Inappropriation Page 15

  “Righto,” he says. “Let’s get you two to the VIP room.”

  John whisks them across the dance floor to the megalith of a giant Māori man, perched on what must be a very tiny stool. The man looks them up and down, inspects John’s VIP pass, then cracks a door open with one gigantic hand. They slip through into a room that is a miniature version of the club outside. There are a few plush, velvet booths and a smaller luminescent bar in the corner. The obvious difference is that in here there are almost no men.

  While Lex and John chatter, Ziggy studies the room, and Hitler Youth confirm that even with her padded bra and the pencil lines Lex called “contouring,” she has the smallest boobs here. And Ruth didn’t straighten her hair properly. It is still frizzy underneath so that it puffs out like a triangle. The way John’s gaze flinches from her makes Ziggy feel like an angry troll doll. But she doesn’t like him either. The violent squash game his eyes play with Lex and something over her shoulder; his name-dropping of Britpop stars and sentimental paraphrasing of John Lennon. He doesn’t seem to care that neither girl knows what he is talking about. It is probably time to exchange emails and get away from the talent scout. Ziggy tries to tug Lex toward the bathroom, but her friend says she doesn’t need to go. A breach of their friendship contract, but Ziggy manages to remain aloof. Next she suggests they go find the rapper.

  “I already texted him,” says Lex.

  “And?”

  “The reception’s bad in here.”

  “So let’s go outside.”

  John folds his arms and grins; his chin squishing back into many supercilious layers. “He’s in the secret VIP room.”

  “Isn’t that where we are?”

  “This is the VIP room,” says John. “There’s also a secret VIP room.”

  Lex hooks an arm over John’s and the judge brushes a long, wet look up the canvas of her body. Ziggy tries not to watch them, fixing her eyes instead on an e-cigarette blipping redly at the far side of the room.

  “Righto,” says John, and walks them to a set of elevators in the passageway. At the doors, another monstrous man dominates a twiggy stool. He checks John’s lanyard, grunts something, and then admits the three of them into the elevator. It is wide and industrial and asynchronous with the stark glamor of the club—a freight elevator that takes them down via an ugly concrete parking garage where a guilty-looking coat check stomps out her joint before stepping inside. The doors close and the elevator drops lower.

  The secret VIP room is blizzardy with cigarette smoke. The air stings Ziggy’s eyes, and in seconds, she has lost Lex and John. She finds a booth, then slides in to rub her eyes and sulk. The girls gyrating around her table appear to be in a deep trance of vanity. Their need for attention seems primal, biological, and gross.

  Then a cigarette appears under Ziggy’s nose. “You want?”

  “No, thanks,” she says.

  “You sure?”

  Ziggy looks across the slim white stick, proffered by a dark male hand, extended from the sleeve of a yellow sweatshirt printed with the words: NO WORRIES, MATE. Ziggy blinks up. The rapper smiles back at her.

  “Actually, okay.”

  He lights the cigarette then turns back to the woman grinding at his side. Ziggy is shaking. She tries to focus on the simple act of inhalation. Then she starts looking around for Lex. She spots her friend on the other side of the room and tries to make subtle flicking gestures with the cigarette, but she fumbles and it slips, taking a white spin to the floor. Ziggy feels a sting beneath her foot; the cigarette has dropped into her shoe. She tries to kick it out, but the burning stick lodges deeper into the tight space between leather and heel. Ziggy reaches down to unbuckle the straps, but female legs press in all around her, crowding out her hands. Now the rapper is watching. Ziggy smiles and feels a tear pop through her eyelashes. The pain is incredible. She keeps smiling as tears stream down her face. The rapper cocks his head.

  “You okay?”

  “I’m fine!” says Ziggy, then thinks: I’m going to die. Her brow blisters sweat and her vision blotches and she gets violently dizzy. “It’s hot in here,” she thinks she says.

  The rapper nods. “Way too hot.”

  Ziggy focuses on the swoosh of his left eyebrow and her mind starts to clear. The pain is easing; the butt must be out.

  The rapper leans in across the table. “But you know the stores?”

  “The shops?”

