Inappropriation Read online

  “Hey!” Ruth calls to the lavender-haired lady fussing with her cross-stitch. “Do you guys stock tampons?”

  The woman gives a short, mortified headshake.

  “So sexist,” Ziggy mutters under her breath, and pulls the maxis off their shelf.

  “Christian women who hate their vaginas,” Ruth extrapolates.

  But for once, Ziggy thinks her mother might be right. She sees the logic: the Pope hates dildos and condoms, and then there is miraculous, bloodless Mary.

  “If I don’t die from period pain, I’m making that into a meme.”

  Ruth’s face is incandescent. She clearly doesn’t know what a meme is, but it’s the sentiment that’s important. Ziggy is on her team. They storm back up to the counter, maxis in hand.

  “And some ibuprofen, please,” Ruth says, unsmiling.

  The woman jerks her wrist rudely as she hands the pill bottle over.

  “We’ve all got one,” says Ziggy. Which feels, emotionally, true.

  IN BED THAT NIGHT, Ziggy thinks again about Gerhard. His aristocratic heritage. His Scandinavian progeny. How her mother and the masseuse had seemed so hungry to know more about him. Maybe Dr. LeStrange is right: that history has groomed women for listening and their own subjective annihilation. It makes sense of Ziggy’s Nazi fantasies, the feeling she had watching Irréversible, and the fact that she can’t stop thinking about the German despite his not even asking Ziggy why she wears a camera on her head. As she starts to drift off, Ziggy pictures Kate’s Instagram—with all its carefully curated images and aphorisms—and thinks Kate must know, deep down, that the boys aren’t really paying attention.

  ZIGGY SPENDS THEIR FINAL DAY lounging on the back of a giant pool floatie shaped like a white swan. Ruth takes the pink flamingo. With a few ibuprofen in her stomach and the sun on her belly, Ziggy feels peaceful. It is a relief to finally have her period. In her bathing suit, she can see her nipples have soft new puff. It is strange to have only just noticed her emergent breasts, like two small stingrays rising slowly through sand. Hitler Youth offer predictable insults—they think her breasts are puny enough to be merely an allergic reaction. But Ziggy’s period makes their main point moot, which has severely compromised their authority. They linger at the dim base of her brain, firing anemic flares.

  Mother and daughter float all the way down the creek to a huge purple amethyst standing erect in the grass. Here, the water swells to a furry brown basin hemmed in by tall grass. This, Ziggy decides, must be the end of the creek. She peers around for a tree house. Despite the strong intuition she has that Gerhard wouldn’t care if she lived or died, Ziggy would really like to see him again. She doesn’t want to return to school an ordinary girl—primed for boyfriends and a life of disappointment and shame. Ziggy wants to come back stripped of all social illusions, and with a really weird sex story.

  “Doesn’t that German guy live here?” Ziggy asks her mother, rolling with great, lethargic indifference onto her back.

  “I think so.” Ruth squints through the trees. “Up on that hill.”

  “He invited us to come by,” says Ziggy, hiding her blush in the swan’s neck. “So I could film the tree house.”

  Her mother seems dubious. “You got the German to break his no-camera rule?”

  Ziggy knows Ruth has issues with the Aryan race. Not so much from inherited Holocaust trauma but rather a sexual trauma that occurred twenty years ago on an Indian train, when a ponytailed German man sat opposite her and rubbed himself through the flap in his Thai fisherman pants.

  “He said to come by,” Ziggy persists. “But it would also be cool to just film from outside.”

  “He might be with a client.”

  “I can be discreet.”

  Ruth giggles, then starts paddling for the bank. She looks back brightly. “Come on then!”

  Her mother’s tone is irksomely sororal, and Ziggy is beginning to feel that all the forced intimacy of the mother-daughter weekend aims toward an acknowledgment that they are two women sharing one body. Ziggy slides her swan farther up the bank, away from Ruth’s flamingo.

  The air inside the rain forest is moist and ticklish. Sun rays splinter through the trees like giant quartz crystals. Ruth keeps pausing to admire the light.

  “Film this, Zigs!”

  Ziggy aims her camera at a mossy branch, panning along a strip of hoary patches like ancient psoriasis. Which is nice, but Ziggy is anxious to get to Gerhard’s tree house, where she is sure there will be handcuffs and vibrators just lying around. When she thinks of his big meaty arms, her brain still tingles. That hand on her neck, jangling Ziggy into many fine silver bracelets.

