Inappropriation Read online

  Ziggy, I agree that many cultures contain aspects of others but also acknowledge that some cultures have received little or no attribution for their culinary traditions. As a half-Anglo, half-Turkish Australian with one transgender parent and one corporate solicitor, I always try to give voice to the less-privileged parts of myself. Look out for the rainbow-sprinkled revani I will be posting here tomorrow!

  Then his friends chime in.

  Exactly—I’d really rather not hear about the Israeli occupation of the honey cake.

  And hate to break it to people, but the Pumpkin Pie is not actually American.

  As a person of German heritage, I would NEVER Instagram a hamburger.

  Western food porn is diabolical. They’ve already poisoned the rest of the world with their calories!

  Ziggy thinks anxiously of her favorite Jewish food: pickled herring. She is now certain that her ancestors appropriated it from the Scandinavians. The conversation on Tim’s wall moves into a general evisceration of meatloaf. Ziggy’s beloved fashit—the dense, meaty log her grandmother makes—is suddenly strange to her. For the first time, she hears the shit part of the word and feels ashamed. Ziggy clicks away from Tim and his Anti-Western authenticity police and onto Reddit. The tone on her queer subreddit is not dissimilar, but at least she feels secure about her inclusion in the all-inclusive sphere. Opening the Reddit home page, she can see which of the popular threads her brother has already viewed. An article about the trolling of a female scholar who claims Rome was ethnically diverse leads Ziggy down a rabbit hole of gnarly links. Is it hate speech to say a movie with an all-female cast is unfunny? Or only if you also call the women fat and unrapeable? Does affirmative action mean you have to like the movie, too? The lines between egalitarianism and fascism seem blurred. It is obvious when a politician misuses their power, but if an anonymous schoolboy mocks a respected feminist thinker, should Twitter shut him down? Is a white penis always power? Ziggy finds she is drawn to the articles defending free speech. Reading them, her brain feels hot and sour like spoiled fruit, fermenting with indignation. Imagining Tessa and Lex know what she is doing, Ziggy revolts—reading all the way to the outer edges of the far-right news and arriving back again at Reddit. To a group called the Red Pill.

  Ziggy reads their threads with morbid fascination. The men are biological essentialists and claim to have seen reality for what it truly is: an impending matriarchy. They prey on women and speak in a language of alpha and beta males. There is no admitting weakness: any woman who doesn’t want to sleep with you is just a bitch or an abuse survivor. “Anyone notice how suddenly all girls have been raped?” is one of the threads Ziggy follows until she feels her soul has been lanced out with a cold syringe. But a lot of the threads sound like one-liners. Everyone is encouraged to take a joke. Especially the Asian men. Ziggy finds conspiracies about estrogen poisoning (it’s in all plastic bottles and body washes) and others about testosterone treatments that will fix erectile dysfunction, depression, obesity, and a general fear of failure. One man advises the others to tell their physicians they are lesbians transitioning to males:

  They’ll give a 13-year-old girl higher dosages than any of u impotent fat fucks.

  On the Red Pill there is incessant talk of the blue pill, or Viagra, and a delicate dance often ensues around saying you need it when needing it is tantamount to an admission of weakness. Still, women can nearly always be blamed for killing boners. Some of these ideas are almost familiar to Ziggy—things she may have heard from her mother’s mouth or Hitler Youth’s running commentary in her head. She reads a long post about why overbearing mothers are responsible for most genocidal maniacs and mass shooters. There is a post that features GIFs of men in skinny jeans walking beside women holding car keys. The passion and detail with which they denigrate the female enemy makes the Red Pill feel oddly like a fan page. These men write emotionally supportive listicles and pine together for female sex robots. Ziggy tries for a moment to empathize with them. Or rather, an image comes to mind that makes her feel almost sympathetic to their cause. She recalls the two Kandara seniors she watched last week in the library. The way they occupied the whole study station, stretching languorously across the table in their oversized jerseys, loose hair flicked carelessly to the side, affecting a kind of unself-conscious lounging that oozed sensuality. They knew their sexual power and played with it under their beguiling, baggy sweatshirts. Something about this had made Ziggy fume. The word whore skulked in her mouth like bad breath.

