The Abstinence Teacher (3 page)

“They’ve given the inmates control of the asylum,” Pastor Dennis observed. “Is it any wonder they’re making insane decisions?”

But the good guys had won that battle; the school board had voted five to four to keep Judy Blume on the shelves (unfortunately, the books themselves had been repeatedly vandalized in the wake of this decision, forcing the librarians to remove them to a safe area behind the circulation desk). In any event, Ruth had foolishly chosen to view these skirmishes as a series of isolated incidents, storms that flared up and blew over, rather than seeing them for what they were—the climate in which she now lived.

Her second mistake was thinking of herself as invulnerable, somehow beyond attack. She’d been teaching high school Sex Ed for more than a decade and had become a beloved figure—or so she liked to think—for the unflappable, matter-of-fact candor with which she discussed the most sensitive of subjects. She believed—it was her personal credo—that Pleasure is Good, Shame is Bad, and Knowledge is Power;
she saw it as her mission to demystify sex for the teenagers of Stonewood Heights, so they didn’t go through their lives believing that masturbation was a crime against nature, or that oral sex was the functional equivalent of kissing a toilet seat, or worse, perpetuating the time-honored American Tradition of not even knowing there
was
such a thing as the clitoris, let alone where it was located. She was doing what any good teacher did—leading her students into the light, opening them up to new ways of thinking, giving them the vital information they needed to live their lives in the most rewarding way possible—and in doing so, she had earned more than her fair share of respect and affection from the kids who passed through her classroom, and some measure of gratitude from the community as a whole.

So when Principal Venuti told her that he needed to talk to her about an “important matter,” she showed up at his office without the slightest sense of misgiving. Even when she saw the Superintendent there, as well as a man who introduced himself as a lawyer for the school district, she felt more puzzled than alarmed.

“This isn’t a formal interview,” the Superintendent told her. “We’re just trying to get the facts straight.”

“What facts?” said Ruth.

The Principal and the Superintendent turned to the lawyer, who didn’t look too happy.

“Ms. Ramsey, did you … umm … well, did you
advocate
the practice of fellatio to your students?”

“Did I what?”

The lawyer glanced at his yellow pad. “Last Thursday, in sixth-period Health? In response to a question by a Theresa McBride?”

When Ruth realized what he was talking about, she laughed with relief.

“Not just fellatio,” she explained. “Cunnilingus, too. I would never single out just the one.”

The lawyer frowned. He was a slovenly guy in a cheap suit, the kind
of attorney you sometimes saw on TV, blinking frantically, trying to explain why he’d fallen asleep during his client’s murder trial. Stonewood Heights was a relatively prosperous town, but Ruth sometimes got the feeling that the people in charge didn’t mind cutting a few corners.

“And you’re telling us that you advocated these practices?”

“I didn’t
advocate
them,” Ruth said. “If I remember correctly, I think what I said is that some people like oral sex.”

Joe Venuti let out a soft groan of dismay. Dr. Farmer looked like he’d been jabbed with a pin.

“Are you absolutely certain?” the lawyer asked in an insinuating tone. “Why don’t you take a moment and think about it. Because if you’re being misquoted, it would make everything a lot easier.”

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 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.