Inappropriation Read online

  Nearly every afternoon, Ziggy takes her unappetizing victuals into the bathroom closet and pretends she is an SS officer’s secret captive—forced to distract the Nazi with interesting personal anecdotes until the Allies invade. Usually she repeats the harrowing things overheard in her living room, where Ziggy’s mother runs her women’s workshops. Every kind of female suffering is represented here, but mostly Ziggy appropriates the sexual abuse stories. When she makes the SS officer weep, he tosses Ziggy a few fingers of onion skin; when he laughs she gets a small capful of vinegar. It is enlargening to feel other people’s feelings. Or maybe it shrinks the world. Either way, Ziggy is good at it. She can describe a stranger’s pain without crying, and under extreme duress. She can joke about incest with a Schick razor pressed to her throat. Which is kind of how she meets Tessa and Lex.

  THE FRIDAY AFTER THEY BURY the celebrity vehicle under their skirts, the grade ten culprits are issued a two-tiered punishment. First they are made to handwrite formal apologies, and then they are all marched down to the ghoulish green stalls of sick bay, where the school nurse is waiting to jab them with HPV. It is obvious to Ziggy that the vaccination will be administered too late for most of year ten, as sexually active members of a high-risk demographic. Ziggy overhears the Cates in line ahead of her discussing the ethics of compulsory immunization. Their argument consists mainly of the fear that a dose of active virus might give them genital warts.

  “Toby’s only slept with one other girl, and she’s in the Dutch royal family, so, like, seriously, he doesn’t have diseases.”

  The other girls agree with Cate that none of their boyfriends could possibly be carrying the STD. In a fury of indignation, Kate Fairfax even calls her father, and for fifteen minutes there is a chaotic hiatus while nurses run between the rooms, holding out cordless phones and giving moral critique with their eyebrows. Then Kate’s father is back in the palm of her hand, cooing apologies from the phone speaker. He has failed to abort the proceedings. The head nurse reenters and summons the first girl. The mass immunization will go on as planned.

  Ziggy doesn’t mind getting vaccinated. It makes her feel that sex might actually be imminent. That the teachers have somehow missed the fact of her prepubescent body, that they believe teenage boys are eager to give her STDs. Ziggy hasn’t yet had her period, and she is both frightened by and covetous of menstruation. At her old school, Ziggy watched the other girls swaddling their swollen bellies like tiny, light-sensitive marsupial pets, moaning and pill-popping and flopping theatrically about. She thinks periods are disgusting. Ziggy knows the hot, animal whiff of her mother’s sanitary products breathing in the bathroom bin. There is something both deathly and too alive in that fleshy stench.

  The summer before starting at Kandara, Ziggy had spent a long afternoon with frumpy and morose Miriam Rosenburg, or “the Blob,” as she was affectionately called. With the internet down, the two social outcasts found themselves in a strange, slightly hysterical boredom on the living room floor. Then, as if to embrace their outlier status more fully, the pair decided that witchcraft might be fun, and set off through the house—collecting organic matter for a gnarly brew. They’d scraped up Ziggy’s father’s nail clippings, plucked parental pubic hair from the bathtub, and then, in a frenzy of revulsion, Ziggy filched the pruned frankfurter of her mother’s used tampon. The girls took their bounty out to the garden, and incanting some half-remembered mumbo jumbo from a movie about black magic and aerobic sex in tartan skirts, they blazed the pyre. Watching the flames, Ziggy had felt a violent euphoria—as if she had destroyed periods or at least severely punished them. Ziggy hates menses because hers hasn’t yet come. Because that elusive spotting in her underwear somehow confirms that she will never fit in with the other girls.

  Slumped on the nurse’s waiting bench, Ziggy is roused from her neo-pagan reverie by the vicious trills of furtive bitching. It is Tessa, the pale, pudgy girl whose red bun perches on her head in chopstick-fixed eccentricity. Ziggy remembers Tessa from the American celebrity’s car. How she smooched the glass then grinned dementedly at Ziggy. She has also seen Tessa smashing around the school corridors with a very gorgeous, brown-skinned girl called Lex. Just that morning she’d watched them ram into the swimming captain then brazenly stare the bigger girl down. Peering around discreetly, Ziggy sees Tessa and Lex behind her, huddling in sultry animus against the popular clique. Tessa draws out a complicated metaphor that places the Cates comatose in the ICU. Something about the relentless tube-feeding of consumer culture that is then metabolized and shat back out into the original feeding tubes. Ziggy is pretty sure catheters don’t work this way, but she likes the gist, how gisty Tessa is.

