Inappropriation Read online

  Lex cringes. “Polish people don’t have AIDS.”

  “At my old school everyone who was ever bad to the Jews had AIDS.”

  “Some people actually do have AIDS,” says Lex. “Because white people brought it back to Africa.”

  Ziggy freezes. She can’t tell if her friend is accusing her of racism or homosexuality.

  “Are you saying gay people gave Africa AIDS?”

  “I’m saying the West owes the East reparations.”

  “I know it does,” Ziggy apologizes. “And Polish people are no exception.”

  “I’m sorry,” Lex says coolly. “But I just don’t feel any sympathy toward the girls in your story. They sound like idiots.”

  “They were,” says Ziggy, straining for emotional neutrality. “And massive attention-seekers.”

  She watches Lex drift unperturbed into some kind of superstitious crack-leaping game. A painfully disinterested silence accompanies them all the way back to the main road.

  At the traffic lights, Ziggy spots two of the Cates on the front porch of a new home decor shop. Cate sits on a hanging cabana chair while Kate takes photos of her from the door. Today, Ziggy is grateful for the Cates. For the contrast they provide. Ziggy may be offensive, but at least she is not one of the popular girls.

  “Look,” she says to Lex. “Kate is Cate’s selfie stick.”

  Lex snaps to snickering attention, but the shoot is unfortunately finishing. Cate bounds out of the swinging chair, and Kate runs after her. They are racing toward a blue BMW idling in the bus zone. Some insipid dance track bleats out the windows. Ziggy can see the shadowy figure of a large boy in the front passenger seat. From the driver’s side, a Rolexed wrist breaches the roof, flicking aggressively toward the girls.

  “Come on Katie!” the driver calls sharply. “I’m not getting booked so you can buy the perfect wind chime!”

  The two girls reach the car and hurl themselves inside. They are greeted with amplifying beats as the throbbing vehicle revs off up the road. Ziggy’s friend stares gravely after it, intoning the words “Lance Fairfax.” Then she shudders and gives Ziggy the dating history of Kate’s notorious brother. Lance has dumped girls for underarm stubble, oversized areolas, spider veins, cellulite. He is quick to tell a girl she smells fishy. Lex and Tessa have watched Lance’s latest girlfriend swan around the mall with the sudden benevolence of a beauty queen, and pitied her. Even at peak arrogance, when the girlfriend was most giggly and hair-swishy and immaculately preened, a fart had to be imminent, and with it, her banishment from the kingdom of Lance’s heart.

  “He sounds terrifying,” says Ziggy.

  “Toxic,” amends Lex.

  “Do you think he farts?”

  “Of course he farts. Men are allowed to fart. They’re just not allowed to express their feelings.”

  “Yep,” agrees Ziggy, then wavers. “But feelings seem maybe harder to hold in?”

  “I don’t think so,” Lex says brusquely. “Anyway, WASPs are born that way. It’s easy for them to ignore their emotions.”

  Ziggy thinks of the last time Jake cried—yesterday, in the laundry room with Ruth, telling her about some school bully, and helping her fold the linens. “Do you think if men cried more it would be harder for them to dehumanize women?”

  “Maybe.” Lex looks pensively into the traffic. “Or maybe it’s just genetic. If more women did science we might actually hear about a cover-up.”

  Ziggy decides to leave the conversation there. Women are bad at science, men lack the empathy gene. She’s had enough argument for one day.

  Now Suze Lansell-Jones shuffles out onto the porch. She stares sadly into the distance, then slumps back onto the cabana chair. Dark circles drag at her eyes and her mouth tightens to a trembling blue nub.

  “Suze looks a bit rough,” says Lex.

  “Maybe we should go.”

  “Nah, let’s say hi.”

  Ziggy doesn’t understand this. She can’t tell if Lex’s sympathy is just nostalgia for a simpler time when Lex and the Cates were still girls and everyone sat around poolside eating watermelon. Or if it is something more strategic. Ziggy cranes her neck to get a better view of the shop. Everything inside appears to be cream-colored. There are chandeliering seashell mobiles and bosomy milk-glass goblets and white “feminist”-printed pillows with frilly fringes of antique lace.

  “It’s like a cream pie in there,” says Ziggy, then clarifies: “The one from porn.”

