The Abstinence Teacher

by Tom Perrotta

  “How do you know all this?”

  “A partner in my firm married the ex-wife. He told me the whole saga.”

  “That’s great,” Ruth said. “I’m glad he’s cleaned up his act. But that doesn’t give him the right to do what he did.”

  Matt sighed. “I know. And I’m gonna send him an e-mail about the praying business. But this whole official letter of complaint thing sounds pretty harsh. There’s only a couple of weeks left in the season. It might not be such a bad idea to just let it slide.”

  “I’m not gonna let it slide, Matt. I’ve let too much slide already.”

  “Come on, Ruth. They say ‘under God’ every day in the Pledge of Allegiance, and I don’t hear you screaming about that.”

  “Maybe I should start,” she shot back. “Maybe you should, too.”

  “Maybe,” Matt conceded. “But I still think you should give the guy a break.”

  At least Matt Friedman had a decent humanitarian reason for turning Ruth down; Mel Zabel was just being a self-serving coward. Despite the fact that Arlene was a hundred percent on Ruth’s side, Mel had convinced his wife to keep their name off the letter out of fear that it would jeopardize their daughter’s position on the top team.

  “He doesn’t want us to be involved,” Arlene reported sheepishly. “He says the bigwigs in the Soccer Association have long memories.

  If we rock the boat this year, we shouldn’t be surprised if Louisa’s back on the B team next year.”

  “Louisa’s too good,” Ruth said. “They wouldn’t drop her to the B team.”

  “I know,” Arlene said, “but everything’s so competitive these days. I’m sure there are a lot of girls on the B team just as good as she is.”

  Ruth tried to argue that there were more important things than a spot on the A team, and Arlene agreed in principle.

  “I’m with you in spirit. But I promised Mel I wouldn’t sign the letter.”

  “I guess I’m on my own then.”

  “I’m sorry, Ruth. I wish I could help.”

  Fine, Ruth thought, as her mallet thudded into the rubbery meat, which she’d wrapped in plastic to prevent any salmonella-laden flecks from splattering around her kitchen. If that’s how it’s gonna be, then so be it.

  It didn’t help that Maggie was out in the yard in her Stars jersey, kicking the ball against the side of the garage. Ruth could see her out the window, a skinny girl standing out in the rain, her legs bare, her hair straggling down across her angry, determined face as she blasted one kick after another off the clapboards, trapping the ball on the rebound, then booting it again, alternating legs the way they’d taught her at All-Star Soccer Camp last summer. She usually kicked into a net, but today it seemed like she wanted to make as much noise as possible, to remind her mother of how much she loved the game and how hard she worked at it.

  You’re gonna hate me, Ruth thought, listening to the ball thunk against the wall a split second after her mallet thudded into the chicken, the two sounds creating a strangely conversational rhythm, as if she and Maggie were talking to each other through the glass.

  Thunk!

  Thud!

  Thunk!

  Thud!

  Thunk!

  She must have gotten a little carried away, because there was a strange expression on Eliza’s face as she entered the kitchen, carrying the paperback Bible that Ruth hadn’t even known she owned until yesterday. She must have kept it hidden in a drawer or under a mattress, the way Ruth and Mandy had hidden books like The Godfather and The Happy Hooker.

  “Mom,” she said. “Are you okay?”

  “Fine,” Ruth told her. “Why?”

  “I don’t know. You’re just kinda whalin’ on that meat.”

  Ruth looked down, and what she saw wasn’t pretty. The plastic wrap had begun to shred under her repeated blows, and the chicken wasn’t so much flat as traumatized, mangled in places, and fraying unpleasantly at the edges. Ruth wiped her forearm across her sweaty brow and smiled at her daughter.

  “Just tenderizing,” she said. “I do it all the time.”

  Yusuf Islam

  RUTH HAD EXPECTED TO SIT DOWN AND BANG OUT HER FORMAL letter of complaint in a matter of minutes. It seemed like a simple, straightforward proposition: Coach Mason violated Article X, Section Y of the Soccer Association Guidelines—i.e., “Coaches are not permitted to inflict their religious beliefs on their players”—and should therefore be punished for this infraction.