  Ziggy leaves the Red Pill, and closing tabs she comes upon Tim’s Facebook wall. She watches a newly posted video of the Mevlevi Order’s mystical dance practice. Initially she is captivated by the soothing constancy of the men’s twirling movement; and then, watching these wide, white triangles spin, Ziggy sees beyond the abstraction of geometric shapes to what they really are: men in skirts, arms raised and slightly rounded as if embracing an invisible groom. Tim might be even less datable than she thought. Even if their gender-ambiguity is somehow complementary, Hitler Youth think Tim’s boner is probably just for the sublime. Disoriented, Ziggy logs out.

  But she doesn’t tell her friends that Tim is most likely in a romantic relationship with God. Ziggy upholds the fantasy that he might be her formal soul mate. She tells the girls that like her, Tim isn’t really religious, only spiritual. Like all her mother’s friends who think that God is just higher particle vibrations and somehow proven by string theory. From his Instagram, Ziggy learns that Tim is vegetarian and doesn’t believe in soap or coffee. Like Ziggy, he enjoys conspiracy theories (has anyone noticed that conditioner never really washes out??), and unlike Ziggy, he tends to overshare—posting erotic dreams of psychedelic fish and female world leaders. Which makes her suspect Tim might be gay. As a prospective Kandara formal date, this doesn’t necessarily preclude him if Ziggy is genderqueer. Which she isn’t. But she keeps the possibility open for her friends. They are being so much nicer to her.

  EVERY WEEKEND, TESSA GOES to the casting calls posted on her dance school’s bulletin board. Now that she has alcoholism trauma, Tessa smells whisky on everyone’s breath, especially the casting agents. The fatigued women she describes sound fairly benign to Ziggy—slouched behind tripods while their toddlers whine from playpens, catching Pokémon in the auditionees’ hair. But Tessa says the boozing is frightening and endemic. Australia, Tessa claims, has a big drinking problem. It makes everyone lazy and provincial and unlikely to ever succeed in America. Ziggy thought the low-grade ambition was because of things like democratic socialism, good weather, and antiauthoritarian convict genes, but Tessa paints a more negative picture. Most vehemently, she complains about an alarming lack of diversity in TV and film. Being a woman of color in the cyborgian sense doesn’t, apparently, translate to the Australian screen. Tessa says all the roles are for wispy Northern Beaches nubiles who can surf or skateboard as convincingly troubled tomboys. Where are the real Australian stories, Tessa wants to know. The stories about drunken teens and rape culture? No one wants to see a pretty Pymble girl lying unconscious in a dumpster. Which is why Tessa is writing herself a date-rape coming-of-age TV pilot.

  At least she starts it. And then, a few days into the autumn semester, Tessa sees an unusual audition notice pinned to the board. It is printed on the letterhead of an American casting agency, the only one with a Sydney office. This slick, windowless structure stands impenetrable as a luxury storm shelter on the corner of a busy city block. Ziggy is familiar with the building. Soapie stars are often seen exiting with immaculate blow-dries, emotional support animals in tow. But this time the role being cast isn’t for someone blond and athletic. The description is uncannily specific: fifteen, female, pale, redhead, can cry on command. Tessa emails a head shot and biography and gets an audition the following afternoon.

  When Ziggy calls her that night, Tessa is ecstatic. She tells Ziggy all about the TV show. It isn’t gritty; there won’t be any cellulite or pubic hair. The part is small—a guest role
in an ongoing crime series—but Tessa’s character gets shot in the leg on a speedboat and has to hyperventilate then bleed to death. As she tells Ziggy about the audition, Tessa talks in a deeper, more adult voice that makes Ziggy feel simpering and small. Tessa says the American casting agent asked her to close her eyes and recall the feeling of waking up from surgery and realizing that her arm was gone. Then he got her to immediately lie down on the carpet and read lines from the script. Tessa says she cried uncontrollably for ten minutes and now has a callback. Something tells Ziggy that what the casting agent made Tessa do is the closest she’s come to real Method acting. She also thinks her friend is probably going to get the part, which gives Ziggy a losing feeling. America has made its choice, and the chosen person is Tessa.

