The Abstinence Teacher

  “I guess you feel sorry for me, huh? But you know what? I don’t care. I’m happy I’m a virgin. And my boyfriend’s happy about it, too.”

  Somebody coughed the word “Bullshit,” and pretty soon half the crowd was barking into their clenched fists. It got so bad that Principal Venuti had to stand up and give everyone the evil eye until they stopped.

  “You probably want to know why I’m so happy about something that seems so uncool, don’t you? Well, let me tell you a story.”

  The story was about a carefree girl named Melissa whom JoAnn had known in college. Melissa slept around, but figured it was okay, because the guys always used condoms. One night, though, when she was having “safe sex” with this handsome stud she’d met at a bar—a guy she didn’t know from Adam—the condom just happened to break, as condoms will.

  “The guy looked healthy,” JoAnn explained. “But he had AIDS. Melissa’s dead now. And I’m alive. That’s reason number one why I’m glad to be a virgin.”

  It turned out JoAnn had a lot of reasons. She was happy because she’d never had gonorrhea, like her friend, Lori, a straight A student who didn’t realize she was sick until prom night, when she discovered a foul puslike discharge on her underwear; or the excruciatingly painful Pelvic Inflammatory Disease suffered by her ex-roommate, Angela, who’d let her chlamydia go untreated, and was now infertile; or herpes, like her old rock-climbing buddy, Mitch, who couldn’t walk some days because of the agony caused by the festering sores on his penis; or hideous incurable genital warts like her otherwise-cute-as-a-button neighbor, Misty; or crabs, which were not actually crabs but lice—real live bugs!—having a party in your pubic hair, like they’d done to her ex-dancing partner, Jason.

  “Oh, my friends used to tease me a lot,” JoAnn said. “They called me a prude and a Goody Two-Shoes. Well, you can bet they’re not teasing me now.”

  And there was one more thing. JoAnn was glad she’d never gone through what her friend Janice had, never had to pee on a stick to discover she was pregnant by some jerk she’d met at a frat party and would never have even spoken to if she hadn’t been so drunk she could barely walk; never had to drive to an abortion clinic with this same jerk, who despised her as badly as she despised him; never had to lie there in a hospital gown while some creepy doctor did his business with a vacuum hose; never had to live with the responsibility of making a baby and then not allowing it to be born.

  “I can sleep at night,” JoAnn declared, “and that’s more than I can say for a lot of people I know. I can sleep because I don’t have any regrets. I’m a strong, self-sufficient individual, and I can look myself in the mirror and honestly say that my mind and my body are one hundred percent intact. They’re mine and mine alone, and I’m proud of that.”

  It was standard-issue Abstinence Ed, in other words—shameless fear-mongering, backed up by half-truths and bogus examples and inflammatory rhetoric—nothing Ruth hadn’t been exposed to before, but this time, for some reason, it felt different. The way JoAnn presented this stuff, it came across as lived experience, and for a little while there—until she snapped out of her trance and saw with dismay how easily she’d been manipulated—even Ruth had fallen under her spell, wondering how she’d ever been so weak as to let herself be duped into thinking it might be pleasant or even necessary to allow herself to be touched or loved by another human being. Why would you, if all it was going to do was make you vulnerable to all those afflictions, all that regret?

  After a short Q&A, JoAnn concluded her talk with a slide show. Instead of the gallery of diseased genitalia that Ruth had expected, though, Stonewood Heights High School was treated to a series of photographs of JoAnn and her boyfriend vacationing on a Caribbean island. If you didn’t know better, you might have thought they were on their honeymoon—two happy, attractive young people frolicking in the ocean, drinking out of coconut shells by the pool, kissing beneath a palm tree, clearly reveling in each other’s company (now that she’d gotten a glimpse of JoAnn’s fearsome bikini cleavage, Ruth was convinced that her breasts had indeed benefited from cosmetic surgery). The final image showed the boyfriend alone—a buff, shirtless, all-American guy—standing by the water’s edge in his swimming trunks, a surfboard tucked under his arm.

