Re Jane by Patricia Park Page A

or her parents, and on the weekends they headed into the city to the bars and clubs. Whenever I’d run into Nina and her gang on the street, we’d only exchange a quick hello; she’d never stop and introduce me to her friends. I knew it was because I wasn’t part of the in group.
    One night at Gino’s, Nina looked across at my book. “What you got over there this time?” she asked. That week’s reading was written by a scholar named Sam Surati, Beth’s adviser at Columbia, who’d since been wooed away by Stanford. Its title was
Could You Please Pass the Smelling Salts?: An Examination of the Victorian Faint.
    â€œYou know,” I said, “same old.”
    Nina snorted. “I don’t know what’s more unbelievable—that your boss gives you homework or that you actually do it.”
    I shrugged my shoulders like,
Whattayagonnado.
“Want to trade?” I said. Nina was reading yet another book on real estate. “Sure, why not.” She took the book from me and began to read aloud.
    â€œâ€˜We cannot discourse on the faint without first beginning our discussion with constructions of the feminine. What is “the feminine’’? To liken it to, if you will, the lapping tides of the Long Island Sound on a breezy afternoon in the heart of the North Fork wine country would merely perpetuate stereotypes of female subjectivity (mercurial, as moody as those shifty waves, as intoxicating as a cabernet franc), as well as to objectify the female form entirely. Nor can we discourse on the feminist movement—in all its wrought history—without first discoursing on the problematic tradition of desire and the male gaze (cf.
Surati,
A Thousand Times “I Do!”: Commodification of Female Chastity in Nineteenth-Century Puritanical England,
p. 147).’”
    â€œThe hell is that shit?” Nina said, putting down Sam Surati’s book.
    â€œMy uncle’s English is better than that,” I said.
    â€œSo’s my
nonna
’s! Why’s a dude writing about feminism?” She looked at the book’s cover. It was pink, featuring a picture of a tulip with quivering petals. A knowing smile spread across her face. “Oh, I know why.
Bom-chikka-bow-wow!
”
    I let out a hearty laugh. “Ed says Sam Surati likes to think he’s quite the authority on
every
subject.”
    Actually, Ed Farley thought Sam Surati was “a self-quoting, womanizing, pompous ass.” That I learned over tuna, red-pepper flakes, and shredded jicama.
    â€œYou’ve been quoting a lot of Ed Farley lately,” Nina mused.
    I stopped laughing and quickly added, “And
Beth
says Sam was her greatest mentor.”
    Nina tapped the cover, her finger aimed at Sam Surati’s name
.
“Just watch. You’re totally gonna have a pop quiz waiting for you tonight.”
    * * *
    Nina wasn’t all that far off. It would be more like an oral examination, with the author himself—Sam Surati was coming to New York. “He’s here on his lecture circuit, and I’ve invited him over for dinner a week from next Thursday,” Beth said at the dinner table that night, clapping her hands together. “Isn’t that wonderful?”
    â€œBut, Ma,” Devon said, “that’s Thanksgiving.”
    According to the primer,
the Mazer-Farleys spent their Thanksgivings getting vegetarian dim sum in Chinatown, because the family didn’t want to impose a Western reading on an already exploitative Western holiday.
    â€œIt was the only day he was free, sweetie,” Beth said. “Plus, I know he’s dying to meet you.”
    Ed pushed his plate away. It was Bitter Greens Casserole Night. (On BGCNs, Ed was always doubly hungry at our sandwich sessions.) “Doesn’t the man have his own family to spend the holidays with?”
    Beth bit her lip, as if she were about to hold back on making a retort. Then her voice