Inappropriation Read online

  Finally an OP with balls,

  admires mma_mutha_fucka.

  And they love what she says about rich girls wanting to be strippers. That callipygous white women profit off black female bodies. That cis-women are scared of incarcerated men turning female because they think it undermines their biological function. This last one is received less enthusiastically, but the general consensus persists:

  Women will always attempt 2 dominate men,

  writes cuckoff.

  Even when it’s just men with boobs.

  Now Ziggy opens up. She has never posted on the subreddit before and so begins by painting a dark picture of the coed private school where a boy called z-man fights the female fascism of a year-ten formal committee. Her post is long and detailed; she even backtracks to Lex’s betrayal in the nightclub:

  I wingman’d so hard i burned my foot on a cigarette & had a long conversation about air conditioners.

  The men are touchingly sympathetic.

  Definition of Hypergamist: Female who dumps u 4 a reality TV judge,

  consoles mma_mutha_fucka.

  The Red Pill are patriarchal but at least they are honest about it. Like her, they hate the hypocrisy of straight women, and within their ranks there is unanimous agreement that the Cates deserve to be knocked from their perch. If Ziggy can’t depose them from the formal committee, surely she can date-rape them at the after party? First Ziggy laughs and then she considers the idea. Figuratively, as a figurative suggestion. Which is how all the comments feel on the Red Pill. Theirs is a language of Classical analogy and naturalist metaphor, a support group where the men inhabit useful archetypes. Ziggy likes the idea of being someone who would not literally date-rape the popular group but rather spike their drinks so that they wet themselves or have horrible diarrhea. Someone who uses lols as their weapon. Picturing herself as this person—the one who throws a sushi roll and is martyred in the swimming pool; the one who pours laxatives into the punch and vindicates an entire year group; the one who wears a camera on her head—feels even more intoxicating when she plays house music loud through her laptop speakers. The base throbs in her chest, vibrates from her forehead. Ziggy may lack the nuance for a smear campaign, but she is on the right side. She just needs the right tactics.

  With this fire raging in her head, a trip downstairs for water becomes a menacing march. When Ziggy gets to the fridge, the phone rings. She answers, and a woman starts to talk very fast about internet service and updates and quickly Ziggy decides it is a scam. But the woman talks right over her, plowing through her script, and when Ziggy says excuse me and the woman just keeps talking—aggressively like it is a game and she is winning—Ziggy feels impotent and furious and then she hears herself call the lady a cunt. The woman pauses and then says thank you very much and have a nice day. The line goes dead. Ziggy moves numbly through the motions of pouring her drink. Then the phone rings again. A man asks to speak with Mrs. Klein.

  “That’s me,” Ziggy lies.

  The man pauses then reads briskly but politely from a long script that essentially says, if you call tech support a cunt, the internet provider has the right to terminate your account. Ziggy makes a brief attempt at outrage, then decides there are other internet providers and hangs up. But now the Kleins don’t have Wi-Fi. In ten minutes, everyone is manic, yelling into the kitchen from their open bedroom doors.

  Ziggy knows she is going to be blamed for this. There is some implacable adult principle where no matter what someone does to you—how violently they ambush you with data, in the cold, deathly drone of a machine—you are not allowed to call them certain swear words. Particularly not women, and not that word.

  Ziggy hollers up into the atrium. “Tech support was being a cunt!”

  Ruth’s voice is razored. “You called tech support a cunt?”

  “She was abusing her power!”

  “What power?” Ruth leans over the railing. She shakes her head, making a smacking sound with her tongue like she is tasting something rotten. “You can’t call anyone in a subordinate position ‘cunt.’ And tech support is always in a subordinate position.”

  “But she was being a cunt.”

  “Go to your room.”

  Ziggy is already going. Trudging up the stairs, letting the injustice boil her blood. Ruth grounds her daughter just as Ziggy reaches the bedroom door. Which is kind of like subordinating someone and then calling them a cunt.

  But Ziggy is not a cunt. That would be her mother. Ziggy knows this is really about the camera and how she has hinted that she might not want to go to the formal. And Ziggy is right. An hour later, Ruth stands outside Ziggy’s door, announcing an amendment to her punishment. She has informed Twinkles of the impending rite of passage. Tomorrow afternoon, her grandmother is taking Ziggy dress-shopping.