  That Saturday morning Jeff is gone. Swimming in Thailand. A last-minute decision to join his mates at an annual ocean race. Ruth insists he mentioned it multiple times that week and Ziggy obviously just wasn’t listening. Regardless, there is something suspicious about her father’s spontaneity. The last time they went overseas, Jeff spent nine months planning their trip with a travel agent; it seemed every time they left the house he would drop the words Athens and Istanbul, just to see if there was a cabdriver or waiter or friendly bystander who had tips about the cuisine or transport facilities. He bought three guidebooks and bribed Jake and Ziggy with quizzes for weeks before they left. And once they were there, Jeff made them savor every bite of gozleme and saganaki and keep a constant tally of their favorite meals and moments. When they forgot their guidebook trivia, Jeff gave them long lectures as monotonous as the winding alleyways of the cities’ ancient quarters. One afternoon during a rainstorm, the Kleins had sat inside a café, drinking mint tea and smoking hookah. Gazing into the downpour, Jeff had produced the first visual metaphor of his adult life. He said the pelting water resembled tiny falling clock hands, like Time had lost its meaning, like History was an illusion. Eternity, he’d clarified with a mystified sigh. Their father’s metaphor has been a major teasing point for years. But whenever it is invoked, Jeff’s eyes glaze over and it is clear he has returned to that perfectly curated moment of cultural transcendence. Flying to Thailand for a swim seems an aggressive impulsivity that makes Ziggy think her father has a terminal disease or a girlfriend.

  But that Sunday night, Jeff emails his family a video. Ruth calls the kids up to the home PC, and the three of them huddle in over the screen. In the orange glow of a tiki bar, three large male figures stumble onto a small stage. Damo is wearing a tiara and poufy blond wig; Gus swishes a long black plait threaded with daisies; and most offensive is Ziggy’s father with his dark sunglasses and gigantic rainbow Afro. They begin yowling into a pair of microphones. The song: “Golden Years.”

  “What is this?” Jake says, horrified.

  “My guess is karaoke,” Ruth says, unnervingly calm.

  “Then why is Dad cross-dressing?”

  Ruth chuckles. “That’s not cross-dressing, Ziggy. It’s just dress-ups.”

  “They’re wearing ladies’ wigs.”

  “Yes . . . well . . . Thailand’s a funny place.”

  Jake appears to be on Ziggy’s side. “They look like the lesbian Village People.”

  “Dad is like some kind of psychedelic Diana Ross.”

  “Come on, you two,” says Ruth. “Your father’s very PC; it’s just a bit of fun.”

  But Ziggy disagrees. Her father is not very PC, and also she knows what this is: they have just studied it in Latin. The Romans were even more afraid of women than the Greeks—luscious Aphrodite was reimagined as icy seaweed sculpture, Venus; Dionysus lost his long, feminine tresses and his female mysticism and was rebranded Bacchus, drunken sexual deviant. But the Roman nobility loved cross-dressing. They were misogynists who could only handle femininity when displayed on other men. What Ruth herself would call “pathological male narcissism.”

  “It’s offensive to women.”

  Ruth eyes Ziggy strangely. “Do you feel offended?”

  Ziggy sees her mother’s trap; she is not going to be offended on behalf of cisgender women. “It’s offensive to transgender women.”

  “And birthday party clowns,” adds Jake.

  “That’s transphobic,” says Ziggy. Ruth giggles, and Ziggy shoots backward like an inking squid in her desk chair. “You hate transgender people, don’t you.”

  Her mother slaps the table. “Of course not!” she yells. “This whole transgender thing is nothing compared to second-wave feminism! That’s what really broke things apart!”

  “So what?!” Ziggy cries.

  “So transgender women are generally pretty happy to perform gender roles! They are deeply in touch with the Feminine and balance out the polarity very nicely. It’s these fluid people who are the real existential threat.”

  “You’re talking like a Nazi.”

  “You’re talking like a Nazi.”

  “What gender roles are you even referring to?” Ziggy spits. “You never cook dinner!”

  “I nurture in other ways!”

  “If you’re so good at balancing the polarity, why is Dad always out?”

  Ziggy’s chest locks up; bracing itself for her mother’s tyrannical hurt. But Ruth appears unharmed, reframing the issue. “Would you like it if I bought more after-school snacks?”

  Her mother’s sudden act of nurture has skewed things so that Ziggy wants to cry. “No, that’s okay,” she mumbles. “They’re all delicious.”

  And now, humiliatingly, her brother takes the emotional lead.

  “Actually,” he says, “can you please stop buying those little pasta salads? They make me feel sad.”

  “Of course I can,” says Ruth, squeezing his shoulder.

  “Dried fruit with macaroni is really depressing.”

  Elated that her mother chose to de-escalate, Ziggy wheels back over and joins in. “Where do they even make those miserable little salads? A shelter for suicidal chefs?”