  “As you might imagine,” JoAnn said, “it’s not easy saying no to a superhot guy like Ed. But when it gets hard, I just remind myself of my wedding night, and how amazing it’s going to be when I give myself to my husband with a pure heart, a clean conscience, and a perfectly intact body. Because that’s going to be my reward, and mark my words, people—it is going to be soooo good, oh my God, better than you can even imagine.”

  The lights came on, and the students applauded enthusiastically, though Ruth wasn’t quite sure if they were applauding for the hot sex JoAnn would have in the future or her commitment to avoiding it in the here and now. Either way, Ruth had to grudgingly admit to herself that she was impressed. JoAnn Marlow had somehow pulled off the neat feat of seeming sexy and puritanical at the same time, of impersonating a feminist while articulating a set of ideas that would have seemed retro in 1954, of making abstinence seem steamy and adventurous, a right-wing American variation on Tantric sex. It was a little scary.

  But it was over. Or at least Ruth thought it was, until she walked out of the auditorium and saw Dr. Farmer and Principal Venuti and several members of the school board standing in the hallway, looking pleased and excited.

  “Wasn’t that extraordinary?” Dr. Farmer asked her. “What a great role model for the kids.”

  “Informative, too,” said Venuti. “Lots of medical facts and whatnot.”

  The board members—there were five of them, enough for a voting majority—nodded in enthusiastic agreement, and Ruth saw that it would be useless to quibble with JoAnn’s facts or find fault with the way she’d presented them. The situation had clearly progressed beyond the point where facts were of any use to anyone, so she just nodded politely and went on her way.

  At least this way she had a heads-up, and didn’t feel ambushed a month later when the school board announced that the high school would be revamping its Sex Education curriculum over the summer, with the help of a dynamic nonprofit organization called Wise Choices for Teens. Later that same meeting, it was also announced that the McBride family had decided not to file a lawsuit against the Stonewood Heights School District after all.

  A PALPABLE current of electricity moved through the classroom as Ruth perched herself on the edge of the metal desk, primly crossing her legs at the ankles. Tugging at the hem of her skirt, she found herself momentarily startled—it was something that happened a lot these days—by the sight of her calves, which had been transformed by all the running she’d done over the summer. They looked lovely and unfamiliar, almost as if she’d borrowed them from a woman half her age.

  She’d started exercising in late spring, at the height of the scandal, on the suggestion of her ex-husband, who thought that a vigorous aerobic workout might alleviate the tension headaches and insomnia that had left her groggy and short-tempered, in no condition to function as a teacher or a parent. He reminded her of how riding a bicycle had gotten him through the darkest days of their divorce, when he missed their daughters so much he regularly cried himself to sleep at night.

  “You can’t brood,” he told her. “You gotta go out and do something positive.”

  It was the best advice he ever gave her. She started small, half-walking, half-jogging a few laps around the middle-school track, but her body responded right away. In July, she was running three miles a day at a slow, steady clip; by mid-August, a brisk five-miler no longer made her feel like she was going to throw up or die of heatstroke. She ran a 10k race on Labor Day, finishing ninth in the Women Forty and Over category. In six months, she lost twenty pounds, streamlined her entire lower body, and realized, to her delight and amazement, that she looked thinner and healthier than she had in college, where she’d majored in Psychology and minored in Doritos.
The only downside to this midlife physical transformation was that it made her that much more conscious of the absence of a man in her life—it seemed like such a waste, having a nice body again, and no one to appreciate it.

  What the running mainly did, though—she could see it more clearly in retrospect than she’d been able to at the time—was provide her with a way of working through her anger and coming to some level of acceptance of the new regime. Because as much as she would have liked to stand up for what she believed in and resign in protest, where would she have been then? She was a divorced mother with two daughters who would soon be going to college, a tenured teacher with six years to go before she qualified for a full pension. It wouldn’t be easy to find another district in the area willing to hire someone with her baggage. And besides, as Randall frequently reminded her, if she quit then they would win, the forces of shame and denial, the people who’d praise the Lord if they forced her out of the classroom and replaced her with someone more compliant. Wouldn’t it be better to stay put and see what happened? The Abstinence curriculum was a pilot program, part of a two-year study funded by a federal grant. When it ended, who knew what would take its place?

