The Night Out

There was a man.  He was a ballet dancer from Houston, working at the Stadttheater Bern.  I saw him in the ballet one night, and a few days later, he came into the McDonald’s where I worked - the first McDonald’s in Bern, possibly even in all of Switzerland, and a handful of students from ISB had gotten jobs there.  One day the dancer came in, we spoke, we formed a friendship, and the friendship became something more.  He was my first love.

The dancer was thirty.  I was seventeen.

At seventeen, the rooms of reason in my brain had not, fully, formed, though I do believe they had begun.  Years later, when I, myself, was thirty, I saw the inappropriateness of this relationship.  Indeed, I believe I was still in my twenties when it dawned on me that High School students should not be involved with people more than five years older than they, if that at all.  At seventeen, though, all I saw was that the man was dashing, he was handsome, he was worldly, he was sophisticated, and he enjoyed my company.  Why?  Why does a man with all those attributes want to spend his time with an effete teenage drama queen that doesn’t know who he is, what he wants, or where he is going?  A person can draw their own conclusions.  And like any effete teenage drama queen with a burgeoning sexuality, I became obsessed with the dancer, even though he treated me very badly, regularly arranging my entire life and schedule to be near him, like a dog who doesn’t recognize the crimes being committed against it, returning repeatedly for more pain.

The dancer demeaned me.  The dancer was unkind to me.  The dancer was cruel to me.  Of all the hateful, hurtful things that have been said to me in my life (the list is considerable), nothing and no one was ever as cruel as the diminishing verbiage and belittling insults I experienced when I was with the dancer.  And since this was my first relationship, and since he was older and knew the world, I thought that this was how people in a relationship treated each other.  The cuts went so deep that the scars would last me the rest of my life, and even though I am healed from the cuts, even though I have let go of the pain, I can feel the scars today.

Eventually, the dancer’s cruelty drove me into the arms of another man.  At seventeen, I was an Aaron Spelling nighttime soap opera.  

The other man was also older than me, and he was also a dancer.  This man was a local elementary school teacher that I knew from my ballet classes at the Halamka Dance Studio in the center of Bern.  He was tall with dirty blonde hair and hazel green eyes, creamy skin like milk, dimples as deep as the Grand Canyon, and a smile that lit up a room and lit up my heart.  He was twenty-five and, as such, he was more of a friend to me than an older lover, the way the dancer was.  He was closer to my age, so we had more to talk about, and we had like tastes and humors, and flirtations.  And one day at twilight, saddened by my latest visit to the bachelor pad of the dancer, I ran into the school teacher while roaming around town.  He smiled and asked what I was listening to on my headphones, and I took them off and handed them to him, so he could listen.  He started laughing.

“Why are you laughing?” I wanted to know.

“Most people listen to rock music on these things, not opera. I wasn’t expecting that”

I had recently seen Die Lustige Witwe at the Stadttheater Bern and had developed one of my things about the Franz Lehar operetta.

Standing there, in the navy of dusk, the Bernese cobblestones beneath our feet, the lights of town illuminating the teeth of two laughing friends, looking at the schoolteacher’s pretty face and benevolent smile, I took a leap.

“Why don’t you take me back to your place?”

I had been reading the novels of Sidney Sheldon and Gordon Merrick since I was twelve years old.  I knew the verbiage of seduction.

The schoolteacher stopped laughing and looked at me - it was only for a moment but it felt like an eternity.

“Ok.”

The night I spent with the school teacher was one of the sweetest nights of my life - fun, relaxed, playful, and comfortable, as well as comforting, all of the things missing from my relationship with the dancer.  It was so comfortable, in fact, that I fell asleep in his bed.

And when I awoke at six am, I was panic-stricken.

My heart was racing as I rode the bus home from the center of Bern to Spiegel.  As I climbed the hill that would take me back to Dählenweg, the last street in Spiegel before the hill upon which we lived became Gurten Park, my mind was like a pinball machine, devising all the lies and excuses that I would tell my parents.  As the horizon on the hill grew lighter, the gray of the dawn removed any cover of darkness through which I might slip, silently, into the Mosher family homestead.  Perhaps, thought I, I won’t have to worry at all; maybe nobody noticed I didn’t come home last night, thought I, maybe I can sneak in through the back door, thought I.  A growing sense of optimism filled my entire being.

Stealthily sneaking around the shrubbery that divided our garden from the street, I hurried past the front of the house and down the hill to the back yard, there to find the door to the basement office unlocked.  Quietly turning the doorknob, I stepped onto cold concrete, closing the latch behind me with a click.  Nobody lived in the cellar, there was no chance of waking anyone, but, still, I tiptoed down the long, darkened hallway, the smell of the cool air permeating my nostrils and filling my lungs.  Up the long, curved, stone staircase, my gentle footsteps carried me closer to my bedroom and to safety.  As I opened the door to the first floor of the family homestead, I felt a sense of relief come over me, for it was only one more plushly carpeted staircase until I could slip into my room, slde under the covers, and feign having slept in my own bed, all night long.  I stepped onto ceramic tile and turned the corner.  I stopped.

“Good morning.”

There, in the foyer of the house, sat my Mother.  She had moved a chair from the Living Room into the entryway, placing it dead center of the room.  The back of the chair was facing the front door.  The front of the chair was facing the door to the basement.  Mama sat, looking at me, waiting for me to say something.  Her back was erect, her perfectly parallel feet were planted, firmly, on the floor.  Her startlingly symmetrical arms lay on the arm rests, her hands cradling gently the corners of the structure.  Her neck was long, her chin was down, her lips were pursed, her cheeks were shallow, her cheekbones were high, and her gaze was direct.  She looked like a Monarch.  She looked like a Monarch about to deliver a harsh judgment, perhaps, even the fall of a blade.  

“You scared me,”  I said, pretending to be frightened by her presence in the hallway, when what really struck terror in my heart was the disappointment I had caused.

“Then we are even.”  

There was no book or magazine nearby, no coffee cup in sight, not, in fact, anything that said she occupied her time throughout the night with anything other than worrying about me.

“I’m sorry I didn’t call.”

“That would have been nice.”

“I shouldn’t have stayed out all night.”

“You’re home, now.”

“It won’t happen again.”

“I would appreciate that.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You should go to bed, you look tired.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

I started to my room, swiftly passing the right side of the makeshift throne, my feet hitting the soft beige carpet of the stairs to the second floor.  Halfway up the flight, Mama’s voice stopped me.

“Be careful not to wake your father on your way up.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

I took another step up.

“Stevie.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I’m glad you’re home safe.”

Moments later I was in my room, my duvet pulled up under my chin, my wide eyes fixed on the window, as the day grew brighter: safe, sound, and moments away from sleep, as my mind memorized what had just occurred - one more in a long line of life events that confirmed the uniqueness and individuality that was Juana, the most forgiving and understanding of mothers in the history of the world.