  “The shops are way too cold,” he says. “The shops are icy. I had to put on a cardigan. Australians don’t understand air conditioning.”

  The rapper seems to be engaging Ziggy in conversation. She takes a deep breath and tries to think why her countrymen wouldn’t understand air conditioning. If there is any truth to the allegation. Whether or not it matters. Her mind comes up blank. Perhaps this proves his point. “I guess people mostly just use fans.”

  “In the US we use air conditioners. Or ACs. That’s what we call them. ACs.”

  “A for air and C for conditioner?”

  “Exactly. You’re the first Australian I’ve talked to who understands what that word means. Australians just don’t get air conditioning.”

  She thinks Tessa would describe what is happening between her and the rapper as “nothingness.” Ziggy finds it relaxing. Perhaps the extreme pain she felt moments earlier has flushed her with endorphins. She feels no insult nor any eagerness to defend her nation’s ignorance; what she says next is simply the first thing that pops into her head: “But ACs are bad for the environment.”

  “That’s true,” the rapper says, pondering. “But you can get energy-efficient ones. And you can use them in moderation. That’s what I’m talking about: Australians turn them up too strong. It’s unnecessary.”

  “I think people know the shops are cold so they just bring jackets.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “We have fans at home.”

  “Good for you.”

  “Thanks.” Ziggy thinks she might be getting bored. “I should probably find my friend.” She looks back across the room and sees Lex, her face burning murderously out of the crowd.

  “Good luck with the air conditioning,” Ziggy says, jumping up and hobbling back into the crush of bodies. As she moves toward Lex and John, Ziggy decides that whatever unwarranted hostility awaits her, she cannot leave her friend alone with the talent scout. A middle-aged man in skinny jeans who calls her “badass.”

  When Ziggy reaches them, Lex is still eyeing her ferociously. For a second the anger feels flattering. Like they are lovers in a play.

  “Why didn’t you invite me over?”

  Ziggy doesn’t know. She thinks it might have been the shock. But there is an obvious and easy remedy. “We can just go back!”

  Lex links an arm through John’s. “Go home, Ziggy.”

  The bodies beside Ziggy twinkle away; her heart lobs hard against her ribs. Through the hurt runs a thin silver pulse of self-righteousness. Ziggy doesn’t mean to injure Lex. The lie that comes to mind is a white one—a mere finessing of the emotional facts. The lie you tell when a white person has been racist but you can’t prove exactly how.

  Ziggy leans close to Lex’s ear. “John said your ass was callipygous.”

  “What?”

  “It means ‘like a shelf.’”

  “So what?”

  “So it’s racist!”

  “Why?”

  Ziggy isn’t sure why. Perhaps it’s just misogynist. But maybe it can be both. “Because it’s making black people into furniture.”

  Lex laughs and the boundary between them—the wall Ziggy’s kindness has crashed and died into all these difficult weeks—feels suddenly dissolved. The air swarms in sweet and warm as Ziggy watches the laughing bounce of Lex’s tongue. Then her mouth claps shut and her breath gets chesty as she appears to gather some huge inner energy.

  “It’s you!” she yells. “You are the sleazy, white, dude!”

  Stunned, Ziggy flusters. “You guys told me
to be gay!”

  “We told you to be a feminist not a dyke!”

  “You’re not allowed to say the d-word!” Ziggy cries, then startles, delighted at her accidental proof. “And neither am I!”

  Lex backs off through the crowd. In the freight elevator Ziggy stares up stupefied as the numbers glow white; each ding sinking through her, deepening the knowledge that with every floor she is moving further into a new life without Lex.

  ALL WEEKEND, ZIGGY’S NEW REALITY waits in a fog at her forehead, ready to assail her with shock and pain. She analyzes the intentions of her now former friends. How they had been trying, not to nurture a latent queerness, but rather to shape her into an empowered straight woman. How they had treated her like a test subject, ripe for DNA modification via traumatic misogyny; making her watch a gruesome rape scene like a pair of Christian psychiatrists hoping to reverse her homosexuality. And even if this is excessive and they weren’t actually trying to make her straight, Ziggy’s friends still have a suspicious tendency to blame things on gay people. Poring over every conversation only leaves her more confused. But most disturbingly, Ziggy still wants to be friends. All weekend, she misses them. Ziggy drags herself around the house, tearing up at the sight of a table lamp she once watched Lex switch on, a yogurt snack cup Tessa said probably tasted like cum. Her grief is insidious and doubled. As if only now realizing that Tessa is also gone.

