The Abstinence Teacher

by Tom Perrotta

  COACH TIM followed her into the kitchen and took a seat at the table while Ruth attended to the coffee. Unfazed by the buzz saw shriek of the grinder, he picked up the Bible that Eliza had ostentatiously left propped against the wire basket full of apples, kiwis, and grapefruits—if he was surprised to see it there he didn’t let on—and began flipping through the pages.

  “That’s my older daughter’s,” Ruth explained, banging the heel of her palm against the bottom of the grinder. “She’s very interested in Jesus these days.”

  “Good for her.” He spoke distractedly, his eyes fixed on the book, expressing no more enthusiasm than if she’d told him Eliza was taking Spanish or had signed up for swimming lessons. After a moment, though, he looked up. “Wish I could say the same about my own kid.”

  “She doesn’t go to church with you?”

  “Abby lives with her mother,” he said. “My ex-wife. I don’t have a whole lot of say in how she’s brought up.”

  “That must be hard,” Ruth said, glancing over her shoulder as she extracted a box of Lemon Zinger from the high shelf of the cabinet. “I’m divorced, too. You know Frank, right? Maggie’s father?”

  “Oh, I know Frank,” Tim assured her. “I probably get ten e-mails a week from him. He’s very generous with the coaching advice. And the, uh, constructive criticism.”

  Ruth felt strangely embarrassed, as if Frank were still her husband.

  “Just ignore him,” she said. “He can’t help himself.”

  “He’s not an easy guy to ignore.”

  “Sometimes you have to insult him,” Ruth explained. “That was my preferred method.”

  “I’ll have to give that a try.” Tim put down the Bible and turned his attention to the coffeemaker, which was hissing and groaning on the countertop as if it were about to explode, but not producing a whole lot of coffee. “Something wrong with that thing?”

  “I don’t know. It used to work a lot faster.”

  “You probably just need to clean it. You’re supposed to run vinegar through the machine a couple times a year.”

  “I used to do that,” she said, though what she really meant was that Frank had. “I never really noticed a difference afterward, except the house smelled bad.”

  “Minerals collect inside,” he said, making a fist to illustrate this process. She noticed again how big Tim’s hands were, at least compared to the rest of his body. “It gets all gunked up in there, like plaque on your arteries.”

  The teakettle whistled meekly—there was something wrong with the hinged cap on the spout—as if reluctant to interrupt the conversation. Snatching it off the stove, Ruth set it down on a trivet bearing the inscription, Come live with me, and be my love. Both the kettle and the trivet had been wedding presents, and should have been replaced a long time ago.

  “You gotta use the white vinegar,” he added. “My ex-wife used balsamic once, and it was a disaster.”

  Ruth laughed as she poured boiling water into her mug.

  “You’re pretty big on the household hints, aren’t you?”

  He eyed her warily, uncertain if he were being mocked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “At the game on Saturday you were bragging about how you put lemon juice on apple slices.”

  “I wouldn’t call it bragging,” he said, sounding slightly miffed. “It’s just, the kids won’t eat the apples if they’re brown.”

  “Whatever. You seemed pretty proud of yourself.” Ruth jerked the tea bag up and down, not really sure if this sped the steeping process. She wouldn’t have been surprised if Coach Tim had a theory on this as well. “Maybe you should get yourself a newspaper column. Call it Tips from Tim. Like Hints from Heloise. Except you’re a guy, which might make it more interesting to your readers since it’s mostly women who care about that stuff.”

  He looked puzzled, as if he couldn’t understand what she was up to, blathering away about whatever popped into her head, as if this were just a friendly social visit. Ruth couldn’t help wondering the same thing herself, and the only thought she could muster in her own defense was that it was hard to maintain an attitude of frosty politeness toward someone who was sitting in your kitchen, offering helpful advice about your appliances. Not to mention the subtle hangdog vibe Tim was giving off, which was making her feel weirdly self-conscious, like it was her responsibility to cheer him up.