  “They want to be the Real Housewives of Sydney because of an algorithm,” says Tessa.

  “And because their mothers actually are the Real Housewives of Sydney,” adds Lex.

  “One day they’ll wake up from their mothers’ wish fulfillment and murder their own children.”

  The two girls continue their character assassinations, claiming Kate’s blond highlights and golden tan and every staged snapshot of sun-filtered joy are attempts to seem in love with life and at one with nature.

  “Kate thinks she’s some kind of Eastern Suburbs sex-yogi,” says Tessa. “But she’s a Northern Beaches westie, and drinking Breezers on a paddle board is not the same as meditation.”

  Despite her geographical confusion, Tessa’s psycho-spiritual commentary sounds like the kind Ziggy was raised on. But better. In the voice of her own generation. With scrumptious anecdotes about Kate Fairfax falling off the back of a speedboat. Ziggy would diagnose the Cates as delusional and repressed—something she knows all about from her mother’s therapy groups. The Cates have just convinced themselves they like to sunbake all day on boat decks for blond boys with no hair on their arms. To Ziggy, the whole enterprise sounds vaguely anti-Semitic. She twists around in her seat.

  “I think Freud would say they only have sex to come boast about it at school.”

  Tessa makes a polite chin-tilt of interest. “You mean the reality principle?”

  Ziggy isn’t sure. Her mother often mixes Freud with her old guru from the Indian sex cult. She nods noncommittally. “Or the blond boy fetish could just be their own narcissism or even the incest taboo if the Cates secretly want to do it with their brothers?”

  Lex giggles, but Tessa looks unconvinced. “Have you read Freud?”

  Ziggy scrambles. “Yes, but personally, I’m on the fence about civilization. I mean, I don’t think progress necessarily causes discontent. All my mum got from being a hippie was a love of ponchos.”

  Now both girls laugh and lean toward her in sweet, intimate congress. Ziggy has been comic at the expense of her mother’s dignity, and though she feels her conscience pinch, the exploitation proves fruitful. The girls want to know more. So Ziggy tells them about the commune—the group therapy and maroon jumpsuits and how, when the whole thing imploded, all the Northern Europeans ended up on the east Australian coast, dealing ecstasy to backpackers. When she starts describing the sexual awakening workshops, Tessa interrupts with a concern. “Do you think the sex was all consensual?”

  “I think so,” says Ziggy. “There were lots of Germans, so everything was pretty well controlled.”

  The two girls exchange a glance. “You’re Jewish, right?” asks Tessa.

  Ziggy nods uneasily. “Why?”

  “Just checking that you can make that kind of generalization.” Her eyes flit again to Lex. “We’re not really into excluding people.”

  “I wasn’t trying to exclude the Germans,” Ziggy bumbles, “I think control is good if used for the right reasons.”

  Tessa squints at her sternly. “Have you read ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’?”

  Ziggy has only really read Anne Frank and the Brontës. Science fiction seems kind of babyish. She shakes her head. Tessa holds out her arm. The skin is a waxy pink that makes it look slightly swollen. Then, with disorienting shock, Ziggy rea
lizes the arm is a prosthetic. Her heart squeezes, but she senses sympathy is the wrong response.

  “She’s a cyborg,” Lex says plainly.

  “I’ll send you a link to the essay,” says Tessa. “It talks about how we’re all transhuman because of our dependence on technology, which is good because it means you don’t have to totally submit to the patriarchy. Cyborgs are part machine, part organism, so they don’t have dads.”

  “She was basically writing about iPhones in 1984,” Lex adds, her voice sparkly.

  “Who was?”

  “Donna Haraway,” says Tessa. “She’s cool. She really hates hot girls.”

  Ziggy’s skin tingles. Donna Haraway. Even her name is like something speeding off into a distant future.

