When he was 16, Boris Fishman and his girlfriend felt ready to have sex but he wanted the setting to be right and there was nowhere to go. Then he had an idea ...

We were each other’s firsts. I was 16, a stressed-out immigrant kid, she was the daughter of Colombian Catholics who were quite fond of the church’s policy on pre-marital sex. So it took us quite a while to awkwardly, semi-defeatedly concede to each other that we had run out of excuses to avoid sex. “This weekend?” I said grimly.

“Your house?” she said.

On Saturday morning, when the springtime sun finally made a strong showing outside after a dreary, wet winter, I came downstairs, where my parents and maternal grandmother were gathered around breakfast, and asked, as casually as I could: “Are you guys doing anything tonight?”

My father, not one for socialising or reading between the lines, wrinkled his forehead and said: “No?”

But my mother, who reads between the lines, needed only one look at me to say: “Of course!” She didn’t know why she was being asked, but she knew she was being asked.

“Why not go out for dinner?” I said, feeling guilty. “My treat.” Since arriving from the Soviet Union a decade before in 1988, none of our immigrant habits had eased; we almost never ate out – too expensive.

But I had been hoarding dollars from my summer jobs landscaping and lifeguarding. My offer must have indicated to my mother how badly I wished for the thing I was asking.

“But we’re not going anywhere tonight,” my father repeated, confused. My mother smacked his arm with the back of her hand: “Yes, we are.”

My grandmother only lolled her head, smiling. Whatever the adventure, she was in, as long as it included the family. (She had lost most of hers in the Holocaust.)

With curiosity, scepticism and goodwill, my parents and grandmother piled into the cramped, rusty Buick that was our first car in America and fumed off to whatever discount place they were going to for dinner. Newly permitted to drive, I jumped into our other car and sped off to a linen shop, in one of the nondescript shopping malls that surrounded our town like a blockading army.

I had been reading quite a bit of Gabriel García Márquez – my girlfriend’s compatriot – and I wanted her first time to resemble the epic, lovelorn couplings in his books. I wasn’t sure how things would hold up at my end, so at least everything else could be perfect.

After buying sheets (surely, I was the only unaccompanied 16-year-old male in the store), I stopped at the florist’s and asked for two dozen roses, rapidly depleting the funds I had set aside for my family’s dinner. I was so anxious that I gashed a finger trying to open the cellophane packaging in which the sheets were packed. I laid them down and wondered how tacky it was for the folding creases to show. Márquez had said nothing about folding creases. I tore the sheets back off the bed, yanked my mother’s ironing board from the hallway closet and got to work, the clock marching forward without mercy. My girlfriend was almost due and my family surely soon after that.

I gashed another finger plucking the petals off the thorn-riddled roses. (You thought I was going to give my girlfriend the flowers? No, like a maestro unveiling his circus, I would peel back the bedspread to reveal … fresh sheets covered in rose petals!)

Trying desperately not to bleed all over the enterprise, I stretched the ironed sheets over the mattress, scattered 300 rose petals on top and covered it all with the bedspread.

The main event was nothing like my literary hero had promised: primarily, we were relieved it was over. Now we could savour the falsely sweet memory of a milestone achieved. We turned on the television, called the diner and ordered a takeaway.

However, there was no sign of the adults. It was dark by now; I couldn’t imagine them choosing a restaurant that took serious time with its meals. There was no such place in our town, in any case.

They weren’t back when I drove my girlfriend home and they weren’t back by the time I returned. Eleven turned to midnight to 1am, and I turned from amusement to worry to terror at having consigned my family to catastrophe all because I wanted to lose my virginity.

I paced the living room and waited.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Boris Fishman’s parents, Anna and Yakov.

Though I would be unable to explain the feeling until many years later, the unease in my chest that evening had less to do with the awkwardness of a first coupling than the knowledge that it had been an obligation performed by two young people who felt a tremendous amount of affection for each other and desperately wished that could be enough.

I wrote my first poems for Gloria and she listened patiently to my complaints about the pressures of all that was expected from me at home. She came to my tennis matches and I wrote her term papers. But there were too many silent moments between us and the fact that our parents did not see us together – a Catholic and a Jew – only deepened the gloom. Our parents’ opinions mattered to us with all the weight they suspected was lacking.

Gloria and I would never regret that we had given ourselves to each other, but among the many other lessons with which adulthood awaited us was the news that for a life together it was not enough to love someone; you had to like them, too.

She was one year older than me and when she went off to college we unravelled. All the same, when I went to college, my mother demanded to know whether I had chosen it because it was only half an hour from where Gloria was studying.

“It’s Princeton, Ma,” I said. “Who cares why I chose it?” (I had selected Princeton because it offered the most financial assistance and because my parents would be footing the bill). But having spent their formative years in a country that lied to and abused its citizens, especially if they were Jewish, my parents were always alert to a con, even from their own flesh and blood.

As for Gloria, we reconnected several years ago after more than a decade. We have dinner every few months, each meeting as if no time has passed. The intense feelings that we experienced in those impressionable years have left us with a seemingly ineradicable tenderness available only to people like us. Sometimes I wonder: would we have stood a chance if we had ignored our parents about our relationship, too? There is no way to know.

So, this is adulthood: being old enough to have questions that will never be answered. Now, the parents listen only sometimes. Gloria and I laugh and commiserate about it when we meet at dinner. In those moments, our friendship feels like a secret and a gift.

But back to that spring night in 1996. When I heard the garage-door rumble open at 2am, I leapt off the couch where I was napping fitfully and burst through the connecting door in the front hallway.

“Where were you?!” I demanded like a parent sighting children who had violated their curfew. “It’s 2am!”

“We wanted to give you your time,” my mother said, taken aback.

“Where were you?” I demanded.

Recent immigrants don’t eat out, not if someone in the family is paying (my pocket was as good as their own, as far as they were concerned). They had spent seven hours parked in the lot outside Shop Rite down Hamburg Turnpike, next to the diner from which my girlfriend and I had ordered food. They had made sandwiches. They snacked on turkey slices with mayo and cucumber and talked about all the things they wished their only son to achieve. Seven hours they had talked and they could have gone on until dawn.

• A Replacement Life by Boris Fishman is published by One, £12.99.To order a copy for £10.39, including free UK p&p, go to theguardian.com/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846