Inappropriation Page 3

  Ruth is committed to her guru’s philosophy, though in the last two decades some of the ideas have badly dated. Shunyata (or Shuni as her disciples referred to her) compared priests and monks to fascists, calling them all obsessive-compulsive perverts. She made gay jokes about beloved celebrity philanthropists. Shuni wore a skullcap, reflector aviators, and a pointy-shouldered silver sports jacket like some sort of intergalactic matriarchal messiah. Toward the end, things had gone awry at the ashram—Shuni, allegedly high on nitrous, performing dentistry on her devotees and making everyone wear maroon. Ruth had already left by the time Shuni spent the treasury on a vast collection of high-end Jet Skis. When accused, the guru merely giggled that her corruption was part of “the big cosmic joke.”

  Ziggy’s mother has publicly distanced her own therapeutic work from Shunyata’s, while conserving the guru’s contentious disdain for gender politics. Ruth’s convictions around the gender binary have hung in there like her allegiance to the color purple. She believes that women are relational, intuitive, nurturing, and emotional; and to increase estrogen levels, they should wear flowing garments and submerge themselves in warm water. She says second-wave feminism went too far: producing ballbreakers like her own mother and denying the inherent softer qualities of Woman, qualities that third-wavers then also dismissed as “binary” in the quest to make everybody feel included.

  The Magnetic Poles also prescribes testosterone-building behaviors for men. Your husband should be man enough to decide where you are going for dinner, to book concert tickets and weekends away, to insist you wear the sexy, sheer nightie and then shag you in it. And afterward, your man should be man enough to lie there, look deep into your eyes, and see exactly what your heart desires for breakfast. Despite his recent macho awakening, it seems to Ziggy that her father is still failing Ruth’s tests. Jeff never makes any demands. Ziggy has not once seen him stand in meaningful eye contact with his wife, insisting she put on a nice dress because he can tell she feels like brunch at the Four Seasons. Ziggy’s dad sort of drifts along behind Ruth—collecting receipts, extinguishing small fires. Ziggy has overheard fights, accusations of you never pinch my bum. Ruth says it isn’t masculine to read twenty Yelp reviews before choosing a restaurant. Just pick one! she yells at Ziggy’s father. Just tell me what we are doing and I’ll do it! He rarely does. Ziggy’s mother makes all the decisions. She chose their unusual, open-plan house with its triangular atrium, painting the walls in reds and dark salmons, giving it the meaty smother of a womb. Jeff enjoys his minimal homelife in the small office off the main bedroom, playing his old Bowie records and eating elaborate gourmet snacks. Ruth occasionally sees clients up in this mezzanine, its shelves crammed with books like Pan and the Nightmare and Meeting the Madwoman; below these is a crimson sofa where her private clients sit and weep. Sinking into its cushions, Ziggy can feel the cumulative sadness like a cool mist. Her brother refuses to sit on this piece of furniture, calling it “the Sofa of a Thousand Tears.”

  AFTER SCHOOL TESSA TAKES ZIGGY on a tour of Kandara’s car pool queue. White women who collect their progeny in sheer yoga-wear, chauffeuring boys’ school drive-bys with the Top 40 up, windows down. Women addicted to Instagramming their barista-crush’s latte art; mums who gym themselves manic then endorphin-buy more yoga pants and Apple accessories. Mothers who, every afternoon at three, quit torturing housemaids to go suck the life from their daughters and the compliments from their sons all the way up until bedtime, when they turn (abusively) to their catatonic husbands for further emotional sustenance. For some unexplained reason, Tessa calls these women the Israelites. Ziggy studies the bronzed Pilates arms elbowing out of open windows, blond-streaked ponytails bouncing to bass-y dance tracks. As if the promised land is an Ibiza nightclub with drive-thru spray-tan. Ziggy wants to better understand Tessa’s metaphor. To know if it is anti-Semitic or if being a WASP might, in fact, come naturally to a Jew? Exiting through the white curlicued gates of their Anglican girls’ school, Ziggy wonders aloud how bumper stickers for boys’ school rowing teams chime with Exodus. Tessa’s explanation is simple.

  “They’re slaves to the patriarchy.”

  Ziggy is relieved that the central enemy is not the Jews. “So Egyptians are the oppressors?”

  Tessa balks. “Do you see any Egyptians around here?”

  Ziggy points a nervy finger at the cyborg’s eyeliner.

  “Men are the oppressors, Ziggy. Men.” Tessa sighs in exasperation. “Moses made the Israelites wander the desert for forty years so that they would forget their bondage. Which explains the amnesia between third-wave and postfeminism. Basically, Haraway and the Cates.” She eyes Ziggy sharply. “But the car pool queue has just internalized their own oppression. Like the Israelis.”

