AMERICAN LIT: 1865-PRESENT

Dana Schmidt was not the kind of girl you would expect to find hanging out with me. You would expect somebody sort of mousy (though cute), intellectual (though cool), with big round eyeglasses maybe and her hair in a bun. Always with books in her arms. Ready with a quote from Kierkegaard or Camus, or Thomas Aquinas. Dana was loud, brash, show-offy, borderline exhibitionist, somebody who would make outrageous proclamations that sometimes shocked my fellow students in the English lit class that we were taking together at the University of Texas. For instance, disclosing the abortion she had as a teenager—and applying that to the class discussion, boldly, brazenly, without discernible embarrassment or hesitation.

Voluptuous would be one word that came to mind describing her. Scintillating might be another. Her last name, Schmidt, never seemed quite right for her, she should have been named something more glamorous and exotic. Maybe she needed a stage name. She spoke out in class with candid and often contrarian positions, challenging her classmates and even the professor, who seemed perpetually bewildered by her. He stood at the podium motionless while she talked, one hand clutching its side, a preoccupied expression on his face. She wasn’t like any of the girls I knew growing up in San Antonio, in Catholic school. She had undoubtedly broken through into a glorified plane of consciousness, a nirvana of sorts. She was the kind of girl I thought I wanted desperately to know, the kind of girl I had never known, the kind of girl who existed only in myth and fiction. She seemed to represent everything about Austin and college life and the changing times that I had craved for so long.

I met Dana in my American Lit 1865-Present class, junior year at the University of Texas in Austin. My junior year, but just my first year living away from home, in another city. (That was a sob story that I’ll hold off telling for now.) She slipped through the right front door five minutes after class had started, and said, “Is this English Lit 301?” Wearing a tight red tube top (breasts spilling out) and white shorts, hair frizzy and exuberant, legs long and tanned, she instigaged an abrupt silence and collective head-turning from the class. The professor, a spruce, lean, goateed man in his early 40s, perhaps, seemed taken aback, as if his class had been hijacked by a movie star.

“Yes, it is,” he said, and Dana smiled at him with her very pouty, very lip-sticked lips, and seemed to bat her eyes at him, and he waved her in. There was an almost audible stir of indignation from my classmates as she moved leisurely along.

“Is this seat taken?” she said in a loud stage whisper, to me, motioning to the vacant desk directly to my right. Motivated by a combination of raging hormones and stage fright, I whispered back. The next few exchanges were delivered in whispers.

“Not at the present time,” I said.

“May I sit there?” she said.

“Undoubtedly,” I said. It was a strange thing to say, I realized, but my pulse was palpitating like a hummingbird’s wings. I held my hand out invitingly. “Be my guest.” And that’s how our relationship began.

I spent the remainder of that class period in acute self-consciousness, pondering my every move, calculating what I should say next, nodding over to her during what seemed pertinent points. Several times, she nodded back, as if endorsing my point of view. She ignored me, however, when class was over. She rose from her desk and flounced on out without recognition or acknowledgement. I couldn’t pull myself together enough to say anything. I sat there for long poignant moments staring at my belongings, feeling the melancholy of opportunity lost, The entire history of my life weighed upon me heavily. I finally left class when I was the only one still there.
I saw Dana again, later that same day. I was seated on a concrete bench beside a busy walkway, watching the passing crowd, soaking in the college experience, my new experience, making up for lost time. A whiff of fresh cut grass floated in the air like a harbinger of abundant life. The campus was buzzing, the first home football game of the season on tap for the weekend. A warm, pleasant sun beaming in my face was like the touch of a benevolent hand. I sat with backpack dangling, alert, watchful, wired. If I were anymore wired, I would be shooting off beams of electricity.