  Then with touching diplomacy, the three of them workshop snack alternatives. Ziggy has seen some tasty-looking yogurt cups at school. Jake says dark chocolate is good for both acne and the heart. “It’s like red wine for kids.”

  Their mother agrees to everything. Making the karaoke video and the status of her marriage feel alarmingly dire.

  ON MONDAY MORNING ZIGGY FINDS Tessa at the lockers, conspicuously reading through a script. “Oh, hi, Ziggy,” she says. “I got the part.”

  Immediately, Ziggy’s friend is occupied with rehearsals and costume fittings and American accent coaching sessions. And when she isn’t busy with the show, Tessa is talking about it—the bitchy wardrobe lady, the violent seizures she has to practice nightly in front of the mirror. She now speaks mostly in an American accent. It is important, Tessa explains, to use a “neutral transatlantic” accent so that people don’t typecast you. At school, she rolls her r’s and pushes her voice out flat and honky through her nose. Lunchtimes are spent on the oval, listening to Tessa’s schedule. Terms like boom operator and Netflix debut jangle the air with a new unreality. Across the harbor, the city skyline now seems skeletal; the buildings spread out in a neat little line. Ziggy feels responsible for all this smallness—every racist politician and inarticulate movie star and the lack of diversity in TV and film.

  By the end of that week, Lex has homework to do at lunchtime. Ziggy spends a miserable hour alone with Tessa, but after school at the lockers, Lex is there, urgently whispering over Ziggy’s shoulder. “Follow me.” She hurries off after Lex, down the hill to Kandara’s lower gates. From here, Lex explains, they can bypass the school bus stop and Tessa by taking the cliffs out to the public interchange. There is a glorious first burst of closeness as they flee the grounds, but beyond the school’s purview, Lex advances a cool three paces ahead. Ziggy tries to cling to the larger compliment of two-ness.

  Taking the cliffs means walking single file along a cracked concrete path with sharp, rusted handrails. Ziggy has never liked it here. This limina
l place where the ocean flows into the harbor is called the Gap—an epic gorge between the east and northern shorelines, notorious for jumpers. At the far end of the path stands a mean-spirited, monolithic high-rise. It is a singular structure—unnecessarily tall in an area of squat, freestanding homes. In a way, Ziggy admires it. It is also the building that houses her grandmother. Twinkles lives on the eighth floor in an apartment cluttered with tchotchkes and photos of distant Hungarian relations. From her kitchen window she has seen five suicides. Boys, she’s told Ziggy. All boys.

  Ziggy tries not to look over the edge. The ocean is wild here and the waves hurl themselves violently against the rocks. But Lex gazes out across the water, her whole being drooling toward America. Behind her friend, Ziggy feels like an afterthought—a literal drag on Lex’s aspirations. Without Tessa, their bodies seem to want more distance; their private thoughts sit inside a thicker silence; and each utterance is tagged with an asterisk that hovers over them, undermining the friendship.

  Or maybe Lex is just afraid of Ziggy. An inexperienced feminist, clearly attracted to girls. Her anxiety makes Ziggy compulsively chatty. She starts to relay a story—a rape-culture cautionary tale she remembers from her old school. Ziggy tells Lex about the warm September evening when three unpopular eighth graders arrived, uninvited, to a Bar Mitzvah reception at their city’s famous revolving restaurant. Inside, the Sydney Swans were signing football jerseys beside a world-renowned string quartet; an Australia’s Got Talent runner-up sang “Hava Nagila” while the Bar Mitzvah boy crowd-surfed; and then, just before dinner, a spectacular fireworks display filled the sky with many dazzling renderings of the words Joshy-boy. But the three disliked thirteen-year-olds missed all of this; the doorman had denied them entry. In their floor-length gowns and diamante drop earrings, the dejected trio wandered out into the night and caught a bus to Bondi Beach. Here they planned to drink beers with some English backpackers and slide down the skateboard ramp on their bums. But when they got there, the backpackers were Polish and the beer was vodka and they found themselves roughly escorted down onto the sand. The girls claimed to have been unattracted to the backpackers. Their faces were red and they all had receding hairlines, but it was easier to pretend to the men and themselves and one another that they were having a good time. Pretending made it so, in a way. The Polish backpackers left the three girls fingered and sandy on the freezing wet shore and then hobbled back up to their dorm room. Traumatized on Monday morning, one girl blabbed to a classmate, and by lunchtime the whole grade knew about their sexual escapade. Everyone said they had AIDS for the rest of the school year.