I've been saving this one for a long time. Strap in.
On a quiet summer day while I was in early high school, I found I had the house to myself. My mother told to me that she was leaving to run some errands in a larger town about forty minutes’ drive away. She’d probably be gone all day, she told me. Or at least that’s what I heard. At this point my then-boyfriend and I had been talking quite a lot about trying sex for the first time and were waiting for the opportunity. This had to be it.
As soon as my mother was out the door I was on Skype instant messenger (I know, right?) with my boyfriend. An hour later he was at my house. We may or may not have played a game of Magic: the Gathering before we got started— I get fuzzy on the details— but anyway within an hour or two we were having, well, a great time.
So, uh, there’s this thing you need to know about my mom. First you’ve got to picture her: a short-haired, slightly round Korean-American woman in her early fifties, not an inch over than five feet tall. Then you have to meet her and see that, aside from being wise and sage and motherly, she’s absolutely adorable. Really sweet, silly woman. (When she’s old I’m planning to call her Yoda.) Anyway whenever my mother got home and no one was there but her kids, which was often, she’d let out this sickeningly cute, cheerful, high-pitched “hell-OOOOoooooo!” that echoed through the entire house.
So my boyfriend and I were going at it like rabbits on crack when we heard this sickeningly cute, cheerful, high-pitched “hell-OOOOoooooo!” echoing through the entire house and a deep, cold shudder of terror washed over us both. We jumped off each other and scrambled to get dressed, trying to stay quiet since my mother had no idea he was even over. Once I was vaguely presentable I darted out of my room to make extremely innocent conversation with her from the top of the stairs. She was a little preoccupied and once it became clear that she was going to stay downstairs I went back into my room to talk to my boyfriend.
I’d love to say that at this point in the story I accepted that sexy time was over and quietly snuck him out of there without incident. In reality, our conversation went more like this:
Me: So, I guess you should, maybe, go? Him: I mean… are you sure? Me: … Him: Like, can’t we keep going? Me: (pokes head out of room again) Mom, I’m gonna take a shower, okay? Mom: (from downstairs) Sure, honey. Me: Uh, actually, can I use the shower in your bathroom? Mom: Sure, honey.
Now I’m not going to defend this idea that I had because it’s without a doubt the shittiest idea that’s ever crossed my mind. However, I will say that the shower in the master bathroom in my house, which is connected to my parents’ bedroom, was way, way bigger and nicer than mine. It was the posh kind with sliding glass doors and everything. At the time that made it seem worth the insane risk I was about to take. When the coast was clear, my boyfriend and I crept into my parents’ bathroom. We shut the door, which did not lock, and, well, got into the shower.
Things had been going fairly well, and for a rather long amount of time, when my boyfriend’s cell phone started ringing. His ringtone at the time was this old Stevie Wonder song... God, I still can’t listen to it. Panicking at the noise, we both jumped apart and tumbled out of the shower. Hoping my mom wouldn’t hear him, I shoved my boyfriend and his cell phone into the bathroom closet. As I got dressed, he tried to explain to his mother over the phone why he was late to meet her downtown, trying to keep his voice down without sounding like he was trying to keep his voice down.
Within seconds of him hanging up, there was a knock at the bathroom door. “Derpulia?” my mother called. “You almost done in there?”
Somehow I determined that the best thing to do was to answer the door, fully clothed. I stuttered. “Uh, yeah, um, I’m gonna be a while.”
“Look, you’re all dressed,” she pointed out, not incorrectly. “Can you just get out of the bathroom while I poop?”
I floundered for excuses for a few minutes and found nothing. “Just— just wait here for two seconds,” I blurted, and shut the door in her face.
I quickly gathered up my boyfriend’s clothes and peeked into the closet, where he was huddled, naked and terrified. “I don’t see a way out of this,” I whispered to him, knowing what I was about to do to him. “Just stay in here and don’t make a sound. I’ll come back for you when it’s safe.”
And I left him.
Long after I forget everything I learned in school, after I forget the names of my friends and the birthdays of my grandchildren, I will remember sitting in my room with my head in my hands, a towel around my shoulders, and the intro bars of a fateful Stevie Wonder song endlessly repeating themselves in my head. I will always remember the day that because of me, the first love of my life hid naked and afraid in a bathroom closet, listening to my lactose-intolerant mother taking a shit.
After what felt like hours, my mother made her way back downstairs and I ran to the now-reeking bathroom to fetch my bedraggled boyfriend. As soon as I opened the closet door, he finished pulling on his clothes and strode past me with a hollow “I’m gonna tell her. I’m gonna tell her everything.”
Helplessly I followed him down into the kitchen, where my mother was washing a dish or something innocent as if she hadn’t just shat all over my teenage dreams. “Mrs. Derpulia's Mother,” he proclaimed with tears in his eyes, “I am so, so sorry. Derpulia and I were fooling around, and then you got home—” here he said something very vague about bathrooms, “—and I’m so so sorry and I’m going now. I’m sorry.”
After he left I sat down heavily at the kitchen table. My secret’s out, I thought. That’s it. He blew it. Now she knows everything.
My mom sat down next to me, all business, wearing her condescendingly knowing therapist-mother face, and said, “So. Derpulia.”
Immediately excuses and justifications started flying out of my mouth. “Mom I’m sorry this all happened this way but I swear we talked about it for ages beforehand, we both decided we were ready, we were really careful, we used protection—”
“Wait a second,” my mother said. “You two were having SEX?”
(We broke up a month or two later, which I like to think is for reasons unrelated to this story. We do not speak to each other now.. which may be related to this story. I hope he's okay.)