  On Monday morning, Lex avoids Ziggy—pivoting swiftly whenever she starts to approach. It hurts but Ziggy lets herself hope this is just a game. That Lex will get bored or lonely and be texting her by lunchtime. But when the bell goes, Lex follows the Cates from the common room out to the harbor-facing hillside. Ziggy spies from the balcony as the four girls make a sparse picnic of their eating disorders. From modern, modular lunch pails, they lay out macrobiotic snacks origami’d in pastel-colored crepe paper—like mealtime at a Japanese space station—while sipping mineral water infused with spring and sucking heart-shaped mints someone’s dad brought back from Dubai. Ziggy can imagine their conversation is a similar suffusion of cis-feminine heterosexual Styrofoam. Lex’s new allegiance is so stunning and mean, it makes Ziggy weirdly euphoric. Her mind spins like Ruth’s rolodex, like pages flipping and tearing off into the wind. Her incomprehension reaches the sweet spot where a cataclysm feels like liberation. But this moment is just the calm before the obsession.

  All week, Ziggy puzzles over what happened that night. How she tried to save her friend from racist misogyny and was attacked then dumped for a group of white patriarchal girl-pimps. Ziggy doesn’t even know what Lex was trying to do with the talent scout; no selfies with the rapper have appeared on Instagram nor can Ziggy find photographic evidence of brunch mimosas with the judge. Still, she thinks Lex is an opportunist who isn’t even trying to reclaim her ass from popular culture. Tessa would understand this, possibly better than Ziggy does herself; something tells Ziggy that callipygous might have been the most manipulative move of the evening.

  As the days pass, it becomes undeniable that a new era has dawned, and Ziggy edges toward despair. Strangely, what makes her saddest about losing Lex is recalling the last thing they watched together: a short clip of a woman who could fart on cue with her vagina. Lex had laughed hysterically, but Ziggy barely chuckled, feeling somehow responsible for the woman’s indignity. When she thinks of it now, Ziggy feels a deathly shame. If it must be over, she wants their friendship to tower in Lex’s mind, to cast a deep blue shadow across her heart. Ziggy wishes, more than anything, that they had watched something better. With Lex and the Cates assembled hillside on their yoga mats, the school buildings look sallow, the grass is sickly pale; even patches of sunlight seem blanched and flat. The whole world is somehow gone. Ziggy wonders if this is how it feels to have a political awakening.

  THE FOLLOWING WEEK, THE PRIME minister is deposed by a man. The morning it happens, Dr. LeStrange comes to class with red pinny eyes and sweat-streaked temples, and her accent is suddenly British. She lets the girls tear through A Doll’s House in their most vacant monotones while she stands at the window, glaring across the bay. Then she speaks right over someone’s goodness gracious.

  “The problem with the literary canon,” Dr. LeStrange says to her own reflection, “is that it’s mostly men.”

  The silence is brutally courteous. The teacher continues.

  “When we read men’s books, we are listening to them—hearing their stories, feeling their pain—and in a sense, allowing ourselves to become them. Listening is an act of empathy, but it is also a form of self-annihilation.”

  Cate chuckles. “Does that mean all women are transgender?”

  Dr. LeStrange smiles defiantly. “In a way, Cate, yes it does.”

  “Gross.”

  “It is not gross, Ms. Lansell-Jones. What’s gross is that house of parliament.” Their teacher turns her fury back on the invisible enemy outside the window. “Those men are boars who don’t even speak proper English.”

  This spawns a light effusion of giggles. A small tension release that Dr. LeStrange mistakes for a swelling tide of feminist dissidence. She gives a triumphant smirk then slouches aggressively from her hips, in impersonation of a sleazy lout. “Who bloody cares, mate? Let’s just leave the object right out of the clause!”

  Her performance is too energetic. The girls draw back as though their teacher has just strapped on a dildo. But Dr. LeStrange continues, hand cocky at her hip.

