But there are always exceptions, and my roommate was among them. She loved USNA dances. And I allowed her to drag me to a few. I was a traditional girl who wanted to get married, but I had exhausted my prospects among the least ‘mad, twisted, tormented’ of pasty-faced, priggish Johnnie pedants. Another girlfriend of mine was engaged to a mid, and he was a great guy. Maybe I would be so lucky? (Though they had met in high school, and he entered the Corps after graduation—and became a pilot, no less—so does he really count?) For all my surface disdain, I was not immune to the romance of dancing with officers in uniform. So my roommate and I would get dolled up and head toward Gate One for a night on the yard.
I quickly learned that for some—not all—midshipmen, not only were Johnnies an alien species, but women were alien too. No one has ever confirmed this, but I swear USNA must offer a class titled, “How to Talk to Women Who Are Not Your Fellow Officers and Classmates,” because every dance conversation followed the same outline:
(1) Introduce yourselves.
(2) Ask your partner where she’s from.
(3) Ask her what school she attends. (One question behind this question was, “Are you legal?” High schoolers often went to Navy dances.)
(4) Ask her about her favorite subjects.
(5) Ask her what she wants to do after graduation.
(6) Thank her for the dance.
Which isn’t a bad formula. But with Johnnies, the script always failed at Question Three:
Mr. Midshipman: “What school do you go to?”
Me, after a fortifying breath: “St. John’s.”
His eyes grew so wide that you could read his internal dialogue: “Marxist! Bluestocking! Feminazi! Weirdo! HARD-A-LEE!” Which tells you a lot about my alma mater.
Once he had recovered (“she looks normal”): “Is it true that…?”
I assured him that whatever rumor he had heard was only half-justified.
Awkward pause.
Him: “What’s your favorite class?”
Me: “Honestly, junior year readings are a real drag. Too much Age of Enlightenment flapdoodle—monads, ‘nasty, brutish, and short,’ blah, blah, blah. I can’t wait until we get to Jane Austen, but we have to survive six weeks of Kant first.”
Look of horror.
“I feel the same way. And you?”
“Ship Hydrostatics and Stability.”
My turn to be horrified.
“It’s hard but really interesting.”
Think, think, think, think. “We’re studying Newton’s Principia in our mathematics tutorial.”
Silence.
“Galileo? Descartes? Franklin? Faraday? … Aristotle? Mind you, I understand very little of it. Not a science person.”
“And you’re paying how much for this education?”
“I can’t talk about tuition or school loans while dancing. Moby Dick?”
“I took a literature class once.”
Silence again.
Him: “What do you want to do after graduation?”
Me: “Still figuring it out. Probably something impractical that pays nothing. How about you? What’s your goal?”
“Not to end up on a submarine.”
Pause. “I can respect that.”
Needless to say, I was never asked to dance twice. I did date one midshipman for a few weeks, but we ran out of things to talk about, and his backup plan met with more resistance than he anticipated. So that was that. Still, I wish him well and hope he’s somewhere not-a-submarine. I instead married an academic, had a bunch of kids, and became a novelist. Stephen won, while Jack was left to the annals of, “Mistakes I Wish I Hadn’t Made in College.”
If we had read Patrick O’Brian at St. John’s, now—we would have known to ask Messrs. Midshipmen if they were musical! USNA and St. John’s, sawing away on our violins and ‘cellos, thumos converging with dianoia. Would have been a point of commonality, growth, and friendship.
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