  Lex screws her face up in disgust. “Suze’s shop looks like a vagina leaking semen?”

  Ziggy shrugs dejectedly. If she is gay, jokes like these might require a less intimate audience.

  When they reach the porch, Suze leaps up from the seat almost into Lex’s arms. She hugs the girl for a long time.

  “Come in, come in, let me get you a coconut water!”

  “That’s okay. We’ve got heaps of homework.”

  Suze seems to startle at the word we’ve. She peers down over Lex’s shoulder.

  “Oh, hello, there. Iggy, isn’t it?”

  “Ziggy.”

  “Yes, Ziggy.” Suze gives her an irked once-over. “Can I get you something to eat?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “I’ve got some lovely organic chocolate from Peru?”

  “That’s okay.” Ziggy botches a smile and tugs at Lex’s tunic.

  “Well, come in anyway and take a quickie little look.”

  Inside the store, Ziggy picks up a creamy leather pouch that houses a large, smooth beach pebble. What does it mean? she wonders, but doesn’t ask Suze—who is aggressively tailgating the girls around the displays. Ziggy fondles the cream feathers of a dream catcher hanging over a cascade of jasmine in a cream pot on a cream tablecloth with cream pom-poms baubled between cream-colored cockles. The only other shade is the gray of distressed patches of whitewashed wood. The space feels inhumanly sanitized. Like an airplane restroom. She taps Lex’s shoulder. “I think Suze is on painkillers.”

  Lex flinches at her comment. Or maybe it is Ziggy’s fingers. Ziggy lets a wide space stretch out between them as they complete their circumnavigation.

  When they reach the counter, Lex smiles at Suze and says the shop is awesome, that she’ll totally tell her mum to come and take a look. Ziggy has never heard her friend be so polite to an adult. The Israelite beams, slouching over the counter with desperate casualness. Ziggy can’t help but notice her golden cleavage gleaming under the halogens. Hitler Youth remind Ziggy that despite all her feminist efforts, she still sees big boobs and mental weakness everywhere.

  “Thanks for stopping by, babes.”

  The girls nod and hurry out the door. Or Ziggy does. Lex glides out whimsically. Walking to the bus stop, she begins to recall fond memories of the Lansell-Jones house. She speaks wistfully of their vast cream-colored sofa with all the pretty throw pillows. How Suze brought them prosciutto melone while they watched reruns of Gossip Girl. How there were always mangoes in the fruit bowl, Belgian waffle cones for the salted-caramel ice cream, a baby animal to play with.

  “Poor Suze,” Lex says, glancing back. Then, the kicker: “Sometimes Cate can be kind of entertaining.”

  TESSA’S NORMATIVE TRANSFORMATION IS even more pronounced. She now has a website with many glossy, duck-faced head shots. Her prosthetic is never on display anymore; her tops are all long-sleeved. Tessa’s school tunic is shorter, and she seems to have forgotten her harrowing first day of filming. For the scene where she fell in a miniskirt and bled to death from an upper-inner-thigh wound, makeup had fashioned Tessa a blood-gushing prosthesis. She had told Ziggy and Lex that the silicone wound had a puckered, vaginal quality, and that between takes the boom operator had made wet, fappy sounds for the gaffer. Tessa said she’d felt sexually harassed and found it hard to keep pretending to hyperventilate: she worried that her performance had been compromised. Which sounded like Tessa’s harassment fantasy had finally come true. Here was her moment to be a feminist and stand up to two
misogynist male techies so that no young actress would ever have to face the same humiliation. “This isn’t America, Ziggy,” was Tessa’s response. “It’s not like I can get a settlement from a boom operator.” She had so internalized patriarchal capitalism that experience was worthless without compensation.

  And now, days before her episode’s online premiere, Tessa seems uncharacteristically positive and aesthetically in love with life. She updates her Instagram hourly with photos of herself standing under a rainbow in a parking station or drinking

  my last green machine till you know what!

  There are even nostalgic posts of group shots with cast and crew.

  <3 these guys sooo fucking much!!!

  Ziggy’s friend is no longer nourished on emptiness, terror, and the threat of misogyny. Tessa now appears to be identifying only as an actress. When Ziggy mentions the boom operator, Tessa says it wasn’t that fucking bad.