  “And what about the idiom sweet as? Sweet as what? It doesn’t matter! You get the idea, and that’s apparently good enough. That’s sweet as!”

  From Cate comes a dripping “Good one.”

  The light dies in their teacher’s eyes. “Lansell-Jones. Out.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Get out of my classroom.”

  Cate glances around, incredulous.

  “Out!” yells Dr. LeStrange, charging back around the desk to her chair. She raises A Doll’s House. “Page thirty-four.”

  “My parents are paying for me to be here.”

  The teacher slams down her book, and the front row of ponytails whip back widely over their chairs. Dr. LeStrange leans across her desk, clutching the front corners and glowering at the girls as if into a slew of bad weather.

  “Either you’re with us or against us, Lansell-Jones,” she says bitterly. “A vagina does not a feminist make.”

  Cate flinches. “Can you please not swear in front of the class?”

  The teacher laughs sharply and again the ponytails make a sudden swing.

  “I told you to leave my classroom.”

  Cate rises slowly, her rosy cheeks bruising a mad purple. Their teacher returns a slightly crazed smile.

  “Feminism isn’t over, Cate. Just because you’re rich. Or white. Or straight.”

  Cate swoons back as if struck. Her face blanches and she shoots out a trembling arm—pointing viciously at their teacher. “Sorry I’m not a lesbian!” she screams, then bursts into violently self-pitying tears.

  Kate jumps up and rushes to her friend. “What you said to Cate was, like, racist, Dr. L,” she cries in a voice cracking with emotion.

  “She hates us!” Cate whimpers between hiccupy sobs. “She hates us!”

  Dr. LeStrange looks down and calmly leafs through her playbook. Cate watches their teacher in breathless fury, makes a sudden diabolical screech then pushes past her desk and runs howling from the room. Her friends dash after her, leaving the rest of the girls in resentful silence—stung by the insinuation of privilege. Ziggy also feels admonished, and worse, left out. Of both feminism and the patriarchy. The lesson ends in a mood of fractured dissonance. Ziggy can see their teacher’s mistake. Invoking feminist intersectionality among a group of mostly white private school girls will only send them running back into the subjugating arms of the patriarchy. Ziggy sneaks a glance at Tessa, who has a constellation of hickeys cloudy across her neck. Not even their prime minister’s ousting can rouse these girls. There was never going t
o be a revolution.

  WHEN SHE GETS HOME, Jacob’s GoPro is sitting, unsupervised, on the kitchen counter. Ziggy slips the camera on and walks around the room. She likes how it feels, this small sturdy weight at her forehead, driving her around. She takes a running jump from the stairs onto the couch, then trots out into the yard and up to the barbecue deck. From here she takes a slow plunge onto the grass—feeling, mid-fall, only faint regret at her imagined suicide. Ziggy lies on her back for a long time, staring up, soothed by the regal green of the Polish topiary. Then she hears a fart. Deep in the hedge she spies two shirtless gardeners, their slick muscles pulsing through the leaves. Ziggy crawls toward them on her stomach. When they see her, the gardeners pose, peace-signing and flexing their muscles. Ziggy doesn’t smile back. At her forehead, she feels a cool intransigence. She keeps filming; even when the gardeners get obviously bored, when their cheeks slacken in hostility and the first rude finger flashes through the green. Then she films their huffy pivot and the four tight buttocks charging back into the bushes.

  Returning the GoPro to the counter, Ziggy notices that the table is set for five. As usual, there is only a large bowl of salad on offer, but it is uncharacteristically sprinkled with bacon bits.

  “Who’s coming for dinner?” she asks Ruth as her mother sets two beer coasters on the table.

  “Damien.” Ruth’s voice is suspiciously neutral.

  “Damo?”

  “Mhm.”

  “Pass.”

  “No, you won’t.” Ruth eyes her daughter sternly. “Today is a sad day for the women of Australia, and I want you at the table.”

  Ziggy finds her mother’s gendered insinuation offensive. But the thought of trolling her father and his swimming buddy is surprisingly appealing. Ziggy puts a beer coaster beside her own placemat. “Can I have a Coopers?”