  She brought him his coffee and sat down at the other end of the table, letting a few seconds go by as a signal that it was time to get down to business. But instead of clearing her throat and telling him how concerned she was about what had happened after the game, she took a sip of tea, and said, “So, did you play soccer in high school?”

  “Not seriously. Where I grew up, the soccer players were mainly these Italian guys fresh off the boat, Angelo and Mario and Guido, and the Schiavoni brothers. The American guys played football.”

  “You don’t look like a football player.”

  “I wasn’t. I devoted my teenage years to getting stoned and learning to play ‘Stairway to Heaven.’”

  “Hey,” she said. “I think we knew each other.”

  “Then I apologize,” he replied. “Because I probably wasn’t very nice to you.”

  Ruth laughed, but she found herself mildly annoyed by the condescension implicit in the joke, the assumption that he’d been a little too cool for the kind of girl she’d been back in the day. Of course, what really bothered her was the knowledge that he was probably right.

  “What, were you some kind of big ladies’ man in high school?”

  He bobbed his head noncommitally, as if to say that this was a complicated question deserving of a thoughtful answer.

  “Not at first. I was a skinny kid with a bad complexion. But I joined a band my junior year. We called ourselves Circuit Breaker for a while. Then we changed it to Balin Son of Dwalin.”

  “That’s a terrible name.”

  “We liked it,” he said. “It was some kind of Tolkien thing.”

  “Balin Son of Dwalin? Why not Big Buncha Dorks?”

  “Go ahead and mock,” he said. “But we were pretty popular. Lots of female fans.”

  “Groupies?”

  “Kind of, yeah.”

  “In high school?”

  “You must be about my age,” he said.

  “I’m forty-one.”

  She expected him to be startled by this revelation, but he just nodded, as if he’d figured as much.

  “I’m a year older,” he said. “So you remember what it was like. Sometimes I think about what kids were doing back then, and I can’t believe it really happened. I mean, I’d hate to think of my daughter growing up the way I did.”

  “It’s a different world,” Ruth agreed. “But we didn’t turn out so bad.”

  Chuckling, Tim reached for a kiwi.

  “I don’t know about that,” he said, pondering the hairy fruit with skeptical concentration, as if he’d never encountered one before. “Some of us got pretty screwed up.”

  Ruth wasn’t sure if he was taking a swipe at her or just making a general statement about their generation.

  “You think it’s better now?”

  “I do,” he said, returning the kiwi to the basket. “At least for me it is.”

  “So what happened to the band? Did Balin Son of Dwalin survive high school?”

  “Not really.” He shook his head, as if he hadn’t thought about this stuff in a long time. “The singer and the lead guitarist had a fight over a girl. It was like a bad divorce. The guitar player got custody of the drummer, and the singer got me. Jerry and I stayed together for eight years, played in five different bands. We even put out a couple of records in our early twenties.”

  “Anything I might have heard?”

  “I doubt it. We called ourselves The Freebies. There were a couple college stations that played our stuff.”

  “You must’ve been pretty serious.”

  “Jerry more than me,” he said. “He re
ally wanted it, and he had the talent. He kept changing and trying new things, and I kinda went along for the ride.”

  “So what happened to him? Did he make it big?”

  Tim looked at the table.

  “He died when we were twenty-five. Choked on his own vomit. Just like Jimi Hendrix, that’s what we used to tell ourselves. As if that made it okay.”

  “That’s terrible.”

  “Coulda been me,” he said. “I was just as messed up as he was.”

  Tim fell into a momentary funk, rubbing his index finger in a circle on the tabletop, as if trying to erase a stain, and Ruth couldn’t help feeling like she was getting a glimpse of the beaten-down guy Matt Friedman had described, the recovering addict who couldn’t even be trusted to drive his daughter home from school.

  “But you changed,” she reminded him. “You turned your life around.”

  He looked up in surprise.

  “It took a long time. I wish I could have those years back.”

  A funny thought occurred to Ruth.

  “You know who you’re like?” she said. “Yusuf Islam.”