  “She can buy me some camera accessories, but I won’t be wearing a dress.”

  “You can explain that to her.”

  There is no explaining this to Twinkles. Which is exactly why Ruth has organized the outing. Female beauty is a second religion to Ziggy’s grandmother, and she takes clothes shopping personally. When a mouse was found stitched into a skirt from her favorite retailer, Twinkles denied the sweatshop’s tragic protest: “the fabric so soft the mice want to sleep there!” But Ziggy can play along. She will go gender-worshipping with Twinkles tomorrow, then discard the sartorial propaganda in a dumpster.

  Lying in bed, Lex’s admonishments spoil darkly through the room. Ziggy’s estrangement from Lex seems weirdly retroactive, as if it were the true condition of their friendship. Their time together now has the gauzy unreality of a dream. The lamp that Lex once switched on has a powerful new presence, claiming secret knowledge of Ziggy’s bygone friend. She switches it off and lies there, a grim resignation sinking through the topography of her duvet. Ziggy might be able to destroy the Cates and preserve the dignity of all grade ten, but Lex’s antipathy runs far deeper than Ziggy can fix.

  Chapter 9

  In the colossal white laundry room that is Zara, Ziggy is reminded of her former friend’s quest to share nothingness and misogyny with the English-speaking world. The shopping atmosphere here lacks the reverence of Ruth’s high-end boutiques. The desperation is more diffuse, the zombies arrive already disappointed. With its epic posters of blithe, blank-eyed dolls casting a cold cone of envy over everybody else, the megastore is an unholy temple to gendernormativity.

  Twinkles paws through the clothing racks, smacking her lips together and unconsciously flicking her tongue. As they browse, Ziggy’s grandmother relays the fond memory of her own first formal dance. The dress her mother sewed, the borrowed shoes she waltzed in all night like Cinderella. The blue-eyed boy who promised to take her to the Champs-Élysées and teach her how to peel an artichoke.

  “He wore the bow tie.” Twinkles gives a luxurious little chuckle.

  Ziggy wonders what gruesome details her grandmother is imagining. An adolescent boy’s probing tongue? Her laddering stockings as he chafed along her thigh? Ziggy shudders considering the pedophilic nature of memory. Now Twinkles is holding up a gigantic, blue kaftan printed with the sleek sixties ad graphic of a black woman smoking beneath a wide-brimmed hat.

  “You wear with a belt,” she explains, bunching the fabric of her own cotton manta ray at the waist. “This ‘the look.’”

  Ziggy flinches at the word. “What’s a ‘look’?”

  “You know what a ‘look’ is, darlink. Fashion.”

  “What’s ‘fashion’?”

  “Ziggy, come on. You know what these thing are. The kaftan is funky.”

  “Funky?”

  “You want a definition of funky?”

  “I thought funky was a bad smell.”

  “Funky is black people and soul music. Cool. Funky is cool. Don’t you want to look cool?”

  “You can’t call black people funky.”

  “Why not? It a compliment!”

  “It’s a stereotype.”

 
; Her grandmother pouts, scolded.

  “And,” Ziggy continues, enjoying the lesson, “you can’t wear black people on your body to make you look cool.”

  Twinkles seems repentant. “Okay, Pippi. Then how about this one with the parrots?”

  Ziggy relents and enters the fitting room line. She watches the girls up ahead hunched over their phones, eyes scrolling behind the stringy hang of fried hair. A few notice her GoPro and begin a nervy fidgeting; others get a soft, self-conscious flicker in their eyes. Ziggy couldn’t explain the joy of this to Twinkles. Her grandmother thinks the GoPro is some sort of rebellious fashion statement-cum-art project. The besequined Hungarian could never understand the politics of her granddaughter’s identity. Even to Ziggy, it is fleet and dispersed as a complicated meme.

  On her small, anemic frame, the kaftan looks obscenely festive. Ziggy consoles herself with the promise that whatever happens, she isn’t going to wear it to the formal. Then she permits Twinkles a peek through the door.

  “It beautiful,” she says. “Cool but no stereotypes. We buy it?”

  Ziggy nods. At least it is over.

