The Abstinence Teacher

by Tom Perrotta

  JOANN MARLOW was her usual perky, overdressed self, as if she couldn’t imagine a better way to kick off the weekend than to throw on a tailored silk blouse, a tasteful string of pearls, and three coats of makeup before heading over to the office to knock some sense into a bunch of reprobate Sex Education teachers.

  “Good morning!” she said, once they’d all taken their places around the big table in the conference room. “It’s nice to see you all!”

  JoAnn flashed a brilliant smile at her captive audience and didn’t seem the least bit put out when it wasn’t returned. She took a sip of coffee from a to-go cup—Starbucks, Ruth noted, not the cheap stuff they brewed for the inmates—and drummed her polished fingernails on the tabletop.

  “Before we start, just let me say that I’m well aware of the fact that these special Saturday reinforcement sessions aren’t very popular. Some of the teachers who’ve been invited here in the past have been pretty vocal about that on their evaluation sheets. Some have said they felt they were being punished. Others have used words like ‘indoctrination’ and ‘total waste of time.’ Maybe some of you share these sentiments. If that’s the case, all I can tell you is, get over it.”

  JoAnn rolled her chair away from the table and stood up. She wasn’t particularly tall, but there was something elegant and powerful in the way she carried herself, a quality of absolute confidence that Ruth couldn’t help envying, even though it was completely foreign to her and deeply off-putting.

  “The first thing you need to remind yourselves,” JoAnn continued, “is that you’re here for a simple reason. You did something wrong. Maybe it was an honest mistake, maybe it wasn’t. I can’t look into your hearts, and I don’t know that I’d want to if I could. At the very least, I think it’s safe to say that everyone here this morning is having a little trouble adjusting to a new way of thinking. And I want to help you fix that.”

  She strode over to the whiteboard and wrote the words “GREAT OPPORTUNITY” in squeaky red marker.

  “So instead of feeling sorry for yourselves and resentful of me,” she said, “I think you’d all be better served by adjusting your attitudes right now, before we start. As hard as it might be for some of you to believe, this is a great opportunity for all of us to reconnect with our shared goal, which is to teach the Wise Choices curriculum to our students as enthusiastically and effectively as possible.”

  “Yez, boss,” Roger muttered under his breath. “I sho is enthusiastic.”

  C. J. covered her mouth with one hand in an unsuccessful attempt to stifle her amusement. Ruth and Trisha stared at the table.

  “Go ahead and laugh,” JoAnn said. “But I guarantee your local school board doesn’t see abstinence as a laughing matter. That’s why they’ve adopted our curriculum, and that’s why they expect you to present it to your students in good faith, without additions, caveats, or sarcastic commentary. And if you can’t do that, you should think about resigning or requesting some form of reassignment before you end up facing more serious disciplinary action.”

  JoAnn turned back to the board, wrote the word “PARTNERS” in very large letters, and underlined it three times.

  “All I’m asking this morning is for you to make a small leap of faith. Just this once, and just as a kind of experiment, could we try to think of ourselves as partners instead of adversaries? If we approach this morning’s activities in the right spirit, then maybe we can make the first small step on the road to establishing a relationship of trust and mutual cooperation. Because the fact is, whether we like it or not, we’re in this together.”

  None of the teachers nodded, but none of them protested, either, and that seemed to be good enough for JoAnn.

  “Great,” she said. “What I’d like to do is start with some autobiographical writing.”

  RUTH STARED at her exam book and tried yet again to focus her thoughts. So far the only words she’d written were a restatement of the assignment JoAnn had given them before stepping out of the room: “A Sexual Encounter I Regret.” By now, enough time had passed that this simple phrase had become the center of an elaborate solar system of doodled objects—stars and crescent moons and sinuous vines, a palm tree and a pair of sexy lips, the Eiffel Tower and a fish wearing sunglasses, the planet Saturn with a large tulip sprouting from its surface.

