Inappropriation Page 10

  Rowena takes a seat beside her and Ziggy leans in close so the others can’t hear. “Have you heard of Donna Haraway?”

  “Did she do ‘Hot Stuff’?”

  “No, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto.’”

  Now a teenage boy comes shooting toward them from inside a tight weave of queens, as if birthed. He hurries to Rowena’s side, frowning and smiling at the same time. He is slight and angular under baggy white pajamas, giving him the long-suffering look of a prisoner of war.

  “This is my son,” Rowena says proudly. “Supporting his mother’s filthy habit.”

  The boy smiles—his doe-sweet features shying, black eyes urgent with intelligence. He puts out a hand. “I’m Tim.”

  Ziggy blushes horribly but extends her hand; Tim has left no room for irony. “I’m Ziggy,” she mumbles. Up close, his clothes have a more deliberate and textured, South Asian look. His lank brown hair parts down the middle. Peaceman.

  “Is that short for Sigmund?” says Tim. His face waits innocently for an answer as Ziggy grapples with the implications. It seems Tim thinks she’s a boy.

  “Like Freud?”

  “Yes,” says Tim. “But not because you’re Jewish. Or because your mother is a therapist. I just can’t think of what else Ziggy could be short for.”

  “It isn’t short for anything.”

  “So just Ziggy? Not that that isn’t enough.”

  “Just Ziggy. Ziggy Klein.” She feels strangely calm in the presence of Tim’s nervous logorrhea.

  “Which is ‘small’ in German,” he observes. “Not that you’re necessarily German. Or small. I know lots of Jews have German names.”

  From Tim’s left hand, a yo-yo suddenly springs to the floor, then leaps back up like a lizard tongue. The world remains oblivious and unchanged, but Ziggy finds the moment extraordinary, as if an alternate reality had shot through clear scrim.

  “Ziggy was just telling us about ‘A Cyborg Manifesto,’” says Rowena, her eyebrows jauntily encouraging.

  “It’s an essay about transhumans,” Tessa interjects, brandishing her bionic arm. “Like me.”

  “Wow-ee,” Rowena says, gawking.

  “Mum,” Tim admonishes.

  “Your googly eye is transhuman,” Tessa informs Rowena, a little condescendingly.

  “Well, that’s good,” says Rowena. “Trannies are meant to be uncanny.”

  Ziggy catches a dark look flit between Tessa and Lex. They have taken issue with the word tranny. Ziggy’s anger is momentarily paralyzing. She sits back in her chair, breathing deep and slow, then experiences a small neuronal miracle. Donna Haraway’s elegant prose floats to the surface of her mind. Ziggy speaks in the baritone of some imagined adult woman in a tweed blazer. “‘Blasphemy protects one from the moral majority within.’”

  Tessa is testy. “And?”

  “And so you guys need to learn how to take a joke.”

  Rowena giggles, but Ziggy’s friends are quiet. They think she is siding with the drag queens. Tessa and Lex inch back in their seats, then return to their phones. Ziggy can tell they are again swapping their faces with celebrities’. Tessa probably merged with the Kardashians, Lex moving between various dead East Coast rappers. Haraway’s ideas of collectivism have never appealed to Ziggy’s friends. She has brought them to a cyborg stronghold, yet there they sit, speaking only to each other.

  Rowena gives Ziggy’s shoulder a squeeze. “I’m afraid we’ve got to head out.”

  “It’s my fault,” says Tim. “I have to make lokma for two depressed friends.” He sighs, hunching over with chronic-looking sympathy. “One depressed friend. One friend with seasonal affective disorder.”

  Ziggy has never heard of this and also, she didn’t think Sydney winter counted as a season. “That’s really nice of you.”

  Tim makes a curt nod (either shy or distracted, Ziggy can’t tell) as he whips out his phone and starts furiously typing. She watches the charm on his bracelet tap against the screen—a star and crescent moon. Ziggy’s phone pings. Friendship request from Timothy Sadik-Bowen.

  “My mother is Turkish; my father is my mother,” Tim says, his face suddenly radiant with mischief. “Salaam alaikum.”

  Ziggy thinks she hears shalom aleichem. So do her friends. When Rowena and Tim are out of earshot, Lex nudges Ziggy. “He’s perfect for you!”