  All of these arguments had seemed perfectly plausible to Ruth as she’d jogged around Stonewood Lake at dusk, or huffed and puffed down the bike path at the first light of dawn. But right now, looking out on a classful of ninth graders, she wondered if she’d been betrayed by the endorphins, because all she wanted to do was apologize to her students for letting them down, for allowing it to come to this.

  She knew it was past time to get started, but she couldn’t seem to locate her voice. The kids were watching her closely, their faces alert and curious, paying the kind of attention she would have killed for on any other day. In the back row, the minders were growing restless, exchanging glances of puzzlement and concern. JoAnn leaned in close to Dr. Farmer and whispered something in his ear. Principal Venuti cleared his throat at high volume and made a spinning motion with his index finger, signaling that it was time to get rolling. Ruth felt a disgustingly fake smile—an adolescent reaction to social panic that she’d never fully conquered—tugging at the corners of her mouth. It took an effort of will for her to rein it in.

  “Well,” she finally managed to croak, in a voice she didn’t recognize as her own. “Here we are.”

  Let’s Find Out

  IT WAS A LITTLE AFTER SIX ON FRIDAY EVENING, BUT ALREADY Bombay Palace was packed, the entrance overrun with cranky families who’d just been informed that they’d have to wait half an hour for a table at the town’s only half-decent alternative to Applebee’s. Tearing off a piece of alu paratha, Ruth registered a flicker of pleasure at her own free agent status. It was one of the few compensations of divorce, she thought, the one night a week when Frank took the girls and she was able to do what she wanted, no babysitter to pay, no one to report to when she got home. A perfect opportunity to be bad, if she’d had anyone to be bad with.

  “Look on the bright side,” Gregory told her. “At least you’re practicing what you preach.”

  “I don’t think it qualifies as abstinence if it’s involuntary,” Ruth told him. “It’s just pathetic.”

  “And it’s definitely not abstinence if a vibrator’s involved,” Randall added.

  “You’re right about that,” she said. “The new curriculum clearly states that masturbation of any kind is strictly verboten. Apparently it’s habit-forming and interferes with your schoolwork.”

  “Damn,” said Gregory. “So that’s why I didn’t get into Harvard.”

  “Frankly,” said Randall, “it’s a miracle you got your real-estate license.”

  Gregory nodded. “I’m just glad I didn’t have to take the test when I was fifteen.”

  “Believe me,” said Ruth. “The kids didn’t look too happy when I broke the news.”

  “I bet Homo Joe was pretty devastated, too,” Randall observed. “What’s he gonna do with that economy-size jar of Vaseline he carries around in his coat pocket?”

  “Or that Burt Reynolds centerfold in his wallet?” said Gregory.

  It was a running joke between Randall and Gregory that Principal Venuti was actually a closeted gay man—aka “Homo Joe”—who took extralong showers in the boys’ locker room, kept a stash of pilfered jockstraps in his “Confidential” file cabinet, and was frequently seen dancing at The Manhole in tight jeans, a fishnet shirt, and a Prince Valiant wig. Whenever possible, a new perversion was added to the list.

  “I really don’t get the logic behind the whole abstinence thing,” said Gregory. “I mean, I grew up being taught that premarital sex was wrong, and gay people were going straight to hell, and playing with yourself was a sin. And look how I turned out.”

  “Greg was wearing leather hot pants and a studded dog collar on the night we met,” Randall told Ruth.

  “I know,” said Ruth. “You showed me the pictures.”

  “It was a Halloween party,” Gregory explained. “And I’d just left the seminary. I was trying to make up for lost time.”

  “I’m not complaining.” Randall reached across the table and gave his boyfriend’s hand a furtive squeeze. “And I wouldn’t say no to a reenactment later on.”

  “We can try,” Gregory said skeptically. “But you’ll need a crowbar to get my fat ass into those shorts.”