  The first thing she sees is the rope ladder. Her eyes scale the tree trunk to a lumpy wooden structure sunk in the Gum’s crotch. Even Gerhard’s tree house has a bulbous, bodily quality. Ziggy wants to get inside, where she imagines it is as dark and juicy as a mouth. She only wishes Ruth weren’t coming with her.

  At the foot of the tree, her mother makes a loud, spirited coowee! then winks at Ziggy with far too much of her face. “Just giving him some warning,” she explains.

  Ziggy watches the window—envisioning a naked woman with sex-eyes and electrocuted hair, facing out at them with dark, threatening nipples. The latch turns.

  “Wilkommen!” Gerhard says and leans out over the ledge, almost smiling. “Please leave your shoes on the grass.”

  THE MAIN ROOM HAS FOUR enormous orange beanbags and a low wooden table. Gerhard sets out cold meats and cheeses. A very German meal, he explains. Ziggy imagines her mother would enjoy this life: limited food preparation and pillows for furniture. Before they sit, Gerhard gives his tour—walking them to the second room, announcing “sleeping quarters,” then turning swiftly back to the kitchenette. Ziggy lingers. The bedroom has a deeper smell: damp towels and the oily fug of scalps, but also a musky something else that makes her body feel thick and slow. She scans a cluster of bottles on the bedside table. Tiny travel shampoos filled with blood-dark liquid. Maybe this is the ayahuasca. Or the San Pedro. Ziggy doesn’t ask; if she is going to get any, it probably won’t be in front of her mother.

  Over dinner, Gerhard and Ruth discuss their work, swapping amusing anecdotes that violate patient confidentiality. Ziggy is far more interested in Gerhard’s food presentation. On one side of the platter there is some pale ham layered in little lippy folds like a giant vulva. Just below this lay several stout gherkins. Which feels deliberate: as if Gerhard is catcalling her from his meat display. When their eyes meet, Ziggy’s cheeks flush, and turning her head she feels an airy drag of radiance.

  Soon the conversation moves to ayahuasca. Ruth leans in conspiratorially over the table.

  “Don’t tell your father I told you, but . . .”

  Ziggy should have guessed her mother has tried it. She tells Ziggy and Gerhard about the white shaman who uses ayahuasca to take people deep into Dreamtime mythology. Ruth says she did it years ago in a conference room at a Holiday Inn near the airport. They’d spent the first forty minutes vomiting into plastic sand buckets while the shaman played a didgeridoo and blew smoke in their faces. Then Ruth began to feel euphoric, seeing small trails of light and patterns, and eventually, with the shaman’s guidance, she could make out the gigantic black serpent curled around the perimeter of the room. Later, Ruth felt a stabbing sensation in her foot. The shaman inspected it and gave her a diagnosis: past-life snakebite. She took Ruth’s foot in her hands and bit down on the heel. Then she sucked out the poison.

  Ziggy is horrified. “Why did you let her do that?”

  “It was the site of a trauma,” says Ruth.

  “A foot trauma?”

  “Your grandmother’s shoes.”

  Now Ruth tells Gerhard about her mother’s shoe collection and how she’d made Ruth wear a tiny ill-fitting pair of Christian Diors to her own wedding. Ruth describes the violent hora she was made to dance with a group of drunken Hungarian guests of unknown origin, the subsequent trips to the
podiatrist. Ziggy notices that Gerhard is barely listening. It is only when Ruth rolls a large strip of ham into a fat tube and slides the whole thing into her mouth, that he seems to reanimate. Together, they watch the meat bounce between Ruth’s teeth, tossed by the pink creature of her tongue. The German frowns. Ziggy realizes her mother is chewing with an open mouth, and feels ashamed for both of them.

  “I’d like to try it,” Ziggy says to Gerhard, willing his gaze away from Ruth’s mouth.

  But her mother is the one who responds. “Try what?”

  “Ayahuasca.”

  Ruth nods and then, still chewing, unfortunately speaks again. “It’s great for working through family-of-origin issues.”

  The German makes a dispassionate tongue-click of concurrence. “It is,” he says. “But also, you have to be ready.”

  “You don’t think she’s ready?”

  “I don’t.”

  Ziggy is shocked. “Why not?”