  Tessa and Lex appear to have made a full recovery, their faces shining at her from across the table. But Ziggy doesn’t understand their enthusiasm. Is Tim perfect for her because they are complementary opposites or because they are both male-presenting lesbians? If her friends think she might like boys now, is it because she is a straight girl or a gay male? Ziggy is too embarrassed to ask. There is something she likes about Tim, which she senses has little to do with his maleness. Not that penises have ever occurred to her as exciting objects of desire. Sexual fantasies of men have always involved an objectless sense of pressure applied to the vulva. But never a penis. To Ziggy, the penis has the personality of a smiling axolotl, detached from the menacing human man it belongs to. Confusingly, Tim is all axolotl: no violent thrust, no sexual menace. He doesn’t seem male to her.

  But now Tessa scoots over and squeezes Ziggy’s arm with strange, goading sorority.

  “He’d be so cute in a tuxedo.”

  And suddenly, however she identifies, Ziggy likes boys.

  Chapter 5

  Ziggy’s mother had loved another man at the ashram. Ruth talked too vividly about the effete, artistic boy whose diplomat father had moved the family around, gifting young Edward a mysteriously international accent and a talent for making bad friends. After high school, Edward had lived for a spell in the rambling townhouse of a British rock icon’s idle son and his supermodel girlfriend. Paying his rent in haikus, Edward slunk around with the supermodel’s group of supermodel friends: long, loopy nights on barbiturates and bright, speeding days launched by morning enemas. One evening, Edward met an older man recently returned from Shunyata’s ashram. “The master says Gandhi was a fascist,” the man told him. Edward was intrigued. The man said that the guru preferred Westerners to Indians because they had more to lose. Indians were still striving for cars and mortgages, but white people were ready to give theirs up; they were ready to abandon their empty existences. So was Edward—sunk in the cold bosom of a bar lounge, the twiggy girls mumbling beside him, eyes rolling back in their chiseled skulls. A few days later, the icon’s idle son got very drunk and forced Edward to wrap himself in furs and recite florid poetry from World War I. Gentle, waifish Edward obliged his cruel landlord, and even fed the pet python when it became obvious that everyone else was either passed out or too vegetarian. Then he packed up his designer kaftans and his haikus and bought a one-way ticket to Bombay. Ziggy never knew how to interpret her mother’s evocations of the London townhouse scene. It seemed she mostly used Edward’s origin story to clarify that wealthy, young attractive people were spiritually bereft and boring. And that one of them had chosen her over a houseful of supermodels.

  Meeting at the ashram, Ruth and Edward fell instantly in love and began a scandalously monogamous relationship. One of Shuni’s strategies for exacerbating the male-female polarity was to make the men chase the women around the complex and into the neighboring fields. Edward chased Ruth and cut his long wispy hair and stopped wearing necklaces. He was still sensitive, but their love had seemingly conquered gender; that is, until the day they strayed too far beyond the ashram’s walls. The couple found themselves in a village, obliviously smooching and groping each other, when a pack of angry local men appeared before them. Edward bolted and—thinking Ruth was just behind him—kept running, almost all the way back to the ashram. But Ruth stayed and talked to the men, who, quite reasonably, asked her not to walk around their village kissing and cupping the cheeks of her lover’s bottom. When she returned to the ashram, Edward was mortified. Worse than this, his cowardice had made it so Ruth no longer found him attractive. His personal growth now seemed purely cosm
etic. Soon after the incident Ruth decided the ashram was an artificial paradigm and that it was now time for her to take Shuni’s teachings back into the gritty real world. One week later Ruth returned to Sydney’s leafy harborside suburbs.