  Writing had never come easily to Ruth in the best of circumstances, and this morning’s circumstances didn’t even qualify as half-decent. She was tired from a night of fitful sleep, cranky about missing Maggie’s soccer game, and deeply suspicious of JoAnn’s motives in choosing this particular subject—she’d said she was “looking for common ground” with the teachers, but Ruth was pretty sure she was just trolling for more horror stories to inflict on impressionable adolescents. It didn’t help that all three of her colleagues were scribbling away like honor students, C. J. and Trisha unburdening themselves with grim diligence, Roger looking oddly exhilarated, chuckling and shaking his head fondly at the sights on memory lane. On top of everything else, Ruth suddenly realized that she was extremely hungry, a condition she deduced from the fact that she was drawing an excessively detailed picture of a donut with sprinkles on it, floating like the sun above the Eiffel Tower and shooting quivery rays of deliciousness into the sky.

  It wasn’t that she was stumped for something to write about. Like anyone else her age, Ruth had committed her share of youthful and not-so-youthful indiscretions. There were a couple of tipsy one-nighters in college she would have taken back if she could, as well as an ill-considered fling with a married, much older grad-school professor that had fizzled after a lackluster session on his office couch. And she certainly regretted her weekend in the Poconos with Ray Mattingly—not because it had gone badly, but because it had gone so well, and because she’d humiliated herself by weeping inconsolably when he broke the news that he was moving.

  And then, of course, there was Frank. They’d had some good times early in the marriage—a nice honeymoon in Tortola, lazy Saturday mornings in their first apartment on Hillcrest—and brought two beautiful children into the world, but from where she sat now, it was hard to feel anything but sorry about that whole misguided era of her life. They’d stayed married for at least four years after they both knew it was over, and during that time, they continued to sleep together out of some pathetic combination of need, habit, and wishful thinking. If she counted all that, then she had no choice but to admit that she regretted most of the sex she’d ever had, and thinking that way made her even more depressed than she’d been when she woke up in the morning, with last night’s date still fresh in her memory.

  SHE HAD set out from her house on Friday night with two condoms in her purse and a totally open mind. She wasn’t exactly planning on sleeping with Paul Caruso, but she certainly wasn’t ruling out the possibility in advance, or looking for reasons to say no. At her age, in the midst of a two-year dry spell, there wasn’t a whole lot to be gained from playing hard to get, or from asking more from the world than the world was prepared to offer. Because most of the time, as Ruth well knew, it wasn’t offering anything at all.

  And besides, she and Paul were already lovers. It didn’t matter that it had happened more than half a lifetime ago, so far back in the past that she couldn’t even picture him clearly anymore. Once you’d broken through that invisible barrier that separates one person from another, you were connected forever, whether you liked it or not. She felt this even with Frank sometimes, an undercurrent between their bodies that didn’t seem to care about—or even acknowledge—the fact that they were divorced, or that she thanked God on a daily basis that she no longer had to wake up next to him in the morning, no longer had to see him brushing his teeth in his underwear, staring soulfully into the bathroom mirror.

  She and Paul had arranged to meet at Ferraro’s, a homey Italian place in Bridgeton that Randall and Gregory had recommended. Ruth braced herself as she entered for that moment of unpleasant surprise she remembered so well from her twentieth reunion
—the gasp of disbelief she had to swallow over and over again as she looked down at the name tag and back up at the face—but the shock she felt upon seeing Paul was a different thing entirely.

  If it took her a few seconds to recognize him, it wasn’t because time had done its usual number on him—quite the contrary. He looked good, way better than she’d let herself imagine in her most optimistic fantasy. He’d cut his hair, of course—no man his age wore it long and parted in the middle anymore—but that wasn’t what threw her off, nor was it his expensive suit, or the fact that he had acquired one of those deep, even tans that didn’t look like it came from spending a lot of time in the sun.

  Sometimes, in magazine ads for weight-loss products, you can see a continuity between the obese person who used to wear those gigantic blue jeans and the skinny grinning individual who displays the gargantuan empty pants to an admiring world. Other times, though, the transformation is so complete that you’re tempted to wonder if Before and After are even the same person.