  “You mean the Israelites,” Ziggy mutters.

  “I mean the Israelis who oppress the Palestinians.”

  Mortified, Ziggy tries to distance herself from Tessa’s metaphor. “At the Wailing Wall I wished for a two-state solution.”

  Tessa nods approvingly, turning her animosity back to the line of idling, enslaved mothers. But a burning hub of activity has surfaced on Ziggy’s upper lip. When her parents took them to Israel last summer, Ziggy didn’t wish for a two-state solution. She had cast her mind back as far as the airport duty-free and then wished for a pair of Gucci sunglasses. Now Tessa has made her feel both guilty and persecuted. A feeling that, she supposes, is very Israeli.

  Tessa concludes their tour with a final generalization. “Kandara girls are just like their mums. They go to uni to meet their future husbands, who are just like their dads.”

  Ziggy knows this isn’t strictly true—the school brochure boasted an impressive list of successful women who had graduated from Kandara. High Court judges, esteemed scientists, and many members of parliament. Even their prime minister spent three terms writing history papers while admiring that magnificent view. It is difficult to know how much of Tessa’s contempt for rich, white women is Haraway and how much of it is inspired by Tessa’s own mother. Being a cyborg, Tessa doesn’t identify as “woman-born.” A convenience, as Mrs. McBride is the cruel overlord of five Filipino housemaids and afternoon drunk driver of two Mercedes Benzes. Or what Tessa calls “a patriarchal capitalist who happens to have a vagina.”

  Despite this militant infidelity to her own Israelite, the one part of “A Cyborg Manifesto” that appears to be missing is the Marxism. It seems neither Tessa nor Lex have any desire to give up money—Lex needs three laptops to produce her own rap albums, and Tessa needs multiple extracurricular performance classes plus summer workshops at film acting academies in London and L.A. But mostly, actual feminist socialism implies that nobody gets to be famous and special and morally superior to anybody else. Class privilege is what results from aspirations like theirs, so Ziggy’s friends have not abolished it.

  UNLIKE ZIGGY’S JEWISH SCHOOL—fortressed by ten-foot walls crowned with shards of glass, added after the Second Intifada—Kandara’s pretty picket fences don’t interfere with its spectacular vista. The pearly pages of the opera house, that handsome span of bridge, the tight clump of skyscrapers like blue bills squeezed in a fist. The school’s website has a live feed of the panorama from the oval, and at any time of day or night you can see the whole city as Kandara students see it—in darling miniature like a sweeping diorama. This expansive view might have emboldened the girls, inspiring second-wave levels of feminist ambition, had it not included Randalls Boys.

  The pillared monstrosity of the boys’ school assembly hall dominates the hill opposite Kandara. Ziggy often sees her peers staring blissfully over the harbor, sunning their cheeks in little boy gaze. And when they aren’t near a window, there is always Snapchat. Ziggy can feel boy specters gawking in the hallways, the bathrooms, on the sectional sofa of the year-ten common room. Boys tingle under the skin, as hyperactive and inscrutable as her eczema.

  But Tessa and Lex have found a way to transcend Kandara’s oppressive social system or,
as Tessa calls it, “upper-middle-class hetero-patriarchal whiteness.” They have a method, a practice. And it is not feminist activism. Her friends have no plan to liberate their tenth-grade sisters, and their strategy seems, at least superficially, pretty counterintuitive. Ziggy’s friends spend their afternoons hanging out at the mall.

  That first delirious afternoon, Ziggy trails Tessa and Lex around Bondi Junction’s six-story shopping complex, steeling herself for malicious male bullying: snickers of “pancake chest” or a barely kinder “mozzie bites.” Leaning over the fifth-floor railing, wedged between her friends, the atrium below looks as dense and interesting as an aquarium. Even the sterile gleam of white tile and halogen is warmer today, their three bodies pressed together, the air bunching in humid like tinsel. It is amazing to Ziggy that intimacy has found her, so fast and in such cool clothes. Then Tessa turns her head, slow and mechanical, deliberate as an actress. Her eyes twinkle. “He’s watching us.”

  Ziggy’s friends take off, bolting down the concourse toward a bedding store and veering left at the last moment into King of Knives. Ziggy jogs after them, glancing around anxiously for the offending onlooker. But she sees only stroller-mothers and the shuffling elderly. No droves of malevolent schoolboys, not even a leering continental salami vendor. Inside King of Knives, Ziggy finds her friends panting behind a Leatherman display case. They smile at her with a beguiling, almost sexual, thrill.

