The Abstinence Teacher

by Tom Perrotta

  “Frank’s a good man.” The Superintendent spoke gravely, as if defending Frank’s honor. “Very dependable.”

  “Unless you’re married to him,” Ruth said, doing her best to make this sound like a lighthearted quip.

  “How long were you together?” asked the consultant, JoAnn Marlow, addressing Ruth in that disarmingly cordial way she had, as if the two of them were colleagues and not each other’s worst nightmare.

  “Eleven years.” Ruth shook her head, the way she always did when contemplating the folly of her marriage. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”

  JoAnn laid a cool, consoling hand on Ruth’s arm. As usual, she was done up like a contestant in a beauty pageant—elaborate hairdo, gobs of makeup, everything but the one-piece swimsuit and the sash that said “Miss Morality”—though Ruth didn’t understand why she bothered. If you were determined to live like a nun—and determined to broadcast this fact to the world—why waste all that time making yourself pretty?

  “Must be so awful,” JoAnn whispered, as if Ruth had just lost a close relative under tragic circumstances.

  “Felt like a ton of bricks off my chest, if you want the truth. And Frank and I actually get along much better now that we don’t have to see each other every day.”

  “I meant for the children,” JoAnn explained. “It’s always so hard on the children.”

  “The girls are fine,” Ruth told her, resisting the urge to add, not that it’s any of your business.

  “Cute kids,” said Dr. Farmer. “I remember when the oldest was just a baby.”

  “She’s fourteen now,” said Ruth. “Just as tall as I am.”

  “This is where the fun starts.” He shook his head, speaking from experience. His middle child, Andrea, had been wild, a teenage runaway and drug addict who’d been in and out of rehab numerous times before finally straightening out. “The boys start calling, you have to worry about where they are, who they’re with, what time they’re coming home—”

  The bell rang, signaling the end of first period. Within seconds, the hallways were filled with platoons of sleepy-looking teenagers, nodding and muttering to one another as they passed. Some of them looked like little kids, Ruth thought, others like grown-ups, sixteen-and seventeen-year-old adults. According to surveys, at least a third of them were having sex, though Ruth knew all too well that you couldn’t always guess which ones just from looking at them.

  “Girls have to protect themselves,” JoAnn said. “They’re living in a dangerous world.”

  “Eliza took two years of karate,” Ruth reported. “She made it up to her green belt. Or maybe orange, I can’t remember. But Maggie, my younger one, she’s the jock. She’s going to test for her blue belt next month. She does soccer and swimming, too.”

  “Impressive,” noted Dr. Farmer. “My wife just started taking Tai Chi. She does it with some Chinese ladies in the park, first thing in the morning. But that’s not really a martial art. It’s more of a movement thing.”

  The adults vacated the doorway, making way for the students who began drifting into the classroom. Several of them smiled at Ruth, and a few said hello. She’d felt okay right up to that point, more or less at peace with the decision she’d made. But now, quite suddenly, she became aware of the cold sweat pooling in her armpits, the queasy feeling spreading out from her belly.

  “I was talking about spiritual self-defense,” said JoAnn. “We’re living in a toxic culture. The messages these girls get from the media are just so relentlessly degrading. No wonder they hate themselves.”

  Dr. Farmer nodded distractedly as he scanned the nearly empty hallway. His face relaxed as Principal Venuti rounded the corner by the gym and began moving toward them at high speed, hunched in his usual bowlegged wrestler’s crouch, as if he were looking for someone to take down.

  “Here’s our fourth,” said Dr. Farmer. “So we’re good to go.”

  “Looks like it,” agreed Ruth. “Be a relief just to get it over with.”

  “Oh, come on,” JoAnn said, smiling at Ruth to conceal her annoyance. “It’s not gonna be that bad.”

  “Not for you,” Ruth said, smiling right back at her. “It’s gonna be just great for you.”

  SOME PEOPLE enjoy it.

  That was all Ruth had said. Even now, when she’d had months to come to terms with the fallout from this remark, she still marveled at the power of those four words, which she’d uttered without premeditation and without any sense of treading on forbidden ground.