  The week she arrived, Ruth met Jeff at a Jewish mixer. Twinkles had made her daughter attend the event as reparations for five years with a guru who claimed Hitler was a saint. Ruth had spent the evening explaining the cult and Shuni’s sense of humor to Jeff, who also had Holocaust-surviving parents—still clinging to private tennis courts in South Africa. He adored a good Jewish joke. Humor had kept their flame robust through a joyful courtship. The couple loved their pranks. Meeting Twinkles, the good Jewish accountant passed around photos of his Cape Town relatives, swapping his mother’s image for a woman with severe acromegaly, and his father’s for a dwarf. Twinkles was polite, exclaiming that Jeff’s mother’s gigantic forehead made her seem very intelligent. His father must have also been a huge mensch. For their honeymoon, the couple went to Cairo, meeting Jeff’s teenage sister at the airport. They dressed in thobes and dark sunglasses, approaching the petite South African from behind, then grabbing and dragging her out through the arrivals lounge, whispering in pidgin Arabic. That was in the year 2000. Ziggy had often heard her parents regale their friends with this thoughtless act of Islamophobia. It was hard to know who had encouraged whom and what had come first, the cultural insensitivity or the romance. At least child-rearing or professional life or both had dissuaded them from this unsavory pastime. Ruth’s terminal disappointment had probably choked off Jeff’s rebellious spirit. Until recently it seemed her father’s whole personality had withdrawn mollusk-like into the hard shell of adult behavior. Ziggy supposes it is sad her parents no longer do anything fun together.

  Jeff’s new friends are a confusing blend of homosexual body-vanity and hetero-tribal male-bonding, but they have certainly brought him back to life. Despite this, Ziggy’s mother continues to insult him; only now it is for being too macho. For their wedding anniversary, Jeff buys them tickets to cage-dive with the great whites off the South Australian coast, and Ruth calls him a male chauvinist. When he gives her ticket to Damo, Jeff is accused of literalism. Ruth calls her husband “avoidant” when he checks his phone at the table, says it is a “failure of empathy” if he goes for a jog after dinner. Tonight, having achieved a genial family meal, Ruth suggests they all watch television together. Ziggy wonders what her mother is up to. And what the four of them could possibly agree to watch. They squish up in eerie intimacy on the sofa, Jeff flicking through the channels. The Kleins do not have cable, which means their options are six. These are quickly exhausted and so they agree to wait for the nine o’clock news. In the meantime, there is a car commercial. Wild horses run beside a haunchy bronze SUV. Ziggy’s heart runs with them, and she feels herself tearing up. Ruth, of course, catches her.

  “Remember when Ziggy loved horses?” she says nostalgically to the group.

  Jeff nods and Jacob sits up straighter, sensing an opportunity for teasing.

  “Whenever we went on long car rides,” Ruth continues, “she had to wave at every single one and say ‘I love you, my darling.’”

  Jacob howls and Ziggy makes her eyes very narrow and piercing like they might break her brother’s skin.

  “You were such a sweet, sensitive little girl.” The grief in her mother’s voice makes Ziggy feel like a part of her has died. It seems unfair that Ziggy has to be a sensitive little girl when her brother just gets to be a boy who’s good at sharing his feelings. Ziggy’s ongoing failure of vulnerability has forced Ruth to nourish herself on Jake’s emotional intelligence. When it comes to emotions, Ziggy’s brother possesses a fluid, otherworldly ease that can probably be traced back to the moment at age six when, naked at play with the utensils in a kitchen drawer, he got the tip of his penis stuck in the garlic crusher. Ziggy had watched Jake flap his arms at hummingbird speed, dancing in frantic circles as he thrust the offending instrument away from his body, trying to distance himself from the pain. Ruth quickly extracted the utensil and Jake’s genitals were entirely unharmed, but the shock sent him weeping into his mother’s arms, and from that day forward Ziggy’s brother was always emotionally transparent in front of their mum and dad. Jake can discuss his feelings in a soft voice, quavering above a trip wire of tears with the unself-conscious candor of a menopausal psychotherapist. Ziggy has tried to emulate her brother, but even articulating certain words—vulnerable, tender, depth—makes her face burn and her throat constrict in terror. She isn’t sure what her own origin story is. Since Ziggy can remember, Ruth has told her to open up, and Ziggy has panicked, shut down, and deferred to the soft-voiced man fussing at her rib cage who desperately wants to avoid conflict.

  Mercifully, everyone’s attention now shifts back to the television. Jeff has found a show about Muslim gold diggers in the far Western Suburbs. Ziggy feels uneasy being one of four affluent Eastern Suburbs Jews watching such a program. But her mother’s immediate critique seems safely class-based. Ziggy is even surprised to agree with some of it. There is a part of her that knows exactly how much cleavage is too much, that grown women should never wear tiaras. Predictably, the Kleins’ spontaneous group activity soon deteriorates. Jeff unwisely remarks on the awesome derriere of the youngest gold-digging sister, and Ruth scolds him.