  But when the episode streams its first night on the internet, it is obvious to everyone that Tessa’s performance was severely compromised. Her eyes are too poppy and while screaming, her face makes strange, vaguely erotic contortions. Ziggy’s friend overacts in an addled panic never before witnessed in any of their imaginary games. It is painful to watch and then distressing to scroll through social media, as the insults accumulate. Lex texts, not altogether joking, that they might need to spend the night on suicide watch. Ziggy waits for a despairing missive from Tessa as people start augmenting the image of her prosthetic wound with tampons and sanitary pads. Ziggy wants to defend her friend, but knows that chivalry will only incite the online equivalent of being dumped, fully clothed, in a swimming pool. Then a genuine expression of concern comes, unexpectedly, from Ziggy’s brother. Jake taps on her door.

  “Your friend’s leg is on Matt Sullivan’s revenge porn page.”

  “Who is Matt Sullivan and what is a revenge porn page?”

  “What’s important here is that your friend is about to become a meme.”

  Ziggy opens the door and glares at her brother. She doesn’t believe he has Tessa’s best interests at heart. “What do you care?” she asks him.

  “If you want to beat them to the punch, I can help you.”

  “Help me do what?”

  “Make her into a meme. A good one.”

  “You want to help me make Tessa into a feminist meme?”

  “She seems like a nice person.” Jake is sincere; Ziggy is moved to be almost friendly.

  “How would we do it?” she asks him.

  “I have the technology; just tell me what kind of meme you want.”

  Ziggy considers this. If the meme’s purpose is to reclaim the prosthetic pussy on Tessa’s thigh, it is obvious which kind she needs.

  “Cats,” she tells her brother.

  Jake grins and swings the door wide for his sister. They hurry together into his room.

  Once Existential Cat is staring ponderously into Tessa’s gash, thought-bubbling why am I here? and what is the void? Ziggy selects Grumpy Cat’s face for the all-important position over Tessa’s crotch.

  “You need one more,” Jake instructs. “For the trifecta.”

  There is one more cat meme Ziggy has always felt drawn to, in an uncomfortable way that compels her now to choose it. Kitlers are cats that look, by virtue of their coloring, like cat Hitlers. “If we make Tessa’s face into a Kitler, isn’t it kind of like she is taking control of her own image?”

  Jake frowns. “I don’t know if feminists will get the joke.”

  “Hey.”

  “Plus I don’t find Nazis funny.”

  Now Ziggy sees her mistake. As a feminist, Tessa can’t be likened to a Nazi. That meme must go to her vagina. Ziggy makes Jake put the Kitler over Tessa’s crotch, while Existentialist Cat gazes into the gaping leg hole and Grumpy Cat is repositioned over Tessa’s face. Which still makes her friend seem too humorless, so she has Jake swap Grumpy out for Happy Cat. Ziggy is satisfied, but if the meme is to be an authentic reclamation, it must be approved by Tessa herself. Ziggy sends the image to her friend.

  After thirty excruciating minutes Ziggy decides that Tessa’s silence just means she is out celebrating with her family. That she has missed not only Ziggy’s text but also, hopefully, the wider public ridicule. But Ziggy is anxious. She is too afraid to show Lex her meme. Lately everything Ziggy does is suspiciously lesbian. Finally she logs off and tries to get some sleep.

  Arriving that morning at the year-ten common room, Ziggy sees a steely Tessa flinging loose script pages from the depths of her locker. Lex and Ziggy gather around the rising sea of white. Tessa doesn’t make eye contact with Ziggy, but she also doesn’t mention the meme. Overnight, the actress has made some profound career decisions. She doesn’t want to be just another fair-haired Australian sex object rising through the skeezy ranks of Home and Away. Tessa declaims into the deep echo chamber of her locker that a serious actress studies at the National Institute of Dramatic Art—three years at NIDA under the tutelage of avant-garde Austrian directors and cranky, ancient Brits who have seen it all, including Olivier in blackface. Ziggy glances at Lex, but her friend’s face is masterfully inscrutable. Tessa continues: she will take classes at NIDA this winter break—clowning with legendary Parisian buffoons, mask workshops with blind Italian sculptors, inner animal with Russian celebrity hypnotists. She will learn how to waltz for Chekhov and sing for Brecht and develop her nascent talent for heightened language. She claims to be rereading Lear and “loving it.”