  At the register, Twinkles snatches the kaftan from the checkout girl and holds it up to the light, inspecting the fabric with forensic attention. “We need a nudie slip,” she announces to the apathetic shop assistant. The woman shrugs and then points to the sliding glass doors; at the opposite storefront with its feathered angels in crotchless panties.

  As usual, Ziggy is disturbed by the Victoria’s Secret window display. The busty mannequins with their spangled wings and frothing tutus; then inside, the same illogical bulges buttoned into corsets and projected onto wall-sized screens. She thinks of the celebrity cult’s avian origin story with its fabricated girlfriends and feels fresh ire for her homoromantic father.

  When she gets to the slips at an unglamorous back alcove of the store, Ziggy sees Rowena. In her bright floral overcoat she seems uninspired as she flips through a rack of utilitarian beige stockings. But instead of saying hello, Ziggy pulls her hood down. She doesn’t want to introduce Twinkles, but also, Ziggy doesn’t want to explain the thing on her head. She waits behind a stand of lacy sockettes until Rowena has moved on toward the second-floor escalators. Twinkles finds her here, peering up at the mezzanine.

  “Who you staring at, Chibbykem?”

  “One of Mum’s clients.”

  Twinkles’s arachnid eyelashes squint in Rowena’s direction. “A transvestite.”

  “They don’t call them that anymore.”

  “A transsexual.”

  “A transgender woman.”

  Her grandmother nods, corrected. “She very feminine.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You know what it mean.”

  “That she’s wearing a dress?”

  “No, Pippi. The way she move, the way she match her clothes. Maybe in the genes, I don’t know. Television?”

  “So there’s a feminine gene?”

  “Maybe . . . some gay have it too.”

  Ziggy can’t tell if her grandmother is being homophobic. Sometimes Twinkles backs herself into a surprisingly liberal idea.

  “Your mother let her sit with the women?”

  Ziggy considers mentioning Ruth’s casting for the Holocaust constellation, but decides against it. A more recent psychodrama session seems safer. “She played the Rainbow Serpent in one of Mum’s Dreamtime role-plays.”

  Her grandmother cackles. “Make sense. The serpent a hermaphrodite.”

  “I thought it was a woman.”

  “The snake androgynous,” Twinkles says authoritatively. “It precede creation. In the Book of Isaiah, Greek mythology, Norse, Hindu. Someone always fighting a snake to separate the land from sea, or the good from evil, knowledge from the unknown.”

  “Mum said the serpent was female.”

  “Your mother bad with detail.”

  Ziggy wonders if Ruth’s mistake was intentional. More of her gender manipulation for facilitating a successful workshop. Then Ziggy hears her own name, in that voice, both jarring and gentle. Rowena is waving from up in the mezzanine. “I’ll come to you!”

  Ziggy feels her whole body contract. She wants to curl up under a rack of tote bags that say DANCE LIKE NOBODY’S WATCHING. Twinkles gazes up at Rowena, pursing her lips in excitement.

  “Wait!” Ziggy cries. “I’ll come to you!”

  But Rowena hasn’t heard her. Ziggy watches the rose-print overcoat vanish behind a mannequin, then reappear, coasting regally down the in-store escalator. Ziggy considers removing the GoPro. She doesn’t want to go back into Donna Haraway and the cyborgs. She senses her interpretation might be insensitive. Trying to explain it in front of Twinkles is also bound to be explosive. But Rowena is swiftly upon them.

  “Don’t you look fabulous?” she says, scanning Twinkles’s outfit. “You must be Ruth’s mother?”

  The small, twinkly woman stares up with wide eyes. “Hello, darlink.”

  “I’m shopping for a new costume,” Rowena tells them shyly. “Tim got me a gig with his friends where everyone has to be nonbinary.” She smiles at Twinkles. “That means I’m not allowed to wear fishnets unless I pair them with a fishing vest.”

  “Like the hermaphrodite.”

  Ziggy shrivels. But Rowena is, as always, gracious. “Yes, or intersex. Or just fashion.”

  Twinkles nods. “Whatever make you feel good, darlink.”

  The three of them share a brief moment of genial calm. Then Rowena’s gaze drifts to the GoPro. “What’s the camera for?”