  “The camera,” Gerhard says flatly. “It’s a mask.”

  Ziggy feels betrayed; she has so far kept the GoPro tucked away in her bag. “I wouldn’t wear it while I took the drugs.”

  “It’s not a drug.”

  “It’s not a mask,” Ziggy snaps. “You should read Donna Haraway.”

  “Should I.” The German’s voice shaves off icily. Ziggy isn’t going to get the drugs. Not only is she not going to get the drugs, she isn’t going to shapeshift or time-travel or partake of any other wild scenarios that might have brought his big, menacing body into tantra with her own. While her mother tries to steer them toward a lighthearted accounting of the local yoga schools, Ziggy sulks at the table. Then she excuses herself to the bathroom. The toilet is through Gerhard’s bedroom: a skimpy stall without a sink. She closes the bedroom door behind her and sits on his bed. From the other room, she can hear snippets of hubristic therapist-speak. Phrases like “transitional object” and “teased at school.” Ziggy pulls the GoPro from her backpack. It feels good to fit the camera on over her forehead, angle it around the room. Shitting in the space. Ziggy films herself raising a plastic bottle from the side table. She holds its little bloody belly up to the light.

  Beside the full ones, there are a few empty bottles bunched together, and Ziggy takes one of these with her into the bathroom. She holds the tiny receptacle below her stream and fills it with bloody piss. When she is finished, Ziggy reenters the bedroom and switches her bottle for a red one. Doing this, she experiences a very pure thrill. It feels powerfully clear to her that if anyone should be poisoned, it is the male tantra master, not the Cates. Ziggy takes a final slow 360 of Gerhard’s bedroom, removes her camera, and rejoins the adults outside.

  Chapter 11

  Returning to Kandara, Ziggy has a charitable new feeling for her peers. When she sees Penny Ward walking around with a booger fluttering in the breeze of her nostril, Ziggy makes a subtle flicking gesture instead of filming it. When the girls lie out for a leg-tanning session on the common room balcony, skirts hiked to asses like a production line of lime-flavored Paddle Pops, Ziggy stays inside, reading. Even when she catches the Cates practicing some sort of belly dance routine in the bathrooms, Ziggy walks directly to the stalls—gaze averted. The camera still gives her days meaning and focus, even if she is not trying to humiliate her peers. However, grade ten remains wary of Ziggy. Which is understandable. She has traumatized them. Ziggy is sorry for this and for insulting Tessa with her convoluted cyborg theory. The mother-daughter weekend has clarified some issues. How it feels to be defined by your body. How it feels to be catcalled by a sausage. For Ziggy, being female is a full-body blush when you want to disappear. In place of her scanty theories, Ziggy now feels like a physical fact—the words natty19 used to describe herself stretched out on a yoga mat in her favorite leotard. All Ziggy’s misunderstandings seem glaring now: a prosthetic arm is not the same as a flat chest; an oppressed butt is different from an unoppressed one; a GoPro is not a phantom penis or even a religious head scarf—at least not for Ziggy. Longtime conflations like PMS and PTSD also expose the flaws in her thinking. She drafts apologies to Tessa, but it is impossible to explain how Ziggy came to the conclusion that “fag hag” seemed like a joke she was allowed to make. She still doesn’t know what Lex is doing with the Cates but then again, Ziggy has never really understood her one-time friend. Trying to force this confusion into a story makes Ziggy feel slippery; the way her body slid around under those evil, shoulder-baring peasant tops.

  If she can finish the semester quietly, Ziggy might be able to return refreshed and revamped for the last two months of the year. At her old school, girls often emerged from summer holidays with a woman’s body and some facial piercings and were suddenly popular. Ziggy doesn’t think she’ll ever enjoy skirts but she could spend October experimenting with hair dyes and chunky rings and possibly still attend the formal. Feeling newly oppressed by heterosexual desires is not a win for Ziggy. It is miserable to be a passive agent in a sexual ecosystem designed to annihilate your essence. Obviously it would be preferable to drink the ayahuasca and transcend social illusions altogether, but she is too afraid to take it alone. Ziggy needs a friend to help her transcend the concept of friendship, and enter a new enlightened stage of life. But nobody at school will even talk to her.