  “Was it the janitor?” Ziggy tries.

  Tessa gives her a pitying look. “Why, because he’s African?”

  “No!” Ziggy’s face scorches. “Because he’s the only man in here.”

  “It was a white man,” Lex informs her. “A tall white man in a suit.”

  The pair withdraw from their post with exaggerated trepidation, peering anxiously in every direction—even up at the ceiling. Tessa wipes her brow and Lex places a hand to her heaving chest. Ziggy can tell they are acting, but this only makes her love them more.

  Next, they take her downstairs to the train terminal, where the three of them board the Illawarra line to Central Station. This is the grittiest place they know: the low, interminable tunnel of the Eddy Avenue underpass. Ziggy has always found this thoroughfare bright and cheerful—with its rush of suited commuters and Dreamtime mural in polished mosaic. But her friends are gifted fabricators. They swerve between the pedestrian traffic—endowing all men with lechery and forcing ambiguous eye contact with the dodgy-looking anarchist punk crayoning beside his kelpies. Again, after Tessa gives the signal (this time: “He’s got a stiffy!”), the two girls run screaming down the tunnel. Ziggy dashes after them, trembling with sympathetic terror.

  Intuitively, Ziggy understands their game. The potent mix of punishment and make-believe is familiar from her own culture. There is fasting for forgiveness on Yom Kippur, Passover’s salted parsley as a proxy for bitter tears, and then there is locking oneself in a darkened closet with an eccentric SS officer. Like Ziggy’s Judaism, her friends’ feminism employs complicated rituals to inflict mild trauma and so dodge the worst afflictions of their forebears. When the girls break for bubble tea in Chinatown, Tessa describes their extracurricular activity as “Method acting.”

  “It’s hard to get catcalled at an all girls’ school,” she explains. “Especially when lesbian is the main insult.”

  “Plus,” Lex adds casually, “if we don’t do these dares, we won’t be famous in America.”

  And this is where their culture eclipses Ziggy’s. She would prefer a system with tangible rewards but as far as she can tell, Jewish heaven involves sitting at the kids’ table in a room full of priestly elders for an eternal Friday night dinner. Whereas Ziggy’s friends have skipped over all practical plans for feminist liberation, and jumped straight to the promised land. America is their reward for self-inflicted female trauma. America had a civil rights movement; it is older, more mature, and the comedians know how to talk about issues on late night television. America calls to Tessa and Lex from multiple media platforms; inciting them to be braver, freer, more traumatized, individualistic, and opinionated than everybody else. Specifically, America wants Lex to be a famous rapper and Tessa a famous actress.

  “I’ve been banned from school recitals,” Lex boasts.

  Tessa enumerates the many ways Kandara has failed to nurture Lex’s talent. That forcing her to have vocal lessons with Mr. Tellyson—a rumored pederast from Randalls with his Gumnut Baby ties and perfect posture—was a form of ethnic cleansing. Lex doesn’t need the school’s help, Tessa tells Ziggy. Their friend has TuneSmith and a YouTube channel and a celebrity rapper she Snapchats.

  “When school’s finished, I’m moving to Brooklyn,” Lex explains.

  “Is that where you’re from?”

  “I’m from Rose Bay. But thanks for the compliment.”

  Tessa’s vocational path is slightly more confounding. She wants to star in movies like those gritty French ones with the real sex scenes. Ziggy knows the type. She has stumbled on them late at night, flicking between the public television stations. Where women are graphically raped to make a point about misogyny. Lots of bruised legs hoisted against concrete pylons. Smeared makeup, pubic hair, cellulite. And then, in the loveless marriages and relentless banality, Tessa sees a special European nothingness that feels deeply familiar. As an existential Australian with an Egyptian grandmother and one arm, Tessa feels uniquely positioned to share this profound sense of emptiness with American audiences. Obviously, most sex is just filling the void, but Tessa will still need real-life experience to repeat it convincingly on camera. When Ziggy asks her friends what they do on weekends, Tessa answers, “Method acting.”

  Ziggy isn’t sure what exactly she’ll be famous for, but right now, it doesn’t matter. She loves the cold kick in her chest as she dodges her Nazi’s casual face-slaps or the swinging briefcase of a predacious male commuter. Running from imaginary attackers, her head gets still and clear and Ziggy feels invulnerable. Tessa and Lex have dismissed her white privilege and welcomed her into the diverse cyborgian tribe. Whether it is because of her prepubescent body, her light eczema, or her hooknose, Ziggy cannot say. It seems unlikely Tessa would include Jews in the “women of color” category because, despite the Holocaust, they allegedly control Hollywood. Regardless, Ziggy feels accepted. Whenever bus drivers ask an alighting Tessa how she lost her arm, the peppy cyborg tells them “shark attack,” then nudges Ziggy. “But my friend gouged out its eyes.” Her inclusion in Tessa’s trauma makes Ziggy feel like family.