  The incident had occurred the previous spring, during a contraception lecture Ruth delivered to a class of ninth graders. She had just completed a fairly detailed explanation of how an IUD works when she paused and asked if anyone had any questions. After a moment, a pale, normally quiet girl named Theresa McBride raised her hand.

  “Oral sex is disgusting,” Theresa declared, apropos of nothing. “You might as well French-kiss a toilet seat. You can get all sorts of nasty diseases, right?”

  Theresa stared straight at Ruth, as if daring her to challenge this incontrovertible fact. In retrospect, Ruth thought she should have been able to discern the hostile intent in the girl’s unwavering gaze—most of the ninth graders kept their eyes trained firmly on their desks during the more substantive parts of Sex Ed—but Ruth wasn’t in the habit of thinking of her students as potential adversaries. If anything, she was grateful to the girl for creating what her grad school professors used to call “a teachable moment.”

  “Well,” Ruth began, “from what I hear about oral sex, some people enjoy it.”

  The boys in the back of the room laughed knowingly, an attitude Ruth chalked up more to bravado than experience, despite all the rumors about blowjobs being as common as hand-holding in the middle school. Theresa reddened slightly, but she didn’t avert her eyes as Ruth continued with the more serious part of her answer, in which she discussed a few basic points of sexual hygiene, and described the body’s ingenious strategies for separating the urinary and reproductive systems, even though they shared a lot of the same real estate. She finished by enumerating the various STD’s that could and could not be transmitted through oral-to-genital contact, and recommending the use of condoms and dental dams to make oral sex safer for both partners.

  “Done properly,” she said, “cunnilingus and fellatio should be a lot more pleasant, and a lot cleaner, than kissing a toilet seat. I hope that answers your question.”

  Theresa nodded without enthusiasm. Ruth returned to her lecture, removing a diaphragm from its plastic case and whizzing it like a miniature Frisbee at Mark Royalton, the alpha male in the back row. Acting on reflex, Mark snatched the device from the air, and then let out a melodramatic groan of disgust when he realized what he was holding.

  “Don’t be scared,” Ruth told him. “It’s brand-new. For display purposes only.”

  IT WAS her own fault, she thought, for not having seen the trouble brewing. The atmosphere in the school, and around town, had changed a lot in the past couple of years. A small evangelical church—The Tabernacle of the Gospel Truth—led by a fiery young preacher known as Pastor Dennis, had begun a crusade to cleanse Stonewood Heights of all manner of godlessness and moral decay, as if this sleepy bedroom community was an abomination unto the Lord, Sodom with good schools and a twenty-four-hour supermarket.

  Pastor Dennis and a small band of the faithful had held a successful series of demonstrations outside of Mike’s World of Video, convincing the owner—Mike’s son, Jerry—to close down a small “Adults Only” section in the back of the store; the church had also protested the town’s use of banners that said “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas.” Tabernacle members had spoken out against the teaching of evolution at school board meetings, and initiated a drive to ban several Judy Blume novels from the middle-school library, including Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret, one of Ruth’s all-time favorites. Randall had spoken out against censorship at the meeting, and had been personally attacked in the Ston
ewood Bulletin-Chronicle by Pastor Dennis, who said that it should come as no surprise to find immoral books in the school library when the school system placed “immoral people” in positions of authority.

  “They’ve given the inmates control of the asylum,” Pastor Dennis observed. “Is it any wonder they’re making insane decisions?”

  But the good guys had won that battle; the school board had voted five to four to keep Judy Blume on the shelves (unfortunately, the books themselves had been repeatedly vandalized in the wake of this decision, forcing the librarians to remove them to a safe area behind the circulation desk). In any event, Ruth had foolishly chosen to view these skirmishes as a series of isolated incidents, storms that flared up and blew over, rather than seeing them for what they were—the climate in which she now lived.