  That Wednesday afternoon a flyer appears outside Ziggy’s bedroom door. At first she thinks Mother Lode must be some kind of women’s workshop and that she is now being spammed by her mother’s clients; or worse, Hitler Youth have switched sides. But reading the imperative to join her comrades in “post-DSM manic euphoria,” Ziggy realizes that this must be Rowena’s nonbinary drag show. Ziggy is moved by the gesture, and Rowena’s willingness to forgive and accept her for abandoning her grandmother in the mall. Last time she checked Facebook, Tim was schooling someone for making kale jokes about a “Trans Violence” pie chart.

  It is not my job to explain the acronym TV to you, a white cisgender straight male, unless you want to pay me for my emotional toil.

  Ziggy found this entirely unreasonable, particularly because the pie chart did look like a pizza and Tim’s acronym was obviously versatile. She worries he might be the kind of person who treats vegetables like the new proletariat. But Tessa and Lex really liked him. There is something sweet about Tim. Whatever his preference, Ziggy feels a comfortable sexual incompatibility between the two of them. If Tim tied his hair back and didn’t talk about baking, he could make a very presentable formal date.

  The drag show is in Kings Cross—the city’s red-light district—which despite its proximity to Ziggy’s home has always seemed a mysterious underworld of sexual deviance. She knows the tall, shadowy terrace houses on Victoria Street with their ornate iron balconies stacked like many dark, vampiric mouths. Driving past them with her parents, Ziggy has strained to see the women propped in dim doorways, a flash of nipple in the dusky glow. Compared to the main drag, these brotheled blocks of Kings Cross have only a crepuscular eroticism. One street south lies the true heart of sexual darkness: that manic hub of strip clubs and rough pubs and cheap sandwich shops where meth heads dine al fresco on beer schooners and chips. Darlinghurst Road is a place where strippers dominate the pavement, baiting tourists while munching on meat pies; where internet cafés are still democratically plentiful; and the police swagger in fat, sated packs, chuckling at the local hobos piddling into the fountain. Walking from the train station to the drag club, Ziggy is captivated by everything she sees. Backpackers vomiting into the gutter, junkies loudly plotting to rob their own mothers, a white man with dreadlocks playing an electric didgeridoo. She finds the club in a back lane beside a café packed with old Arabic men smoking hookah and younger ones playing chess, passing joints back and forth between them. Ziggy has never been anywhere so cosmopolitan. A boundariless place that still has a fully realized self and a terrific sense of humor.

  The atmosphere inside the club is drastically different from Dong Dong’s. Ziggy takes a long narrow corridor to a
back room lit by a snake of green lights strung above the stage. This dance floor is neatly packed: a younger and meticulously androgynous audience. Ziggy sees flashes of brilliance all around her: a thin string of pearls dipped into a dark ruff of chest hair, a diamante drop earring that spells the acronym CUNT. She scans the room for Tim in his white pajamas then gets distracted by a blue light blinking in the thick of the crowd. The music is suddenly loud and synthetic and the bodies ahead shuffle quickly sideways, clearing a space in the center of the room. The two long, overalled people in front of her drift apart, and in their wake Ziggy sees the dancer: a dark-skinned woman, topless and moving with anxious, intricate gestures. Her breasts are dotted with Day-Glo paint, and she wears a traditional indigenous skirt. On her shoulder hangs a Hessian sack with a huge blue F on it. Each step sends her bag swinging sideways, and the bounty of fluorescent tube lights shift, throwing sharp blue rays at the ceiling. Ziggy remembers a recent news story about an Aboriginal welcoming ceremony performed for the queen. The dancers had worn traditional body paint over their bare breasts, and their ceremony was later shared on social media. Within hours, Facebook had very insensitively removed these photos, calling their ancient culture “pornographic.” Awe and shame swirl inside her as Ziggy realizes that she is witnessing a true cyborgian woman of color; the Haraway essay come magically to life.

  At interval Ziggy spots Tim, standing in the back corner, holding a bottle of water. He wears his usual all-white apparel, but on his bracelet hand, instead, she sees a silver mesh glove. She moves toward him through the dense and fascinating crowd. When he sees her, Tim points at the GoPro.

  “My mum said you’d started wearing a camera. . . .”

  Ziggy nods nervously. “Did she say why?”

  “No. Maybe something to do with fashion. Or anti-fashion. She said you and your granny had a fight about it in Zara—”

  “I was kind of confused . . .”

  “—which I thought was amazing.”