  That’s the way it was with Paul. Ruth had come here to meet the grown-up fat kid of her memories—the sweet vulnerable teenager with a can of Pringles in one hand and a trumpet in the other, the boy who’d taught her that you didn’t have to fit the world’s definition of “perfect” to be loved—and she wasn’t quite sure what to make of the studly businessman sipping a glass of red wine at the bar, exuding an air of masculine self-possession she would have found very attractive if this were a blind date, if he’d been anyone else in the world.

  Suddenly aware of her scrutiny, Paul spun on his stool and met her gaze, his face breaking into a broad smile that didn’t betray a hint of the ambivalence she was directing at him. If he noticed this discrepancy, though, he didn’t let on as he slid off his seat and began moving toward her, opening his arms as he approached, gathering her against his disconcertingly flat body, squeezing her tight and letting out the kind of soft groan you’re allowed to make when you’re hugging someone who’s heard you make sounds like that before.

  “Ruth,” he said. “Wow.”

  He let go of her and took a step back, smiling at her with a kind of awestruck disbelief as his eyes roamed up and down her body.

  “Holy shit,” he said. “Guess you’re not my little neighbor anymore.”

  C. J. VOLUNTEERED to be the first reader.

  “Ever since I’ve been aware of myself as a sexual being,” she began, “I’ve known that I am a lover of women.”

  “Me, too,” Roger chuckled, but C. J. silenced him with an imperious glare and resumed her narrative.

  “When I was a teenager, this knowledge frightened me, implying as it did a lonely outcast life, lived on the fringes of quote unquote normal society. Growing up in small-town, Red State America in the 1970s, I was as yet unaware that there were vibrant communities of women just like me—supportive, loving, beautiful, strong dykes of every race, creed, and color—and even if I had, I’m not sure that I would have had the courage to imagine myself living among them.

  “All I really did in high school was muddle through, biding my time until I could sneak off to college and figure out who I was without my parents, siblings, neighbors, and everyone else I knew looking over my shoulder, ready to mock and ostracize me for any deviation from the so-called norm. Scoff if you must, but even today, in this supposedly enlightened country, there are places where it isn’t safe to be a gay teen—not just physically, but mentally, spiritually—”

  JoAnn tapped the table. “We get your point, C. J. Could we just skip ahead to the part where you’re actually responding to the assignment?”

  “I’m sorry,” C. J. said, in a voice oozing with insincere apology. “Am I making you uncomfortable?”

  “Not at all,” JoAnn replied. “I’d just appreciate it if you picked up the pace. I’d like to give everyone else a chance.”

  “Fine.” C. J. flipped forward a couple of pages, squinting to find her place. “Okay … here it is … So what’s a confused young dyke to do when a boy asks her to the prom? All I can tell you is that I found it very difficult to say no. I had four close girlfriends at the time, and they all had dates. Plus, they were all going to Lori Welker’s lake house after the prom, and I didn’t want to miss out. It was our senior year, and they were my whole life, those girls. You can probably imagine how happy my mother was. Her butch little girl, dressing up like a princess on the big night. She put makeup on me and stuffed me into a frilly dress. I felt sick about it, sick and dishonest, but there I was.

  “My date was a boy named Donnie, and he wasn’t so bad. He didn’t care about me one way or the other, he just wanted to be part of the fun. One thing we had in common, we both liked our Southern Comfort, and we both liked to dance when we were drunk. So the prom itself was actually a pretty cool experience.

  “The after-party was when things got weird. We hung out as a group for a while, but then the couples started to drift off, one by one, looking for private places. And finally, it was just me and Donnie, and we were trashed.”

  C. J. paused to gather her courage.

  “You ask me why I let him have sex with me, and I guess I could hide behind that as an excuse, say I was just too drunk to resist, and maybe there’s a little truth in that, but only a little. I think deep down I was just praying that I would like it, that Donnie would do what the prom and the rest of my life hadn’t—turn me into a good little straight girl like everyone else.