  Her second mistake was thinking of herself as invulnerable, somehow beyond attack. She’d been teaching high school Sex Ed for more than a decade and had become a beloved figure—or so she liked to think—for the unflappable, matter-of-fact candor with which she discussed the most sensitive of subjects. She believed—it was her personal credo—that Pleasure is Good, Shame is Bad, and Knowledge is Power; she saw it as her mission to demystify sex for the teenagers of Stonewood Heights, so they didn’t go through their lives believing that masturbation was a crime against nature, or that oral sex was the functional equivalent of kissing a toilet seat, or worse, perpetuating the time-honored American Tradition of not even knowing there was such a thing as the clitoris, let alone where it was located. She was doing what any good teacher did—leading her students into the light, opening them up to new ways of thinking, giving them the vital information they needed to live their lives in the most rewarding way possible—and in doing so, she had earned more than her fair share of respect and affection from the kids who passed through her classroom, and some measure of gratitude from the community as a whole.

  So when Principal Venuti told her that he needed to talk to her about an “important matter,” she showed up at his office without the slightest sense of misgiving. Even when she saw the Superintendent there, as well as a man who introduced himself as a lawyer for the school district, she felt more puzzled than alarmed.

  “This isn’t a formal interview,” the Superintendent told her. “We’re just trying to get the facts straight.”

  “What facts?” said Ruth.

  The Principal and the Superintendent turned to the lawyer, who didn’t look too happy.

  “Ms. Ramsey, did you … umm … well, did you advocate the practice of fellatio to your students?”

  “Did I what?”

  The lawyer glanced at his yellow pad. “Last Thursday, in sixth-period Health? In response to a question by a Theresa McBride?”

  When Ruth realized what he was talking about, she laughed with relief.

  “Not just fellatio,” she explained. “Cunnilingus, too. I would never single out just the one.”

  The lawyer frowned. He was a slovenly guy in a cheap suit, the kind of attorney you sometimes saw on TV, blinking frantically, trying to explain why he’d fallen asleep during his client’s murder trial. Stonewood Heights was a relatively prosperous town, but Ruth sometimes got the feeling that the people in charge didn’t mind cutting a few corners.

  “And you’re telling us that you advocated these practices?”

  “I didn’t advocate them,” Ruth said. “If I remember correctly, I think what I said is that some people like oral sex.”

  Joe Venuti let out a soft groan of dismay. Dr. Farmer looked like he’d been jabbed with a pin.

  “Are you absolutely certain?” the lawyer asked in an insinuating tone. “Why don’t you take a moment and think about it. Because if you’re being misquoted, it would make everything a lot easier.”

  By now it had finally dawned on Ruth that she might be in some kind of trouble.

  “You want me to say I didn’t say it?”

  “It would be a relief,” admitted Dr. Farmer. “Save us all a big headache.”

  “There were a lot of witnesses,” she reminded them.

  “Nobody had a tape recorder, right?” The lawyer grinned when he said this, but Ruth didn’t think he was joking.

  “I can’t believe this,” she said. “Are people not allowed to like oral sex anymore?”

  “People can like whatever they want on their own time.” Joe Venuti stared at Ruth in a distinctly unfriendly manner. Before being named Principal, he’d been a legendary wrestling coach, famous for verbally abusing several generations of student-athletes. “But we can’t be advocating premarital sex to teenagers.”

  “Why do you guys keep saying that?” Ruth asked. “I wasn’t advocating anything. I was just stating a fact. It’s no different than saying that some people like to eat chicken.”

  “If you said that some people like to eat chicken,” the lawyer told her, “I don’t think Mr. and Mrs. McBride would be threatening a lawsuit.”

  Ruth was momentarily speechless.

  “Th—they’re what?” she spluttered. “They’re suing me?”

  “Not just you,” the lawyer said. “The whole school district.”

  “But for what?”

  “We don’t know yet,” said the lawyer.

  “They’ll think of something,” said Venuti. “They’re part of that church. Tabernacle, whatever.”

  “They got some Christian lawyers working pro bono,” Dr. Farmer explained. “These guys’ll sue you for wearing the wrong color socks.”