Dana was walking up from Guadalupe Street, the main drag fronting campus, by herself, backpack riding high near her shoulders, leaving her hands free. Her stride was resolute. Her posture was superb. She seemed to be singing to herself, head bobbing back and forth, frizzy blonde hair bouncing slightly in the gentle breeze. She seemed tuned in to some higher energy force, something cosmic and divine. My heart leaped. My chest tightened. I felt invigorated. I felt frozen. I almost let her pass by, but a surge of animal magnetism and an invisible hunt seemed to propel me upward from my spot on the bench. It seemed suddenly that this could be the rest of my life, right here.

“Dana!” I shouted. It felt daring saying her name. “Hey!” I was on my feet now, waving in a way that I hoped to somehow convey both coolness and urgency. “I’m Will from your American Lit 1865-Present class. I sat next to you. Professor Whitbread. Remember me?” The emotional exertion of making this statement nearly rendered me incapacitated.

She stopped and turned, looking me over inquisitively, suspiciously, perhaps. Perhaps she thought I was like any other libidinous young man who lusted after her body and viewed her exclusively as a sex object. I did not. This was a very minor part of my attraction to her—45%, at most. I loved her effervescence and her uninhibited spirit. I saw her as a symbol of the kind of world I wanted to inhabit, a smart, sophisticated, forward-thinking world. I could see her taking me places, places of the mind I had never been before. OK, places of the body, as well. She smiled. She had the kind of smile that bestowed upon the recipient almost a kind of blessed status, a beatified state of being. She touched her hair, as if to push it back down in place. I hoped that meant she was primping for me.

“Oh!” she said. “I do remember you. Will, you said? Hi there, Will!”

“Hi there back!” I said. “Dana.” I paused briefly before moving in with a deft series of class-relevant remarks. “I liked what you said about the Emperor of Ice Cream this morning. Most of the others missed the main point. You nailed it.”

“You think so?” she said. “Wow! Thanks! Sometimes I think I go a little off the rails.” She maneuvered around a gaggle of talkers to come right up to me on the bench. I sprung forward to meet her partway.

“Not at all,” I said. “Your comments were very insightful.” This was English major speak for, “I think you’re beautiful and sexy.” We stood silent for a few moments, as if gearing up our conversational queues. The ensuing dialogue could have been lifted verbatim from our American Lit discussion period.

“Hart Crane is a pivotal figure in 19th Century American Realism, don’t you think”

“T. S. Eliot exemplifies the emotional vacuum in modern capitalist society so perfectly.”

A nice, safe, intellectually stimulating academic conversation, squarely in my comfort zone. As an English major, I could go on like that for days. Then Dana said: “Hey, want to go grab some coffee in the student union building?”

I had a government class in ten minutes, but made the command decision to blow that off and go with Dana. Maybe I’d just blow off everything in my life and we could take off somewhere far away—Sumatra, Indonesia, California. Who needed a college degree, anyway? I began making travel arrangements in my mind.

She gestured and I followed self-consciously beside her, glaringly aware that I was among the biggest frauds every perpetrated on a college campus. It’s hard to explain why, but it was acutely embarrassing to me that I had transferred in from a community college, San Antonio College, spending my first two college years there, living at home. Even acknowledging that fact made me feel foolish and unsettled. So when meeting somebody new I essentially erased those two years from my life history, pretending I had been on the Austin campus since freshman year. Maintaining this pretense required constant vigilance, avoiding, deflecting, side-stepping inquiries about where I had lived, professors I had taken, and so forth. I didn’t so much make up a story as to pretend there was no story. Yes, it was absurd. Yes, I was an idiot, a fool, a knave, a simpleton. Yes, I probably needed to see a psychiatrist.

I could see everybody gawking curiously as we shuffled through the checkout line in the union cafeteria, this bombshell of a woman and me, a deeply insecure, angst-ridden young man with low self-esteem. I tried my best to project an image of someone savvy, discerning, experienced. Somebody possessing some deep inner wellspring of wisdom—it was exhausting to continue this façade. We slid onto benches on a back corner table, sitting face-to-face. We held our coffees in both hands, blowing on them with an insouciant savoir faire. We were so savoir faire. I sat apprehensively, thinking she might call out my charade at any moment.

