The Abstinence Teacher

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 heard.

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.

“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 exdancing 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 (#ulink_4085552d-884a-5132-b4ca-b2822fc95457)