  AFTER LIVING the first forty-one years of her life in near-total obscurity, Ruth had been shocked to find herself transformed into a public figure—the Oral Sex Lady—a person she barely recognized. The story was first reported in the Bulletin-Chronicle (“Sex Ed Crosses Line, Family Says”), and then picked up by some larger regional papers before getting an unwelcome moment in the sun of a big-city tabloid (“Oral Sex A-OK, Teacher Tells Kids”). Ruth was contacted by numerous journalists eager to get her side of the so-called scandal, and although she was itching to defend herself—to rebut the malicious and ill-informed Letters to the Editor, to put her “controversial remarks” in some sort of real-life context, to speak out about what she saw as the proper role of Sexuality Education in the high-school curriculum—she had received strict instructions not to comment from the school district’s lawyer, who didn’t want her to jeopardize the “sensitive negotiations” he was conducting with the McBrides’ legal team.

  The gag order remained in effect during the emergency school board meeting called to address the crisis, which meant that, after issuing a terse, abject apology to “anyone who might have been offended” by anything she’d said “that might have been inappropriate,” Ruth had to sit down and shut up while speaker after speaker rose to accuse her of recklessness and irresponsibility and even, in the case of one very angry old man, to suggest that she had more than a thing or two in common with “a certain lady from Babylon.” A handful of parents spoke up on Ruth’s behalf, but their support felt tepid at best—people were understandably reluctant to rally around the banner of oral sex at a school board meeting—and their statements were regularly interrupted by a chorus of boos from the Tabernacle contingent.

  The bad taste from this experience was still strong in Ruth’s mouth when she got to work the next morning and found a notice in her mailbox announcing a special schoolwide assembly on the subject of “Sexual Abstinence: Saying Yes to Saying No,” presented by an organization called Wise Choices for Teens. At any other point in her career, Ruth would have barged into the Principal’s office and told Joe Venuti exactly what she thought about Abstinence Education—that it was a farce, an attack on sexuality itself, nothing more than officially sanctioned ignorance—but she was well aware of the fact that her opinion was no longer of the slightest interest to the school administration. This lecture was damage control, pure and simple, a transparent attempt to placate the Tabernacle people and their supporters, to let them know that their complaints had been h
eard.

  So Ruth buttoned her lip—it had become second nature—and went to the assembly, curious to see what the students would make of it. After all, Stonewood Heights wasn’t the Bible Belt; it was a well-to-do Northeastern suburb, not liberal by any means, but not especially conservative, either. On the whole, the kids who grew up here believed in money, status, and fun; most of them would readily admit that they were a lot more focused on getting into a good college than the Kingdom of Heaven. They traveled, drove nice cars, wore cool clothes, and surfed the web on their camera phones. It was hard to imagine them being particularly receptive to the idea that an earthly pleasure existed that they weren’t entitled to enjoy whenever and however they felt like it.

  Ruth wasn’t sure what kind of spokesperson she’d been expecting, but it certainly wasn’t the young woman who took the stage after a warm welcome from Principal Venuti. The guest speaker wasn’t just blond and pretty; she was hot, and she knew it. You could see it in the way she moved toward the podium—like a movie star accepting an award—that consciousness she had of being watched, the pleasure she took in the attention. She wore a tailored navy blue suit with a knee-length skirt, an outfit whose modesty somehow provoked curiosity rather than stifling it. Ruth, for example, found herself squinting at the stage, trying to decide if the unusually proud breasts straining against the speaker’s silk blouse had been surgically enhanced.

  “Good afternoon,” she said. “My name is JoAnn Marlow, and I’d like to tell you a few things about myself. I’m twenty-eight years old, I’m a Leo, I’m a competitive ballroom dancer, and my favorite band is Coldplay. I like racquet sports, camping and hiking, and going for long rides on my boyfriend’s Harley. Oh, yeah, and one more thing: I’m a virgin.”

  She paused, waiting for the audience to recover from a sudden epidemic of groans and snickers, punctuated by shouts of “What a waste!” and “Not for long!” and “I’ll be gentle!” issuing from unruly packs of boys scattered throughout the auditorium. JoAnn didn’t seem troubled by the hecklers; it was all part of the show.