She smiled again. This time, it was the smile of an almost ethereal being, someone operating outside the normal plane of existence. Sanctified, I smiled back. I swear I felt a light breath of grace pass over me.

“Good coffee!” she said. This seemed a stand-in for something more, something much more intimate.

“Good coffee!” I said back. This was a stand-in for “I want to kiss you.” I lifted my mug in a kind of celebratory salute. She lifted hers, too.

The conversation proceeded serenely along on literary and philosophical terms, but then veered wildly, onto sex. This may have evolved incidentally from my mention of the lush sensuality of a Sylvia Path verse, about which we heartily agreed. Sex was another of those topics I tried diligently to avoid, as my resume in that field was rather thin. Still, I felt compelled to imply that I was a regular Lothario in my love life, as virtually my entire standing as a 20-year-old male human being depended on that characterization. I tried to respond with authority and acumen.

“I think sex should only be between two people who truly love one another,” Dana said.

“Oh, me too!” I agreed enthusiastically, almost breathlessly. “Sex should only be between two people who love one another.” (In practice, I was all too willing to waive that requirement.) My hands shook perceptibly as I lifted the coffee mug to my mouth—or, more precisely, approximately two centimeters to the left of my mouth. I could love her, I believed. Yes, I could certainly love her! I may already be in love with her. Perspiring suddenly, I was hoping my riposte would put the closing touches on the topic—I tried to redirect the conversation onto the football game that weekend—but she continued pouring it on.

“It would be interesting to spend a weekend or a holiday having sex with somebody but not talking at all,” she said then. “Don’t you think?”

“Yes!” I said. I couldn’t think. I could exist only in a state of overheated animation, like some pack animal in a crowded water trough. Was this an invitation? Should I suggest we head over to her apartment right now? Instead, I fell silent, and we sat there quietly for a few minutes more, pondering our coffee cups, pondering next moves, pondering our futures. It was like the falling action following the climax of a movie or novel. I didn’t trust myself to make a move or say anything.

“I need to go study now,” Dana said, finally, standing from her bench.

“I have a class coming up,” I said.

“See you in Whitbread’s,” she said.

“See you there,” I said. “I think I’ll just finish up my coffee right here.” I let her go off by herself then. I had had enough for now. I felt that I would require a professional debriefing, like astronauts when they return from outer space. For technical reasons, I didn’t feel that I could rise from the bench just then.

Two days later we had coffee again after Whitbread’s class, and then again after his next class, and pretty soon you might say we were friends. My first new friend since I had moved to Austin. We would pick up our coffees in the union cafeteria and then proceed around to various locations on campus—the biology pond, a grassy lawn, the art museum, a massive bronze sculpture of Poseidon with his team of flying horses. One day, we sat in the stands of the empty football stadium; she had never been to a game or even inside the stadium before.

Our conversations spilled over into everyday topics, philosophical topics, mundane topics, movies we had seen, what our high schools were like, where we went grocery shopping, our aspirations for life. She seemed to draw out something hidden in me, something lurking just beneath the surface. I was shy and repressed and introverted—I had always believed—but she made me feel strong and assertive, worthy of her affection. I could be brash and outspoken. I could speak engagingly about all manner of topics, trivial and profound, discovering myself to be remarkably abstruse and erudite. She seemed to enjoy listening to me, listening intently, as if I were the first individual in her life to take her seriously as someone with a mind as well as a body. I was acutely aware of that body, of course, though I never tried to touch her or force myself on her physically. I was overwhelmed by her, partly, but fearful also that she would reject my advances and our relationship would be over. This was something new for me—a friendship with a girl—and I looked forward to our meetings after class immensely. She seemed to value my opinions. She leaned forward when talking to me. Surprisingly, I served in a kind of mentoring role to her, somebody who could guide her thinking on important topics, topics she had never considered before. On a peripheral note, she called me William, my full given name, while everyone else in my life called me Will. I found this endearing somehow, thinking it meant I was somebody special in her eyes. I really wanted to be special in her eyes. I secretly reserved a transition to a real romance for some undefined moment in the future. I still hoped for that. But I could wait. If she wanted to jump into my arms, I would welcome that overture without reservation.

