also started expanding the size of our family, as Marly Jo’s belly swelled and our first baby came into the world.
All the while I worked hard down at the sperm bank. I gave people their forms to fill out when they came in. I reviewed their paperwork and filed it. I took them into the donor rooms and got them set up with everything they needed. Some guys needed movies and magazines, or music. Others wanted complete silence. Others still wanted something to eat, certain brands of lotion, or warm towels. All of these things I gave them or let them have.
The remaining few wanted to bring their wives in with them.
Though you might think that couples would be the exception at a sperm bank, it was actually pretty common to have them there. I can’t imagine their difficulties because Marly Jo and I never had struggles with this at all, but some couples want a baby and just can’t seem to make one on their own. These couples would come into the bank and he would give the sperm to us, then, later, after we tested them to make sure they were a-o-k for making a baby, the doctor would bring in the wife and put the sperm inside of her. It was her own husband’s sperm; we were just helping the little crawlers along is all.
Over my years at the clinic I watched them all coming in. These couples, hesitant and hopeful, nervous and expectant. In through the door, and out to the back to begin the process of getting off. In the beginning, I was nice to all them couples, but I tried hard not to think about why they were there, or what they were doing behind the solid white door that separated me from them. Later though, I began to imagine what they were doing back there.
I want to make clear that I didn’t imagine those men that were alone, I only imagined the couples, and what it must be like trying to get off in that sterile room. Knowing other people had been in there only 30 minutes ago, doing the same thing in a different way, but with the same goal in sight. When I thought about it I used to get a little warm below the belt, almost the way Marly Jo made me feel when she came close, stroking the back of my neck with those manicured nails the way she did when she wanted to make love.
The same day our own child came, a couple I knew well found out that they were finally pregnant. They had been coming into the clinic for a few years, and hadn’t been blessed with any luck up until this point. I remember this specifically because they were a couple who argued frequently in my lobby, and I often had to put them into a room just to keep them from alarming the other guests. There was always a bit of an argument about whose fault it was that they couldn’t get pregnant, he believing his sperm was fine, and her believing her own eggs ripe for the picking.
In the end they would go back into that room and do what needed to be done, her coming back the following week to have the sperm inserted. It still baffles to me this day that between the two of them they couldn’t just get the sperm inserted themselves, but I am not in the business of judging other people.
I guess what really gets me about their situation is that the following week after their last big argument she came in on her own. She was in with the doctor for a full hour and when she brought me her invoice it was for an “insemination procedure.” She paid and left, only to return the following day with her husband. Upon leaving, she handed me an invoice identical to the one she had given me the following day.
I didn’t ask any questions, but I looked her up and down with curiosity. I knew full-well that the husband only had one tub of sperm on file, and there was no way they got two inseminations out of it. Later, when my little Betty was born and this couple came out all smiles about their pregnancy I didn’t have the heart to ruin their happiness no matter how bad the rat smelled. I was happy, so why shouldn’t this couple be happy too? But happiness never lasts as long as we think it will.
A few months later (four months to be exact) Marly Jo and I realized that something was wrong with our little Betty. She had stopped advancing. She should have been sitting up on her own, but she only lay there, stumbling over her self whenever she tried to move. We took her to Doctor Robbins, and he told us that Betty might only live another week due to an unusual illness that cause infant death.
We buried Betty under the old weeping willow. The life went out of Marly Jo that day, and her golden hair turned a dull gray. Where she used to whisper and laugh with me, she only stared blankly around the house and sat silently smoking cigarette after cigarette until the sun went down and she could go back to bed. I kept up my job at the sperm bank, but never wanted to think about sex, or having children, or getting off at all.
About a year after Betty died I sat down at the table to read the paper and drink my coffee. Under the community section, there were the death notices. Marly Jo used to yell at me for reading them, she thinking it wasn’t right to be so fascinated with death, but she had given up on that after our baby went to rest. The first notice was that of a three month old who died suddenly of a rare disease. In reading the notice, it came clear to me that this was the baby of the very couple who had gotten pregnant on my daughter’s birth day.
Now I am not trying to be coy here, but there was something unsettling about that report. A baby, died of the very same rare disease as my baby, and the parents having made that baby at my very own sperm bank. I walked out into the den where Marly Jo sat smoking and held the paper out to her. After reading it, a look of fear came over her face and a tear came down her cheek. I never saw Marly Jo cry, not even when little Betty died. Not even when we got married, or when she cut her hand on a broken glass. But this time she cried. It was a downright sob, but I didn’t have the heart to hold her no more.
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