The Abstinence Teacher Read Free Page A

can’t remember. But Maggie, my younger one, she’s the jock. She’s going to test for her blue belt next month. She does soccer and swimming, too.”
    “Impressive,” noted Dr. Farmer. “My wife just started taking Tai Chi. She does it with some Chinese ladies in the park, first thing in the morning. But that’s not really a martial art. It’s more of a movement thing.”
    The adults vacated the doorway, making way for the students who began drifting into the classroom. Several of them smiled at Ruth, and a few said hello. She’d felt okay right up to that point, more or less at peace with the decision she’d made. But now, quite suddenly, she became aware of the cold sweat pooling in her armpits, the queasy feeling spreading out from her belly.
    “I was talking about spiritual self-defense,” said JoAnn. “We’re living in a toxic culture. The messages these girls get from the media are just so relentlessly degrading. No wonder they hate themselves.”
    Dr. Farmer nodded distractedly as he scanned the nearly empty hallway. His face relaxed as Principal Venuti rounded the corner bythe gym and began moving toward them at high speed, hunched in his usual bowlegged wrestler’s crouch, as if he were looking for someone to take down.
    “Here’s our fourth,” said Dr. Farmer. “So we’re good to go.”
    “Looks like it,” agreed Ruth. “Be a relief just to get it over with.”
    “Oh, come on,” JoAnn said, smiling at Ruth to conceal her annoyance. “It’s not gonna be that bad.”
    “Not for you,” Ruth said, smiling right back at her. “It’s gonna be just great for you.”
    SOME PEOPLE enjoy it .
    That was all Ruth had said. Even now, when she’d had months to come to terms with the fallout from this remark, she still marveled at the power of those four words, which she’d uttered without premeditation and without any sense of treading on forbidden ground.
    The incident had occurred the previous spring, during a contraception lecture Ruth delivered to a class of ninth graders. She had just completed a fairly detailed explanation of how an IUD works when she paused and asked if anyone had any questions. After a moment, a pale, normally quiet girl named Theresa McBride raised her hand.
    “Oral sex is disgusting,” Theresa declared, apropos of nothing. “You might as well French-kiss a toilet seat. You can get all sorts of nasty diseases, right?”
    Theresa stared straight at Ruth, as if daring her to challenge this incontrovertible fact. In retrospect, Ruth thought she should have been able to discern the hostile intent in the girl’s unwavering gaze—most of the ninth graders kept their eyes trained firmly on their desks during the more substantive parts of Sex Ed—but Ruth wasn’t in the habit of thinking of her students as potential adversaries. If anything, she was grateful to the girl for creating what her grad school professors used to call “a teachable moment.”
    “Well,” Ruth began, “from what I hear about oral sex, some people enjoy it.”
    The boys in the back of the room laughed knowingly, an attitude Ruth chalked up more to bravado than experience, despite all the rumors about blowjobs being as common as hand-holding in the middle school. Theresa reddened slightly, but she didn’t avert her eyes as Ruth continued with the more serious part of her answer, in which she discussed a few basic points of sexual hygiene, and described the body’s ingenious strategies for separating the urinary and reproductive systems, even though they shared a lot of the same real estate. She finished by enumerating the various STD’s that could and could not be transmitted through oral-to-genital contact, and recommending the use of condoms and dental dams to make oral sex safer for both partners.
    “Done properly,” she said, “cunnilingus and fellatio should be a lot more pleasant, and a lot cleaner, than kissing a toilet seat. I hope that answers your question.”
    Theresa nodded