  “Cyborgs identify as ‘women of color,’” Tessa continues. “Because ‘women of color’ is the only category that doesn’t exclude any of the excluded.”

  Ziggy sees a flash of agitation in Lex’s eyes, but the actual woman of color quickly recovers. “You need to identify all the exclusion,” she explains, “before you can create a system that’s fair to everybody.”

  “So who gets to be a cyborg?” asks Ziggy.

  “If you are oppressed and excluded,” says Tessa, “you can identify as a cyborg.”

  Ziggy nods toward the three girls sitting opposite, their shirts unbuttoned down to their abdomens. She knows the psychological term for this. “What if you internalize the patriarchy?”

  Tessa gives Ziggy a bright, commending smile. “The Cates are not women of color.”

  “They’d have to give up their privilege,” says Lex. “And experience way more suffering.”

  Ziggy likes the sound of this. “You can just give your privilege up?”

  “Men can’t,” Tessa says curtly. “But women can if they really try.”

  Ziggy wonders if this means amputating an arm or if low self-esteem is good enough. Tessa appears to register her confusion. “All women have been oppressed,” she says. “So they’re generally better at empathy.”

  This sounds a lot like Ziggy’s mother. She considers telling the girls about the constellation therapy Ruth does on Wednesdays—where a group of women role-play one another’s childhoods and then, standing very still while breathing deeply from their diaphragms, tap into diverse cultural and historical suffering. Ziggy has watched a line of women designated “the Germans” fall weeping at the feet of an opposing line of “the Jews.”

  Ziggy’s name is called. She rises slowly and walks toward the nurse standing in the open doorway, waving her gloved hands with sinister finesse. When Ziggy glances back between them, the two girls smile at her. Tessa gives an energetic thumbs-up with her prosthetic; Lex keeps appraising with those hot, woody eyes.

  From her mother’s therapy practice, Ziggy knows that trauma can change a person’s DNA; there have been numerous epigenetic studies on mice and Holocaust survivors. She wonders if this is what the girls are saying: that it might be possible to traumatize yourself into a more sympathetic, morally superior class of identity. And if, every afternoon in the bathroom closet, Ziggy is already doing it.

  TESSA SENDS THE LINK that night and Ziggy reads “A Cyborg Manifesto,” learning all about the non-exclusionary, uncategorizable category of the “cyborg.” Tessa explains that Australians are ill equipped to be cyborgs because they love borders, that a new country lacks the cyborgian self-confidence required for dissolving boundaries. But Ziggy thinks Haraway talks about affinities, not identities. And cyborgs seem to encompass everyone from drag queens in wigs to dogs with homing chips under their coats. Still, she really likes the gist.

  Ziggy falls quite naturally into sitting with Tessa and Lex at lunch, where she learns many interesting concepts. Like “the void.” Tessa ascribes it to any girl posing for a bathroom selfie or applying lip tint before the reflective glass of her phone. When Ziggy asks for clarification, Tessa’s eyes stare off in decadent angst, like two pale gems polished by eternal malaise. Her gaze is cynical and Egyptianized (Tessa’s grandmother had lived fabulously in pre-independence Cairo, and though the woman was presumably just another blobby-faced Anglo, Tessa wears a thick black line beneath each eye in homage to her eccentric matriarch) as she explains that the void is something you discover as a twelve-year-old who spent their summer holidays in the cancer ward. She brandishes her prosthesis, and thrillingly, Ziggy looks. Tessa says she first experienced the void in her hospital bed, reading an age-inappropriate giftbook that included the more uplifting parts of Sartre. Seinfeld had come next—on the recommendation of a kindly nurse, who said it was a show about nothingness.

  Tessa grins at Ziggy. “George Costanza is pure death drive.”

  Ziggy smiles uneasily. Once again she has only an abstract sense of what Tessa is talking about. The cyborg says she watched all nine seasons of Seinfeld in recovery, swallowing lukewarm Jell-O while the neurotic Jewish bachelor maintained a glib existential stasis that Tessa found deeply soothing. She made her peace with nothingness. Returning to school, Tessa felt pleasantly numb and no longer cared that the other girls were prettier, thinner, and had both of their arms. They were clearly frightened of existence, and every moment of their lives was an aestheticized dodging of the void. All the sunshine and swimming and organic lunches were a vain attempt to seem at home in the world, as if this could save them from the ultimate fact of nothingness. Then Tessa had read “A Cyborg Manifesto” and discovered a female theorist who hated the popular girls too.