  “The collar will suffice,” Randall assured him.

  As she often did in their company, Ruth wondered how much of this banter was serious and how much was manufactured for her entertainment. Either way, dinner with Randall and Gregory was a lot livelier than the occasional girls’ night out she shared with Donna DiNardo and Ellen Michaels, a longtime colleague who taught History. Defying the Sex and the City stereotype of randy, uninhibited single gals dishing colorful secrets to their friends, the three women rarely spoke about anything but work and movies. Ruth and Donna made a special effort to steer clear of the problematic realms of sex and romance, lest they trigger one of Ellen’s weepy, chardonnay-fueled tirades against her ex-husband, Marty, a lawyer who’d run off with a much younger colleague and started a new family, leaving her all alone in a big empty house, her kids grown up and gone, nothing but the goddam TV for company, probably for the rest of her life.

  Tonight, especially, Ruth was grateful to have such diverting companions. It had been a rough week, a sustained attack on her dignity and self-esteem. Here she was—a woman who had always prided herself on being a fighter—standing up day after day in her own classroom and, under the watchful eyes of her three “guest observers,” betraying everything she’d ever stood for as a teacher, the values on which she’d built her entire career. She’d done what she could to let the kids know she wasn’t buying what she was selling—grimacing, talking in a robotic voice, stressing as often as she could that the curriculum didn’t necessarily reflect her personal opinion—but it didn’t matter much. She still felt dirty at the end of each class, unable to meet her students’ eyes as they filed out of the room.

  “Abstinence is perfectly reasonable in theory,” Gregory said. “It just doesn’t work in practice. It’s like dieting. You can go a day or two, maybe even a week. But eventually that pizza just smells too good.”

  “Just ask Father John,” Randall said.

  “Who’s that?” asked Ruth.

  “The priest who molested him.” Randall looked at Gregory. “What were you, twelve?”

  “Thirteen,” said Gregory.

  “What?” Ruth was taken aback. “You guys are kidding, right?”

  Both men shook their heads.

  “Really?” she said. “By a priest?”

  “Finally.” Randall pumped his fist in mock triumph. “A story we haven’t told her.”

  “Molested is too strong a word,” Gregory said. “I think it’s more accurate to say it was consensual.”

  “Come on,” Randall protested. “Nothing’s consensual when you’re thirteen.”

  “Not technically,” Gregory conc
eded. “But I did enjoy it. And I certainly volunteered for more.”

  “That’s putting it mildly,” said Randall.

  “Don’t mind him,” Gregory told Ruth. “He’s just jealous.”

  Ruth nodded, trying to look as nonjudgmental as possible. No woman she knew would have admitted to enjoying sexual advances from an authority figure at thirteen, but she had come to believe that certain things really were different for men.

  “He was a cute little altar boy,” Randall said. “The whole thing was such a tawdry cliché.”

  Ruth had no trouble believing this. Even at thirty-eight, with his apple-cheeked face and lank, sandy hair, Gregory still looked like a member of the Vienna Boys’ Choir, despite the weight he’d put on in the past couple of years. At thirteen, he must have been an angel.

  “Father John was a sweet, mixed-up man.” Gregory smiled wistfully at the memory. “He died of AIDS, but none of the parishioners would admit it. To this day, they still call it cancer.”

  “Thirteen’s too young,” Randall insisted. “I agree with the abstinence people on that.”

  “Maybe,” said Gregory. “But the other kids had been calling me a fag since second grade.”

  “So?” Randall said. “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “I don’t know.” Gregory looked thoughtful. “It was just kind of a relief to make it official.”

  “You were lonely, and he took advantage,” Randall said. “You should at least be able to see it for what it was.”

  “It happened to me,” Gregory snapped. “Not to you. So don’t tell me what it was.”

  “I just don’t think it’s right,” Randall muttered.

  “I guess I wasn’t as lucky as you.” There was an edge in Gregory’s voice that Ruth hadn’t heard before. “I didn’t meet Mr. Perfect on the first day of college and have a storybook romance.”