  Lex rolls her eyes. “And what about Charmaine?”

  “What about her?”

  “Is she a serious actress?”

  Ziggy has never heard Lex side with Charmaine so assumes this is a black thing and that Tessa is done for.

  “Of course,” Tessa says carefully. “It’s just harder for her to land character roles because she gets type-cast.”

  “What’s so good about character roles?”

  “It’s what Australians do best.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we’re trained.”

  Lex snorts. “Or because you invaded this country and have no real character of your own?”

  Ziggy’s arm hairs go static with schadenfreude. Lex is clearly using Tessa’s anti-Australian polemic against her. Hopefully, being Jewish gets her off the hook for Aboriginal genocide, though Ziggy knows almost nothing about Australian history. Each year, her Jewish history teachers promised to get to it, but only ever played Gallipoli then returned to the Third Reich. Ziggy tries anyway. “You mean how the prime ministers refused to say sorry?”

  Lex remains glaring at an oddly reticent Tessa. “And how they keep the borders closed because they’re so insecure about themselves.”

  Now Ziggy understands: Australians make good character actors because they suppress their shameful history then unconsciously repeat it at offshore detention centers.

  “It’s like they have no sense of self,” she ventures.

  Lex is more specific: “It’s like they’re sociopaths.”

  Tessa nods, contritely. Ziggy can see she is being magnanimous. The aspiring sociopath looks at Lex and makes a small national sacrifice. “You mean like Mel?”

  “Yes,” Lex snaps. “And Russell.”

  “And Geoffrey?” Tessa offers kindly.

  “Obviously Nicole,” Ziggy adds, enjoying the game.

  But Tessa’s calm accountability seems to be aggravating Lex. It appears she wants blood. “And Heath,” she snarls.

  This is blasphemous; as unpatriotic as calling the Joker a bad performance, and Tessa won’t have it.

  “Hey,” she says. “Leave him out of this.”

  Ziggy makes a meager attempt at diffusion: “I think Nicole’s most realistic role was that psychotic weatherwoman.”

  Lex ignores her. She glowers at the thespian. “So you’re saying trauma is actually bad for acting?”

  “It depends on your craft,” Tessa says with aggressive pomposity. “Feelings can be
a hindrance to language-based plays.”

  “Language-based plays?” Lex over-articulates with theatrical disgust. “You got objectified for wearing a miniskirt on TV and now you only want to do theater?”

  Tessa is suddenly trembling. “I got objectified and trolled!”

  “Every girl—except Ziggy—who steps outside in a skirt gets fucking trolled!”

  “Well I’m a better actress than that!”

  “Than what? Oppressed people?”

  Tears gleam at Tessa’s eyeballs, but for Lex, even this is not enough.

  “You’re a racist!” she yells, and then charges off down the hall. Tessa begins to bawl into the crook of her bionic arm. Ziggy feels a sharp tweak of sympathy.

  “I’m sorry you got trolled,” says Ziggy. “Was it bad?”

  Tessa looks up, slowly, as if into a harsh light.

  “You trolled me.”

  “I was trying to make you a feminist meme!”

  “I’m a serious actress!” Tessa screams, her face a dangerous purple. “She is a whore and you are a predator! You two can go fuck each other!”

  It still wouldn’t be consensual, thinks Ziggy. LOL, think a delighted Hitler Youth.

  Chapter 6

  Now that their friendship group has shrunk to two, Ziggy feels completely unsafe in her gender and sexual ambiguity. Even with the dwindling specter of Tim. Lex has increasing issues with homosexuals, and now even transgender women can be too white to be women of color. Ziggy doesn’t dare ask if Tessa showed her the pussy reclamation meme. The neutral cargo pants and T-shirts Ziggy had been wearing are now swapped for short A-line skirts and shoulder-baring peasant tops. She rattles around inside booby blouses; the fabrics jut and sink, impervious to her shape. To appease her friend, Ziggy walks around on weekends feeling squarish and wrong and angry with women. The shameless flaunting of curves now seems grotesque and manipulative. Of course Lex gets catcalled. Forty percent of her ass is always peeking out of her shorts. Rowena, at least, enjoys the attention. She seems like the only woman Ziggy knows who isn’t a whining, menstruating biological contradiction.