  There was only one problem: no such rule existed. She scoured the Stonewood Heights Youth Soccer Association Handbook—it was available as a .pdf download at SHYSA.org—and couldn’t find a single reference to religion in the entire twenty-two-page document. Even the surprisingly detailed Coach’s Code of Conduct was mute on the subject. There were paragraphs devoted to the coach’s responsibility for civil behavior on the sidelines (“SHYSA has zero tolerance for verbal abuse or second-guessing of referees”), for ensuring that each player got a roughly equal amount of time on the field, for taking care that players weren’t exposed to severe or dangerous weather conditions, and for providing a smoke-free youth soccer experience for the children of Stonewood Heights. A whole page was devoted to the issue of sexual abuse—Ruth was pleased to learn that coaches had to submit to a background check, and impressed by the Association’s stern and highly specific set of prohibitions, issued under the bold heading, YOU MUST NOT:

  Allow or engage in inappropriate or intrusive touching of any kind (Examples: Don’t “help” a child change clothes, or even tuck in a child’s jersey. Refrain from delivering “congratulatory” pats on a child’s buttocks)

  Make sexually suggestive remarks to a child, even in jest

  Take children, other than your own offspring, alone on car journeys, no matter how short

  Engage in roughhousing or sexually provocative play with a child

  As thoughtful and thorough as the drafters of the Handbook had been in most matters, it had obviously not occurred to them that a coach might take it upon himself to lead his team in organized prayer. The closest Ruth could come to the kind of rule she was looking for was an ambiguously worded catchall provision: “The coach must confine him/herself to the technical realm and only provide athletic instruction.”

  Though this guideline could reasonably be construed as barring coaches from discussing subjects other than soccer with their players, Ruth found it way too vague for her purposes, and completely unrealistic. Was the coach not supposed to comment on the weather, or tell the kids a silly joke, or ask how someone had enjoyed their trip to Disney World? Strictly speaking, all these things were as far outside the boundaries of soccer instruction as The Lord’s Prayer. If Tim Mason was guilty of breaking this rule, so was every other coach in the league. Besides, it seemed like a depressing anticlimax, writing a letter full of moral indignation, only to accuse someone of “not confining himself to the technical realm.”

  As a result of this confusion, Ruth made several false starts on the letter on Monday night. Some of the early drafts were too emotional, verging on melodramatic (“I was flabbergasted. This was not the Stonewood Heights I knew, or the America I loved.”); others got bogged down in unnecessary detail (“I believe that Assistant Coach Roper was sitting on Coach Mason’s right, though it’s possible that I’ve gotten the mental image reversed, and that he, Mr. Roper, was actually on the left.”); still others strayed into such deep legal water that Ruth quickly found she was in over her head (“I am, of course, not an attorney, but it seems like simple common sense to assume that if it’s unconstitutional for public-school teachers to lead their students in prayer, then surely the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment is equally violated when a youth soccer coach, who can be viewed, in a certain sense, as a sort of volunteer teacher, engages in a similarly religious exercise in a public forum, in this case a county park.”).

  It wasn’t until she hit upon the tactic of putting Maggie front and center that things began to fall int
o place:

  … My daughter loves playing for the Stonewood Stars, and has enjoyed participating in youth soccer since the age of five. She participates because she loves the game and wants to compete at a high level while honing her athletic skills, improving her fitness, and enjoying the camaraderie of belonging to a team. She does not, however, play soccer for the purpose of receiving religious instruction. That is what churches and synagogues and mosques are for. I don’t know what the Association’s policy on coach-sponsored prayer is (there doesn’t seem to be any spelled out in your Handbook), but it seems clear to me that organized prayer at a soccer game falls far outside the purview of the SHYSA mission statement, which, as you know, proclaims the admirable goal of “teaching the game of soccer to the youth of Stonewood Heights in a way that encourages healthy competition, good sportsmanship, physical fitness, and above all, fun.”