“William,” she said to me, one day. It was a warm, sunny fall day. We were seated on a bench behind the art building, on a small rise, watching the cars and the foot traffice on the Drag down below. This was one of my favorite spots to sit with her, quiet, secluded, our own secret place. A light breeze seemed always to blow there. Heavy bronze sculptures, seriously avant garde, stood stationed around, like inert soldiers. “There’s something I should tell you.”

“What is it, my dear?” I said. Taking liberties, being corny. I enjoyed taking liberties with her sometimes. I enjoyed being corny. She stared straight ahead, at some point in the landscape below. I tried to follow her eyes but couldn’t tell where she was looking. She took a sip of coffee and then semed to spit out the words:

“I’m getting married,” she said.

“Oh,” I said. I clutched my coffee tight. I found myself staring off into the distance, too. We spoke staring off into the distance. “Really. Wow. That’s great. Cool.” I smiled, though my smile was like that of somebody picking through the pieces of a house that was razed in a hurricane.

“You don’t know him,” she volunteered. “I’ve known him since high school. He’s an interna at a hospital back in El Paso.”

“When is it?” I said.

“Not for a while,” she said. “He needs to finish his internship first and I need to graduate from UT. A couple of years probably.” That was some solace for me, anyway, that it wasn’t happening right away. Maybe there would still be a chance for me.

I never understood why, exactly, but she reached into her backpack then and pulled out her driver’s license. She wanted to assure me that this other part of her life was real, too, maybe. Maybe she wanted to assure herself.

The photo was old, from back in her high school days. The crazy thing was that she looked like a different person from the Dana I knew here in Austin. Here in Austin, she was this flamboyant, wild-haired, counter-culture character, a rebel, a renegade, a free-thinker, unconstrained by the bounds of a moribund society. Back in El Paso, she was a demure, dowdy girl with close-cropped, curly hair and square black eyeglasses. Her jawline was slack and insecure. She looked like somebody who said her prayers every night and finished her homework on time and never argued with her parents. I dismissed that Dana from my mind and went with the one I knew. That Dana I was in love with. That Dana patted my hand and smiled, though her smile was unlike any of the ones she had revealed before. This was a shy, almost sheepish smile, the smile of somebody not at all certain of what she should do.

We continued on with our regular meetings, our usual conversations, though things seemed different now—the Doctor (as Dana called him) stood between us, like some nefarious spirit. From Dana’s descriptions, I pictured the Doctor as a thin, ascetic man, narrow-nosed, fastidious, focused, humorless, a taskmaster, a recluse, a nerd. I didn’t say this to her, but I didn’t think he was right for her—not right at all. I couldn’t see how she could really love him. Maybe she could still love me.

It was late, late in the year, December 22, the semester long over, the streets near campus deserted and forlorn. My roommates had dispersed back to their homes in San Antonio for the holidays and wouldn’t return home until after New Year’s. My part-time job shelving books for the public library kept me in Austin right up until Christmas Eve. There were a smattering of lights on around our 3-story apartment complex, a few lonely thresholds lined with red and blue Yuletide lights. Dana was gone, too, back to El Paso, I presumed. She had disappeared from my life after our class final, slipping out the door without even a wave or looking back. I had called her phone number here off and on, to no avail. I drove past her apartment north of campus in fruitless hopes of seeing her coming out the door. I had been feeling empty and alone ever since she left.

I was camped out on a ragged couch in our empty living room, channel surfing the TV, and feeling ragged myself, melancholy, bleak. It was dark outside early now, by 6 pm, and the early darkness seemed to envelop the world like a heavy drape, a black hole of darkness, a darkness that consumed everything nearby. I should pack, get ready to leave for San Antonio after work the following day, but I wasn’t up for packing just then. I wasn’t up for anything. It seemed a long time off before anything good would be happening again. I missed the hubbub and activity of the school semester. I missed Dana more than anything else.