  His response was a blank stare.

  “You know, Cat Stevens. He became a Muslim and changed his name to Yusuf Islam.”

  “I’m not a Muslim.”

  “I don’t mean that. I just mean you’re a musician who rejected the rock ‘n’ roll life and found happiness in religion.”

  He made a face. “I wouldn’t exactly call Cat Stevens rock ‘n’ roll.”

  “You know what I mean. Besides, ‘Peace Train’ was kinda a rock song, right?”

  “I guess, but—”

  Before he could finish the thought, Tim’s face broke into a peculiar grin, so radiant and unexpected that Ruth felt momentarily cheated when she realized it hadn’t been meant for her, but for Maggie, who had materialized behind her in the doorway, dressed in pajama bottoms and her soccer jersey.

  “Hi, Monkey,” he told her.

  “Hello, Turnip.”

  “Honey,” Ruth said wearily. She’d specifically asked her daughters to stay upstairs while she and Coach Tim had their conference.

  Maggie shrugged. “I just wanted to say hi.”

  “Well, you said it.”

  Maggie bowed to her mother, hands pressed to her forehead in prayer position.

  “Yes, master.” She straightened up and flashed a conspiratorial grin at the coach. “Practice on Thursday?”

  “You bet.”

  “Regular time?”

  “Yup.” Tim waved good-bye. “Now get outta here. Your mom and I need to talk.”

  THE ATMOSPHERE seemed to thicken around them after Maggie’s departure. Ruth sighed, and Tim nodded, acknowledging the suddenly obvious fact that the time for small talk had expired.

  “So,” he said. “I guess we have a problem.”

  Ruth had spent the last three days preparing for this exact moment—nursing her grievance against Coach Tim, sharing it with other parents, setting it down on paper—but now that she had a chance to say it to his face, she didn’t quite know where or how to begin. It seemed beside the point somehow, as if the man in her kitchen bore only a tangential relationship to the man she’d been complaining about.

  “I’m a little curious,” she said. “Why do you call her ‘Monkey’?”

  “It’s just a nickname. She likes to climb trees, and Monkey sounds a little like Maggie. I do it for all the kids. Nadima’s Nomad, and Candace is Caddyshack.”

  “And you’re Turnip?”

  “I prefer ‘Coach Turnip,’ but yeah. And I got off easy. They call John Roper ‘Mullet.’”

  “Ouch.”

  The coach grinned. “Candace showed some of the girls his high-school yearbook. Class of ’85. Apparently he had an unfortunate haircut.”

  “Girls that age can be a little mean.”

  “Nah, it’s just fooling around. They’re good kids. Maggie especially. You’re lucky to have a daughter like that. You’ve done a great job raising her.”

  Ruth felt a surge of gratitude that took her by surprise. She tried hard to be a good parent, but she didn’t often get credit for it. It was hard enough just being divorced; to be a divorced Sex Education teacher who’d been publicly accused of immorality made you a bad mother by definition, or at least it had begun to seem that way.

  “Thank you,” she said. “That’s nice of you to say.”

  “Look,” he said. “I know you’re upset about Saturday, and I don’t really blame you.”

  “You don’t?”

  “Believe me,” he said. “I didn’t mean to offend anyone, or make you feel uncomfortable. I have no interest in shoving my faith down anyone’s throat.”

  “Then why’d you do it?”

  “I got carried away,” he explained. “Abby got hurt, and the game was so amazing, I just kind of lost track of where I was. You have to understand, for me praying is like breathing. It’s just something I do.”

  He sounded sincere, but Ruth didn’t want to let him off the hook so easily.

  “That’s fine, as long as you realize that not everybody believes the same thing as you. You’ve got Jewish girls on that team, a Muslim—”

  “I’m well aware of that. A couple of the other parents have already spoken to me about it.” He paused unhappily. “They said you were maybe planning to write to the Soccer Association?”

  “I was thinking about it,” Ruth admitted.