  I don’t, for the life of me, see how Christian prayer fits into this. If I’m wrong, please let me know. If, however, you agree with my opinion that Coach Mason has egregiously overstepped the bounds of appropriate conduct, then I would like to know, as soon as possible, what disciplinary action SHYSA plans to take against him before I consider any and all steps (including seeking advice from legal counsel) I might take to ensure that my daughter and her teammates are not exposed to this sort of behavior again.

  Once she found her footing, the writing flowed quickly. She began what turned out to be the final version of the letter right after dinner on Tuesday evening and finished it shortly before her unofficial deadline of eight o’clock, the time when Tim Mason said he would be stopping by to discuss the matter with her in person.

  HE’D CALLED on Monday afternoon, around the time Ruth was meeting with Dr. Kamal, but she hadn’t gotten the message until several hours later, when she was tucking Maggie into bed.

  “Sweetie,” she said, laying her hand softly on her daughter’s shoulder. “Sleep well, okay?”

  Maggie’s only reply was a halfhearted, mildly hostile shrug. Ruth couldn’t help but be impressed—Maggie had managed to last two full days without uttering an unnecessary word in her presence. She’d answer a direct question if she had to, using monosyllables or grunts if possible, but other than that she was implementing the silent treatment with monklike discipline.

  “I love you,” Ruth told her. “I know it may not seem that way sometimes.”

  Maggie didn’t exactly flinch when her mother’s lips brushed against her forehead, but she did tense up ever so slightly, as if she were receiving an injection and trying to be stoic about it. Then she pulled her stuffed owl, Morton, tightly to her chest and rolled onto her side to face the wall.

  “I once went a whole week without talking to Grandma,” Ruth said, her eyes straying to the poster on Maggie’s closet door, Mia Hamm looking cute and boyishly fierce in her white uniform, two fists clenched above her head, the crowd a pixilated blur behind her. “My senior year of high school. I can’t even remember what we were fighting about. It seems so silly now.”

  Ruth pulled the chain on the bedside lamp and stretched herself out on the narrow twin bed. It was an old habit, only recently broken—for the first nine years of her life, Maggie hadn’t been able to fall asleep without one of her parents lying beside her. On a lot of those nights, Ruth had dozed off herself, lulled by the sound of her daughter’s breathing, only to wake at one or two in the morning, cold and disoriented, still in her clothes. More often than she would have liked to admit, the journey across the hall to her own room seemed too arduous, so she just wriggled under the covers, snuggling up against Maggie’s warm little body.

  “I used to get so furious with your grandmother,” she continued. “I thought she was too nice. She always smiled and pretended everything was fine, even when it wasn’t. It was like she lived in a world where it was illegal to complain. Sometimes I would get frustrated and say really terrible things to her. And you know what she used to tell me?”

  Maggie didn’t reply, but Ruth responded as if she had.

  “She told me I’d miss her when she was gone.”

  Ruth stopped the story there, leaving out the part that suddenly seemed most important, and sad beyond words, which was that she used to swear to herself, No, I won’t. I won’t miss you a bit. At least she’d never said it out loud, not that she could remember, anyway. But she wished she could apologize to her mother for even thinking it.

  “Mom?” Maggie said, after a minute. She sounded wide-awake.

  “Yes, honey?”

  “Coach Tim called after school. He said he needs to talk to you.”

  “After school?” Ruth was puzzled. “Why didn’t you tell me before?”

  “I don’t know.” Maggie let a couple of seconds go by. “I just didn’t want you to be mean to him.”

  AFTER SEALING the letter in a stamped envelope, Ruth still had fifteen minutes to spare before Coach Tim was scheduled to arrive, most of which she spent trying to resist a powerful urge to change her clothes and put on some makeup. She’d gone for a run that afternoon—three laps around Stonewood Lake, four and a half miles total—and was wearing her usual postshower ensemble of Adidas warm-up pants and a hooded cotton sweatshirt, not dowdy, exactly, but hardly flattering.