The desk phone rang then, loud and clamorous, invading my space, and I almost let it go. I didn’t have the energy to talk to anybody just then. I didn’t think I was capable of a conversation. But the lure of a ringing phone was strong. I picked up after five rings. I sat up straight in my chair. It was Dana.

“William!” Dana said. “Hi there!” This was her cheerful, chipper voice, the voice she had used when we were exploring interesting places on one of our walks.

“Dana!” I said. “Hi there back! Where are you? I thought you must be home in El Paso.”

“I’m still here,” she said. “The Doctor had to work over Christmas, so I postponed going back. I didn’t didn’t want to spend too much time with my family! I’m leaving in the morning.”

“Oh . . .great,” I said. “What are you up to tonight?”

“Nothing much,” she said. “Just packing up right now. I was wondering, would you want to go look at Christmas lights? We could maybe drive around my neighborhood a little bit. If you want to.”

“Of course I want to!” I said. I was standing up off the couch now. My heart was beating fast. I could hardly contain myself. “When? Right now?”

“Yes,” she said. “Right now.”

“I’ll be right over,” I said.

“Do you know where I live?” she said.

“Yes, you gave me the address once.”

I put on a different shirt and took it off and put on yet another one, trying to identify just the right shirt for Christmas light looking—and whatever else. I drove to Dana’s garage apartment in a paroxysm of joy and restored vigor. I ran up the wooden stairs outside and banged on the door, foot tapping. When Dana opened up, I was grinning unabashedly. I launched myself through the doorway and into her arms. Her waiting arms, it seemed to me. We hugged—we had never hugged before—and I squeezed her tight. I hoped that my display of affection wouldn’t put her off. I hoped it wasn’t obvious how much in love with her I was. Or maybe I hoped that it was obvious.

There was a suitcase open on the couch in the front room, partly packed. A small ceramic Christmas tree stood on a desk, lighted up. We talked in jagged, excited bursts. The topics of the conversation didn’t seem as important as just the conversation itself. Any old words would do. It was like seeing each other again had released an endorphin bomb into our systems. She was dressed enticingly tonight in sleek black slacks and a Mexican peasant’s blouse with a scoop neck, braless, breasts unencumbered. I liked to think she had dressed for me. Her lips were red and sensuous. I held her by both arms, talking a mile a minute.

“So you’re leaving tomorrow morning, you said?” I said.

“Yeah. Leaving early.”

“What is that to El Paso, a 12-hour drive?”

“12 hours. 11 ½, if I push it.”

“Good highway, anyway,” I said.

“Right,” she said. “Divided highway all the way.”

I glanced around her apartment, then. It was like viewing a Forbidden Palace. It was the place where she could be her most secret self, dressing and undressing, eating, sleeping, getting herself ready for class. This was the first time we had been truly alone, in an enclosed space. We had always been where there were other people—in the classroom, the student union building, somewhere on campus or near campus. It was a thrill to be alone with her there. My spiritual self seemed to expand exponentially, merging with my physical self.

We talked for a few minutes more, about school and Christmas break and our families back home—no mention of the Doctor—then we headed out to view the Christmas lights. It was cozy and snug inside my beat-up old Ford Mustang, the console heater blowing out salubrious drafts of crisp warm air, visible to the eye. We found a radio station playing seasonal songs and sang along, like children around a cheerful hearth. Every now and then my hand would jerk out and touch her hand, or her wrist, or her shoulder. She didn’t object. For a brief while I was happy, about as happy and whole as a human being can ever be.

“That’s a good house!” we said.

“Ooh, look at that one!” we said.

Arriving back at her apartment, we were raucous running up the stairs. Inside, there seemed to be something in the air, something dreamy and bewitching, like a Hallmark movie. Something was going to happen, you could just tell. The kinetic energy in the room was off the charts. We stood talking face-to-face, inches apart.