  Listening to this, Ziggy thinks of her father. Jeff has recently discovered swimming and mateship and his capacity for building muscle. This past weekend Ziggy had been woken by loud bellows, and run downstairs to find four buff, shirtless men yelling at the rugby match on TV. Her father has always been a towering grayish blur—chest cowed by his ectomorphic hunch. But that morning Jeff Klein was radiant. He had pectorals, biceps. They were golden and glowing against the faded ethnic weave that covered the couch. Jeff’s new swimming buddies perched around him. One of them—a vast, sunburned shouldermass—had offered her a beer shandy. At nine o’clock in the morning. Australia was slaughtering New Zealand in South Africa or some combination of those three; whichever it was, the rugby was early and the beers were very inappropriate.

  Until now Ziggy had mostly dismissed her father’s new hobby as a thin branch on the wintry tree of his obscurely dull existence—accountant at a large corporation who did five A.M. ocean swims to counteract the drudgery. But lately he had started flying to remote islands up the east coast, where crocodiles nested in ocean lagoons and jellyfish netted the shorelines like lacy sheets. And now these men. Smooth, tan rectangles like luxury leather suitcases, performing friendly headlocks then spanking one another’s bottoms. That morning, Ziggy saw how her father’s distant, depressive aura had sloughed off like lizard skin. Jeff Klein was saying “Yessss!” to the television. All week, he’d been adding winky faces to his texts. An emoji of a turd throwing dollar bills down the toilet. As far as Ziggy can tell, her father is still careful with money, but he has now added a disturbing sass. And designer Fitbits. If a wristwatch counts down the minutes till death, a Fitbit accrues steps like shares in immortality, and Jeff suddenly has one in silver and one in rose gold. The evidence is accumulating rapidly against him. Like the pretty girls at school, Jeff Klein is clearly dodging something deeper.

  Or it might be something in plain sight, purple and extroverted. With her maroon frizz and bosomy blouses over sensual tights, Ruth Klein presents as a bolshy, Jewish kinesthetic. According to Ziggy’s mother, if you aren’t baring your soul, the conversation doesn’t count; and Ruth unburdens herself everywhere—clothing store cash registers and cafés and always with an aggressive casualness that makes Ziggy think of public breastfeeding. Her mother runs group workshops specializing in the Sacred Feminine. Women meet daily in her living room to weep and dance and anoint one another’s foreheads with body paint and bindis. Ruth subscribes to a belief system she picked up at an
Indian ashram in the early nineties. She’d told Ziggy that Shunyata’s teachings focused on drawing distinctions between the genders in quest of a satisfying sexual union and pathway to God. Throughout history, Man had used Woman as a measure of his own difference—assigning her the baser physical virtues while raising himself to loftier spiritual and intellectual planes. Ruth doesn’t believe in gender equality. Because Woman is not Man. She is better. Woman is being, eternity, and life itself. She is the Source, the elemental substance that Man sought to separate himself from, to feel himself as a distinct presence, an ego or personality closer to his narcissistic notion of a Supreme Being. Man has denied Woman her totality, calling the highest, most impenetrable matter “God,” which Ruth believes is just more of Woman.

  Manipulating the guru’s theology into something Ruth calls “the Magnetic Poles,” her workshops acquaint women with their feminine natures then encourage them to take the final step—dissolving back into existence by merging (in the Kleins’ swimming pool) with the Masculine. Ziggy’s mother thinks sex should be a cosmic dance between the genders. Full of mystery and risk. “A woman discovers herself inside a seduction, which is a negotiation; it’s very deep and very powerful.” On her sassier days: “And anyway, agency is just an illusion.”

  The constellation therapy is used to decipher which parents have damaged the women’s sense of self and then forgive them for it. Ruth has also added an artistic component where the women achieve further release through the decorating of symbolic pillows. There are fetus-shaped inner-child pillows for cradling; phallus pillows for kicking; and labial pillows for apologizing to then adorning with rhinestones. Ziggy understands why her father might prefer to spend his time submerged in freezing water.