  Chapter 2

  Hitler Youth arrive one night while Ziggy is brushing her teeth. They think she can probably go a bit faster. When she finishes in under twenty seconds, Ziggy feels euphoric, and Hitler Youth urge her to set records in the areas of hair-washing, body-drying, and eyebrow-tweezering. So she sets records, then smashes them. Now Hitler Youth switch tactics. They tell her she is quick and coordinated like a boy. That’s sexist, Ziggy thinks back. Hitler Youth don’t care about sexist. Look in the mirror, they tell her. Ziggy does and sees her little torso, once blankly familiar, now ribbed and rangily boy. Hitler Youth lurk in the dreggy depths of Ziggy’s mind—a scratchy illustration of some blond lederhosen’d boys she saw once in a Holocaust book for children. Their mouths flap like crude puppets, but their words are piercingly clear.

  Ziggy can remember watching The Sound of Music as a kid with her grandmother. How they sang mightily along until they got to Rolf and Liesl’s duet. Whenever the imminent Nazi appeared on-screen, Ziggy’s grandmother got quiet and blinky. The air seemed to condense, holding its breath with Ziggy’s. It made the love scene more excruciating, thinking her grandmother somehow knew and disapproved of the tingling feeling Ziggy was having between her legs, and over a Nazi. And now, in one dreadful evening, an entire squad of Rolfs have occupied her imagination.

  The next morning they are there again as Ziggy walks to school. She can see their brown lederhosen through the dense lantana, and hear their German singsong among t
he varied birdcall. At lunch, these Nazis-of-the-mind tell her to eat every last chip crumb then turn the packet inside out and lick off all the grease. They tell her she is waifish and gangly. It almost seems they want to help her. Drink this liter of soy milk, they say as she stands before the common room’s refrigerator. Estrogen will grow your breasts and, they counter, give you cancer. At the bathroom mirrors—surrounded by lip-balming, stomach-sucking girls—Hitler Youth tell Ziggy she might be smart but it comes out sharp and mannish through her small, square mouth; that her oblong-shaped head makes her seem drably cerebral; that she lacks sensuality and could never pull off that sultry staring face that endows the other girls with a mysterious feminine aura. Ziggy’s vagina is bald, they remind her—prim and sexless as a little pink peace sign. An excess of flesh with a single, urinary function. Shower in the dark until further notice, demand Hitler Youth. Or better yet, don’t shower at all. In a drought-prone country, the Nazis argue, Ziggy should stick to the quick rinse-off and the number-twos-only flush.

  Ziggy’s house sits on an over-irrigated hill beside the topiaried fortress of the Polish embassy. Year-round, buff young men snap their shears at the thick juniper hedges that lend the consulate grounds a woodsy, European creep. When she gets home from school that day, Hitler Youth instruct Ziggy to stand in her room, curtains open, and remove her top for the embassy gardeners. When nobody looks up, Hitler Youth explain that this is because she has the body of an eleven-year-old boy. Her little brother’s little brother. Twelve-year-old Jacob, who has just started at Randalls Boys and spends most of his extracurricular life online, making jokes in Latin. Ziggy has seen him browsing Hentai sites and Katy Perry videos, which she believes makes her brother internet-sexual. Ziggy would prefer a mild, Millennial kink like this to the sickening thrill she gets crawling into the bathroom cupboard or now, staring dejected at the gardeners, when Hitler Youth tell her to hoist a leg on the windowsill and look up her own skirt. But from this angle, Ziggy’s green school bloomers have a disturbingly gonad-like bulge. She tries to flatten it with her fingers and then presses down forcefully with her whole palm. The pleasure kneads into disgust and quickly Ziggy is ripping at the leg holes, tearing off her panties and attacking the rogue fabric with her craft scissors. When she is finished, Ziggy crouches between the angry green pieces of her underwear like a hunted animal. If this were one of Ruth’s workshops, Ziggy’s shredded garment would be an emotional victory—her feelings finally expressed, her voice restored. But Hitler Youth are unmoved by catharsis. They think Ziggy’s violent episode suggests high testosterone and the possibility of introverted testicles. She knows that these can sometimes drop late, random as asteroids. Ziggy hates being vulnerable but not enough to want balls. She lies on her back and experiences a very Jewish sense of alienation: on her bedroom floor Ziggy is an insignificant speck in an uncaring universe, specifically chosen to feel bad about it.