  “Callipygous means ‘shelf-like,’ Jeff.”

  Ziggy’s father bristles. “Not true, Ruth. It simply means beautiful, shapely buttocks.”

  “Still, you shouldn’t be commenting on their bodies.”

  “You just did.”

  “As a woman I’m allowed to.”

  Ziggy groans. “Mum, I think you need to read Judith Butler.”

  “Who’s that again?” Her mother already sounds irritated.

  “A legendary feminist thinker,” says Ziggy. “If you think women are the ocean, you should probably read Judith Butler.”

  “Well, I’m glad Judith Butler has been sitting in a library finding a grand theory for all of us out here in the real world.” Ruth gestures broadly to their large, open-plan entertainment area. “I work with women, Ziggy. I’m on the ground, doing the fieldwork.”

  “And?”

  “And nothing. Woman is the Source,” Ruth says bluntly. “It’s like the ocean saying it would rather be a bottle of soda water.”

  “That’s so ancient it’s like indigenous. Appropriator.”

  Ruth blows a dismissive raspberry. “Woman is the highest incarnation.”

  “Well, that’s great for Jake.”

  “I’m fine being male—”

  “Gender is just a construction,” Ziggy intones over him. “You should all read Butler’s book.”

  Ruth tucks a smooth, shapely calf under her bottom, eyeing Ziggy with aggressive interest. “What about transgender women? Is their gender just a construction? Are they also making it all up?”

  Ziggy hadn’t considered this. Panic goiters in her throat. She couldn’t argue even if she had read Judith Butler. Ruth shifts, thrusting a large pillow knob between them.

  “You tell me if gender still feels like a construction when you’ve hit puberty, or maybe after you give birth to your first child? In the meantime, you can stop offending those of us who’ve actually had these experiences.”

  The absence of these experiences mists coolly through Ziggy’s chest and crotch. Ruth never fails to make her daughter feel somewhat missing. She nudges Jeff roughly. “And your father knows when I’m joking.”

  “Does he?”

  Ruth stares at Jeff, her eyes shining with challenge. “Do you?”

  “Of course.” He leans in and pecks the crown of his wife’s head. Ziggy can see the white skull through her frizz, and wonders if these glimpses of frailty are how he still loves her. Jeff grins at Ziggy. “But I am going for a jog now.”

  Jake and Ruth laugh but Ziggy stares hard at the floor. If she cries in front of them, she risks dissolving into Ruth’s flesh and l
iving forever as a damp spot between her mother’s breasts. Ziggy rises stoically and then makes a stompily indignant exit.

  In her bedroom she remembers the offending adjective, callipygous. A whimsical word that makes her think of little twig-legged, potbellied birds. But Google has bad news. The word describes a protruding bottom so extreme, it resembles a shelf or other flat surface good for resting jugs. To Ziggy’s great disappointment, her mother was right and her father was most definitely objectifying the gold diggers.

  FROM HIS SOCIAL MEDIA PROFILES, Ziggy learns that Tim is a practicing Sufi. He posts Rumi quotes, clips of Whirling Dervishes, and Michael Jackson music videos, and in every selfie he wears the same sexless white pajamas. Tim talks a lot about queer and Turkish cuisine. He posts his cis-mother’s traditional recipes and long discourses on the origins of various food with headings like “When It’s Racist to Call a Dessert Too Sweet.” Less frequently he posts frivolous recipes for heavily sprinkled cupcakes. Ziggy is slightly terrified of Tim but would still like to chat. When he posts an extensive piece about the history of something very syrupy called revani, Ziggy sees her opportunity. Tim claims that the semolina cake was brought to Turkey by Sephardic Jews who migrated there after their expulsion in the late 1400s. Despite this, in Israel revani is consumed with yogurt, which is a Mesopotamian invention, thus originating in Turkey. The question seems to be: which came first, the revani or the yogurt? As if this might prove something about a people’s claim to Jerusalem. At least, this is how it sounds to Ziggy. Tim’s friends quickly weigh into the discussion. Someone claims the dessert actually hails from Egypt. Someone else gets granular and lists off the geographic origins of all the ingredients. Ziggy types, erases, then retypes her comment below an impassioned post about who gets to claim the almond. Finally she sends it.

  isn’t “authenticity” < humanity?

  Tim loves her comment with a big red heart emoji. His written reply is less affirming.