  “I guess you want to know what it was like for me. It was disgusting, and painful, and humiliating. Sobering, too. If there was one last shred of doubt in my mind that I was queer, Donnie Bolger’s penis knocked it right out of me on prom night.”

  C. J. smiled sadly, running her fingers through her slicked-back hair.

  “As everyone here has probably guessed, I’m not a big fan of abstinence. I believe that we human beings have been put on this earth to love and worship one another to the best of our abilities and inclinations, regardless of our sexual orientation or marital status. But I will say this—for as long as I live, I’ll think back to that awful night in 1979 and wish to God I had abstained. Thank you.”

  PAUL SEEMED a little more familiar to her once they sat down and began to talk. Even as a child he’d spoken slowly and with unusual precision, as if he’d gone to broadcasting school, and the sound of his voice made her feel a little more certain that the boy she’d spent those wild afternoons with a quarter of a century ago was still hiding out somewhere inside the body of this handsome stranger.

  “You look great,” he said, once they’d gotten through the obligatory small talk about traffic and the perils of MapQuest. “You haven’t changed a bit.”

  “Everyone tells me that,” she replied. “I guess it’s the upside to having gray hair and wrinkles when you’re a teenager.”

  Paul grinned. There was some loose skin around his collar that was the only physical trace she could find of his former self.

  “Touché,” he said. “You were always funny. I remember that.”

  Ruth was surprised by this—humor didn’t often get included in the inventory of her virtues—but let it pass unchallenged.

  “Can I ask you something?” she said.

  “Sure.”

  There were a hundred ways to phrase the question, some kinder than others. Ruth chose the direct route.

  “What happened? You’re a completely different person.”

  Paul shrugged. “I got tired of being fat. I decided to make some changes.”

  “When?”

  “Ten years ago. After Missy and I got divorced.”

  Ruth nodded sympathetically, trying not to reveal any pleasure or excessive interest in this revelation.

  “I didn’t know you two had gotten married.”

  “I knew it was a disaster when I was walking down the aisle. But it was like I had to do it, like it was in the script.”

  “Been there,” she said.

  “We have two kids,” he said. “So that kinda compli
cated things.”

  Ruth resisted the urge to tell him about her own situation and what a hard road it was for a single mom. They’d have time for that later.

  “So did you start going to the gym or something?”

  “Exercise was part of it. But mainly I just had to learn to discipline my eating. Do you remember how much food there was in my house?”

  “It seemed like a lot,” Ruth conceded.

  “All we ever did was eat. The whole family. I asked my mom about it a few years ago, and she pretended not to know what I was talking about. I mean, we had two spare refrigerators in the basement, and both of them were always full.”

  “But you got married,” she pointed out. “You weren’t living in your parents’ house anymore.”

  “Overeating was a habit, and Missy aided and abetted it. But when my marriage finally ended, I just kinda woke up and realized I’d been given a second chance, and could live my life the way I wanted to. I lost 120 pounds in two years, and I’ve kept it off.”

  “Wow. That can’t be easy.”

  Paul ran his hand slowly down the front of his shirt, as if he were trying to iron out the wrinkles.

  “It’s actually not that hard,” he said. “Because I really like who I am now. I go to the gym sometimes, and I see this dude in the mirror, and I’m like, Hey, who’s that good-looking guy? I wish I could be like him. And then I realize it’s me.”

  “THANK YOU, C. J.,” JoAnn said. “That was a very interesting piece. I think you put your finger on a couple of really important issues that some of us might want to address in the classroom. One is the link between alcohol abuse and self-destructive sexual behavior, and the other is prom-night peer pressure. A couple of schools I know have gone so far as to set up sobriety checkpoints at their proms, complete with Breathalyzers and police officers, and I think your essay goes a long way in showing why that might not be such a bad idea.”

  “That wasn’t my point at all,” C. J. protested. “What I object to is the mandatory heterosexuality at the prom, all those smug straight people rubbing it in everyone else’s face. That’s what led to my self-destructive behavior.”