  “I hope you won’t,” he said. “I made a mistake, and I apologize. I promise it’s not gonna happen again.”

  “You mean that?”

  His eyes made a silent plea for mercy.

  “I love coaching this team,” he said. “I don’t know what I’d do if they took it away from me.”

  ALL IN all, Ruth thought as she slipped her nightgown over her head, the meeting had gone surprisingly well. Coach Tim had turned out to be so much more reasonable than she’d expected, a lot less rigid and confrontational than the other Tabernacle people she’d tangled with in the past.

  It must have been his background that set him apart, the hard living he’d done before he found Jesus. She had known a couple of other recovering addicts and AA types over the years, and to one degree or another, they’d all displayed the same vulnerability and melancholy self-awareness as he had, the same refusal to judge other people or condemn them for their shortcomings. It made perfect sense to her that people who’d hit bottom would be attracted to Christianity and find solace in its message of forgiveness, the idea that it didn’t matter how badly you’d screwed up your life, there was always another chance to start over and get things right. Where she always came up short was in figuring out how that part of the religion coexisted with the sanctimonious and intolerant part, the angry, Goody Two-Shoes Christianity that was always gleefully damning people to hell and turning its believers into hypocrites. All she could figure was that Coach Tim just ignored that stuff and took what he needed to keep himself going.

  She fell into bed feeling happier than she’d been in a long time. It was just such a relief to know that she wasn’t going to have to gird herself for a bitter public fight, expose herself once again to the anger and ridicule of her neighbors, or get maneuvered into a corner where she had no choice except to betray her principles or break her daughter’s heart. She hadn’t fully understood how heavily the burden had been weighing on her until it had been removed.

  On top of the relief, though, she felt a sense of giddy possibility that had nothing to do with Coach Tim or her kids or the normal parameters of her life, and everything to do with the strange thing that had happened just a few minutes after he’d left. She was in her study, ripping up the letter she’d written to the Soccer Association, when the phone rang. Her first thought was that it must be Tim, calling from his car with something he’d forgotten to tell her—the image was startlingly clear in her mind, for some reason—but the voice on the other end belonged to a different man.

  “Ruth?” he said. “I
s that Ruth?”

  “This is Ruth,” she said. “Who’s that?”

  “Don’t I sound familiar?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You do. Your voice is exactly the same.”

  “Is this some kind of joke?” she said. “Because if it is, I really don’t have the time.”

  “It’s Paul,” he said. “Paul Caruso. Your old next-door neighbor.”

  “Paul? Oh my God.”

  “So Ruth,” he said. “I heard you were looking for me.”

  SHE WOKE the next morning with her high spirits intact, amazed by the sudden change in her fortunes. It was weird to remember how bad she’d felt just twelve hours ago—besieged and heavyhearted and alone—and how little it had taken to turn things around.

  She and Paul hadn’t talked for long. He explained that an old buddy of his, Artie Lembach, a trombone player in the marching band, had seen Ruth’s posting on the Classmates.com bulletin board and passed along the information.

  “I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “It’s gotta be what, twenty-something years?”

  Embarrassed, Ruth started muttering untruthfully about how she’d decided to reconnect with lots of different people from her past, as if to suggest that he was no one special, just a small part of a much bigger group.

  “I was so excited to get Artie’s e-mail,” he said, lowering his voice to an intimate register. “Because, Ruth, I think about you a lot.”

  “Really?” She felt a warm surge of blood moving into her face and was glad he wasn’t there to see it.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I mean, sometimes you don’t realize it when things are happening, but then when you look back …”

  He let the statement hang there, and she didn’t ask him to complete it. Instead she changed the subject to him, asking where he lived, and what he did for work, and whether he was married. He said he’d been in Connecticut for the past ten years, working in the hightech field. As for his marriage, it was a long, complicated story, one he’d be happy to tell her if she was free for dinner over the coming weekend.

  “This weekend?” she said. “You mean three days from now?”

  “I’m in the city on business,” he said. “I can easily make it out to where you live. How about Friday night?”