Our mother also had a job, though not, of course, for the money. She worked three days a week as a program director for the American Society of Magazine Editors, a position made available to her through the intervention of Wurttemberg’s legal counsel, whose sister was executive assistant to ASME’s director. The actual job application and hiring had consisted of a lunch at Smith & Wollensky （at which she’d been so afraid to order anything off that expensive menu that she’d ended up with an onion soup and a waiter who looked at her with open hostility）; after that she was basically handed the annual internship program and told that she was in charge. Johanna liked reading the application essays of students from the Midwestern state schools, who seemed starstruck by the prospect of interning at Progressive Grocer or Scientific American, and the Ivy League girls （women） who she suspected would drop out of the program if they didn’t get assigned to Vogue, Mademoiselle, or Glamour. They were only a few years younger than she was, but they were all so focused! In fact, they made her wonder if the rest of her generation wasn’t rushing past her into some promised, post-coeducation future she hadn’t been told about. In June, when the young people arrived in New York for their orientation, she was the one to greet them in the lobby of their NYU dormitory, offering ASME T-shirts and maps of the city with the restaurant for their welcome dinner circled in red. Waiting for them at her little table, handing them their keys, she watched them approach, already in their Professional-Summer-in-New-York-City clothes, and felt the force of their ambition. The only thing she wanted as much as these college students wanted to work in magazines was to be pregnant.
Then, during her second ASME summer, not one but two young interns （Seventeen and Reader’s Digest） came weeping to her with unexpected and very unwanted pregnancies, and Johanna Oppenheimer walked directly into the office of the sister of Wurttemberg’s legal counsel and quit. After that, fertility and its discontents would be her only employment.
How she came to despise the use of the word “journey” to describe this, the grating, grueling, sometimes boring, always excruciating business of trying and failing to become pregnant. It was not supposed to be a thing at all! It was supposed to just happen in the way it had always happened, something along the lines of open legs, insert penis, bring forth offspring. That was how it had worked for her sister, and even for the thoroughly unremarkable person Bobby had finally married and impregnated （though not, as it happened, in that order）。 But not for Johanna and Salo Oppenheimer. For the first year, Salo wasn’t even aware of the fact that his wife was actively trying to become pregnant, and she somehow persuaded herself that this made it not count as a year of failure. Then one afternoon she asked him, as if the notion had just occurred to her, whether the two of them were not ready for the next step. And he had said: “Next step to where?”
It wasn’t that he was holding back. He wasn’t holding back. He wasn’t even afraid. It was just that the idea of it, of a pregnancy that might, in due course, turn into a baby and thence into a child, or “person,” was so utterly beyond his ken that he could not immediately understand what she was talking about. He was so not there with her in her longing, so not bitterly disappointed each month when it didn’t happen. He wasn’t a step behind, vaguely believing that it would all work out eventually. It wasn’t an acknowledged issue between them, something he’d made his feelings clear about and asked her to concede to. No. It simply wasn’t there at all. It was as if the entire notion of procreation would have to be fully reinvented for the sole edification of Salo Oppenheimer.
If she could have moved ahead without his help or even knowledge, she’d have done it in an instant, but the first thing you gave up when you dragged yourself, finally, to the famous infertility doctor you’ve read about in New York magazine was the privilege of keeping a secret from your husband.
“We’ll see you and your partner on the eighth, at eleven A.M.,” said the receptionist for the famous infertility doctor.
She would have to tell him.
“What do you mean, infertile?” had been Salo’s first reaction.
“I don’t know. I’m just concerned. I’d just like to get checked out. Both of us to get checked out.”