  It would have been easy enough to run upstairs and throw on a pair of jeans and a casual shirt—the fitted maroon top with the scoop neck always looked good—maybe a bit of lipstick and a quick touch-up around the eyes, but she was disgusted with herself for even considering it. This wasn’t a date, it was a negotiation—possibly even a confrontation—with a man who had abused his authority and driven a wedge between herself and her daughters, a man about whom she had just composed an impassioned letter of grievance. What did she care if a man like that thought she was pretty, or at least reasonably attractive for her age?

  And yet, she couldn’t help being aware of a strange undercurrent of schoolgirlish anticipation about his visit, the sense of being on the verge of something unusual and exciting. After all, when was the last time a good-looking man—at least a good-looking man who wasn’t gay or to whom she hadn’t once been unhappily married—had shown up on her doorstep, even on an errand as unpromising as this one? What harm would it do to brush her hair and hide the shadows under her eyes?

  My God, she thought. I’m pathetic. I’d probably put on a skirt and heels for Dick Cheney.

  If there was one thing that rankled about being a woman, it was this conviction, drummed into your head before you had a chance to defend yourself, that it was your job—your obligation—to always look your best, even in situations when you had no logical reason to care. The truly courageous feminists, Ruth had long believed, weren’t the sexy ones like Gloria Steinem, but those combative women like Andrea Dworkin who made a point of embracing a kind of defiant frumpiness—ugliness, even—as an announcement to the world that they were through living as ornaments, subordinating their own comfort and selfhood to the remorseless demands of the male gaze.

  Jesus, she thought. It’s just a pair of jeans.

  Finally, with only a couple of minutes to spare, Ruth gave in and hurried upstairs, as she’d known she would all along. She compromised to the extent that she rejected the maroon top—it really was the kind of thing you’d wear on a date—in favor of a stretchy gray T-shirt beneath a cropped black cardigan. She dabbed on a tiny bit of eye makeup, but skipped the lipstick.

  It’s not for him, she reminded herself. It’s for me. So I won’t be at a disadvantage.

  LATER, AFTER Tim left, she realized—though maybe it was less a matter of realizing than of being able to admit it to herself—that she’d secretly been hoping to find herself enmeshed in one of those corny “opposites attract” narratives that were so appealing to writers of sitcoms and romantic comedies. The formula was simple: you brought together a man and a woman who held wildly divergent worldviews—an idealistic doctor, say, and an ambulance-chasing lawyer—and waited for them to realize that their witty intellectual combat was
nothing but a smoke screen, kicked up to conceal the inconvenient and increasingly obvious fact that they were desperate to hop into bed with each other.

  Luckily for Ruth, this ridiculous fantasy crumbled immediately upon contact with reality. The visibly uncomfortable man who stepped into her house a few minutes after eight was barely recognizable to her as the scruffy hipster coach she’d been so taken with on Saturday morning, and completely unsuitable for even the most outlandish romantic scenario. In his Dockers and button-down Oxford shirt, his long dark hair strangled into an ill-considered ponytail with the aid of some kind of gel or pomade, this cleaned-up version of Tim Mason looked shifty and a little too slick for his own good, like a small-time criminal whose lawyer had instructed him to wear something nice for the judge.

  “Mrs. Ramsey,” he said, without looking her in the eye or offering his hand. “I won’t take up a lot of your time.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” she told him, withholding the ritual invitation to call her by her first name. “I really think we need to talk. Can I get you some coffee or tea or something?”

  She could see that his first impulse was to refuse, but for some reason he checked it.

  “Coffee’s okay, if it’s no trouble.”

  “Decaf?”

  “Regular, if you got it.”

  “You’re lucky,” she said. “If I drink coffee at night, I’m wide-awake at three in the morning, ready to start the day.”

  He stared at her with such a pained expression that she had to stop and review the conversation to make sure she hadn’t said anything inadvertently offensive. But then it occurred to her that it didn’t really matter what she said. It was just being here, under these circumstances, that was making him look so miserable.

  He hates me, she thought, but instead of being offended, she just felt sorry for him, which was probably a bad idea, given the hard line she was determined to take on the prayer issue.