  “School,” Ziggy generalizes. She catches Twinkles ogling Rowena’s chest. “Look,” Ziggy says to her grandmother, pulling a black bandanna off the rack. “This might go well with the kaftan.”

  “Darlink, black doesn’t go with baby blue.”

  “But it goes with the GoPro.”

  Twinkles looks stricken. “You wearing the camera to your formal?”

  “I can’t keep up with the trends either,” Rowena says kindly.

  But Twinkles doesn’t want sympathy. Her eyes darken and the fleshy bulb at the end of her nose goes alarmingly pink. She flicks the hem of Ziggy’s hoodie. “You a beautiful girl and you waste it.”

  “Beauty is labor,” Ziggy experiments. “And I’m not participating unless I get paid.”

  Her grandmother gasps. “You want to be a prostitute?”

  Rowena giggles. “I think she just wants to spend her allowance on technology rather than makeup.”

  “I buy her that thing!” cries Twinkles. “I didn’t think it mean she want to be a little boy.”

  “I don’t think that’s what she’s saying.”

  “What you saying then?” Her grandmother’s eyes bore into Ziggy; two dark mirrors shining with an epic, impersonal hatred. “You want to look ugly?”

  “I’m just saying I don’t want to wear animal print.”

  Twinkles tosses her head, batting her eyelashes in a lavishly sarcastic pantomime. “No funky, no cool, no animal print . . .”

  Ziggy knows Twinkles grew up on thawed turnips, that some days they had to eat the pets for dinner—she understands that after a childhood like that, diamond rings and silk stockings might take on mythical proportions. But just because you ate putrid horse meat in World War II doesn’t mean you get to spend the rest of your life shaming women who don’t paint their nails.

  “Animal print is sexist.”

  “How sexist?”

  “It’s internalizing the patriarchy.”

  “Pippi, that fascist.”

  “No, the gender binary is fascist!”

  Twinkles looks hurt. “Now you being a very little girl.”

  Rowena is pretending to distract herself with hair accessories. Ziggy realizes she might be insulting both of them but she can’t let her grandmother get away with “little girl.”

  “You really think dressing like a leopard makes you sexy?”

  Twinkles’s laughter has a blunt, butcherous qual
ity. Spite quivers in her slabby cheeks. “All this nasty because you haven’t yet get the breasts?”

  Ziggy lets a coat hanger fall to the floor; but it’s not quite violent enough. “At least I don’t dress like a slut.”

  Twinkles gapes up at her granddaughter. To Ziggy she looks like a series of black holes contracting and expanding with the wheezing cosmos. The two of them face each other, panting; their trauma seems to conjoin them—like a single organ pulsing back and forth between their bodies. Then in her periphery Ziggy sees Rowena moving toward her, and she panics—tearing away from Twinkles and bolting for the exit. Shame propels Ziggy all the way across the shop floor and out into the mall.

  It is painful to imagine Rowena standing there beside Twinkles, consoling the tiny, bewildered septuagenarian. But Ziggy can’t go back. And she can’t stop running. People eye her warily, angrily, as if they know what she has just called her grandmother. Probably they are only nervous about someone running indoors. Which makes Ziggy run faster. She takes the corners aggressively, making herself lungy and hazardous. When she sees a sign for the women’s bathroom, Ziggy turns sharply then smashes through the swinging door.

  Inside, she sits on a toilet seat, catching her breath, trying to figure out who is wrong and who is right and whether she looked irreparably bad in front of Rowena. Ziggy pictures Twinkles’s face: the shining eyes and kohl tears sludging through her blush. Hitler Youth think Ziggy is not just a little boy; she is now a little bastard. Even they can see it isn’t her grandmother’s fault she’s sought solace in the spiritual void of sparkly aesthetics and binary terrorism. If anyone has a legitimate narcissistic wound, it is a child Holocaust survivor. Twinkles is entitled to her never-ending mirror phase. But also, she is just very old and very precious and Ziggy can see that now, flashing on those bluish, barnacled fingers Twinkles is always pinching her with. Head in hands, sousing in shame, Ziggy apologizes to the phantom grandmother that sits merciful at her heart. Which will have to be enough. Returning to the scene of her crime is too terrifying. Ziggy knows she wouldn’t be able to make it through the word sorry without crumbling into tears.