“That was a fun semester hanging out with you,” I said.

“It was,” she said. “It was a really fun semester.”

Again, those words seemed to mean more by implication than their literal definitions, a prelude to something significant. I had waited a long time for this. I had waited all semester. It seemed now that all of our conversations throughout the semester had let forward to this moment in time. My mind raced as I pondered next steps. This was her idea, right? She invited me over, correct? She knew we would be alone together, true? She must have understood what could possibly transpire.

I leaned in suddenly—too dramatically, I sensed—kissing her on the lips. Like any first kiss, it was strange and mysterious, magical. But it was good. Sometimes first kisses weren’t good and you could realize immediately that this was never going anywhere. But this was good. Before long, we were seated together on the couch, making out madly. I wasn’t sure precisely what procedures should follow next, but I plowed ahead, sliding my hand under her blouse and onto her unfettered breasts, applying a slow, circular motion. I unzipped her slacks and slid my hand under her panties and into her crotch. It was like a paint-by-numbers operation, movements I had assimilated from literature and from my schoolboy years. I couldn’t believe it was happening.

Strangely, though, it dawned on me that I didn’t feel much of anything, any real passion, any desire. It was as if I were abstracted from myself, hands operating in some alternate dimension. And to put matters in purely clinical terms, Dana didn’t seem all that aroused, either. It was like making love to a mannequin. I labored heroically, but we just weren’t getting anywhere. We were like two boxers who couldn’t land their punches. Finally, she pushed my hands away and pulled up her slacks and zipped them back up.

“Oh dear William,” she said. “I just don’t think this is going to happen tonight.”

This was probably about the nicest way she could have put it, but I sat shrunken beside her, a deflated balloon, feeling the kind of emptiness and anguish one can feel only after rejection by a woman. I felt a tiny flair of anger, too, but I suppressed it. I understood that I had no justification for anger. I groped for a way to salvage some semblance of self-worth from this complete debacle.

“Is it the Doctor?” I said, pleadingly. I wanted it to be the Doctor, not just me. I wanted so badly for her to find me attractive, compelling, a sexual being.

“That’s right,” she said. “I’m getting married to the Doctor. Spencer Ashcraft.” This was the first time she had referred to the Doctor by name.

I sat there nodding, eyes closed, head down. I spoke to her from this position.

“But you like me, right?” I said. I was desperate now, groveling, grasping for some slender straw of affirmation that would carry me onward to the next semester. To carry me onward for the rest of my life. “If it wasn’t for the Doctor you might want to?”
She shook her head. It seemed to be a yes. I latched onto it being a yes. If it wasn’t a yes, I would fall into a deep, dark hole that I might never be able to climb back out of. I took her hand and held it lightly between us, as if it were a baby bird that had fallen from a tree.

“I’ll see you next semester, right?” I said.

“Of course, I’ll see you next semester.”

She leaned over then to kiss me softly on the left cheek. I shivered slightly at the touch of her lips. Somehow, this kiss seemed more intimate and meant more to me than our kisses face-to-face.

“William,” she said. “I am glad to know you.”

“I am glad to know you, too, Dana.”

I dropped her hand, then, squeezing gently before I let go. This was enough for now. I could go on with my life. I could function like a normal human being now. More than anything, I supposed, I just wanted to be wanted. That was perhaps the most primal human need of all—to be wanted.

I worked my library shift the next day in high spirits and drove down afterwards to San Antonio for the holidays, where I greeted my family members effusively. The residue from Dana’s kiss remained on my cheek throughout the holiday season.

Steven McBrearty grew up in San Antonio, TX., in one of those large, rollicking Catholic families so prevalent in the past. On any given day, there would be games of pitch and catch in the hallway or tackle football in a back bedroom. Steven moved to Austin to attend college at the University of Texas and has remained living there ever since. He has published three collections of short stories –Christmas Day on a City Bus, 2011; The Latin Sub, 2017; and Children of the Shopping Mall, 2021—as well as numerous individual fiction and humor pieces.