Dana Collette
Dana Collette is a minor but pivotal figure in Charles Decker's retrospective account of his psychological disintegration. She is a young woman, a friend of Pete McKennedy's, who throws a party at a camp her parents own near Schoodic Point. The party, which Decker attends with his friend Joe McKennedy and Joe's older brother Pete, is a crowded, drunken, and drug-fueled affair that represents the last genuinely happy time Decker can remember before his life collapses into violence and institutionalization.
Identity and Role in Decker's Narrative
Dana is described as a short, almost pretty girl with bleached hair, wearing a bright fluorescent orange dress so short that its hem swirls around the lace bottoms of her panties. She is sexually forward and assertive, pressing her hip against Decker's and whispering in his ear to go out the back door. She is also involved in a "kind of a thing" with Pete McKennedy, which she asks Decker not to reveal. Her role in the story is defined almost entirely by the failed sexual encounter that follows, an event that Decker recounts in excruciating detail as a turning point in his sense of masculine failure and self-loathing.
The Failed Sexual Encounter at Schoodic Point
After Dana directs Decker to the back door, he descends a flight of weather-washed steps to a small, crescent-shaped beach below the cabin. The scene is frozen and beautiful, with a slip of a moon and the rhythmic sound of the Atlantic Ocean. Decker, who is very high on marijuana, loses his erection before Dana arrives. Despite her attempts to arouse him—kissing him, touching him, sliding her hand inside his underpants—he remains flaccid. He tries to force himself, thinking of Sandra Cross in sexy black underwear, but the image of his father with his hunting knife, talking about the "Cherokee Nose Job," intrudes and destroys any remaining arousal. Decker's penis, he says, is "on coffee break." He eventually rolls off, apologizing. Dana sighs an irritated sound and says, "It happens," but her smile looks manufactured. She tells him to wait before coming back up to the party, then zips into her dress and leaves him alone under the steps.
Consequences and Thematic Significance
The encounter is a catastrophic blow to Decker's already fragile sense of masculinity. He is left with the cold certainty that he is queer, a fear that haunts him. The memory of the failure is immediately linked in his mind to his father's violent, misogynistic talk about slitting his wife's nose, a connection that reveals the deep entanglement of his sexual shame with his hatred and fear of his father. The event becomes a recurring reference point in his narrative, a symbol of his inability to perform the role of a "normal" man. Later, when he recounts the story to his hostages in Room 16, he notes bitterly that Sandra Cross's story of her own sexual experiences had more power than his, because hers contained an orgasm. Dana Collette, then, is not a fully realized character but a catalyst: her brief, casual invitation and the subsequent failure crystallize Decker's deepest anxieties about his own identity, his body, and his place in a world defined by a brutal, heterosexual ideal.
