Inappropriation Read online

  Her father hangs up and then, as usual, rings back fifteen seconds later. This one is a butt dial, and Ziggy yells into the speaker with her usual frustration, “Dad! Hang up the phone!” Ziggy waits, listening to the muffled swish of his pants and some faint Muzak. It sounds like her father is in a shopping center. Which is strange. Jeff buys everything online and his gifts are all “experiences,” like white-water rafting trips through the remote ranges of Tasmania or river surfing tours in harshest alpine New Zealand. In the last argument Ziggy overheard, Ruth told him to just give her ticket to Damo or Gamo or whomever has the biggest biceps for rowing the Milford Sound. Ziggy’s mother says a male shared near-death experience is a gay orgasm for straight little boys still terrified of women.

  It becomes quickly clear from the murmur of female voices and the amplifying pop track that Ziggy’s dad is now not only walking through a mall, he is walking deeper into the throbbing endorphin chamber of a women’s clothing store. Ziggy hears a familiar high ding—the celestial C of a newly vacated fitting room. The sound is one she recognizes from last summer, when her grandmother insisted they buy sports bras in anticipation of the breast-swell that never came. The memory of waiting in line and the sound of those dings—as the humiliation of entering a tiny room to get topless with a septuagenarian D-cup drew closer—has implanted itself in Ziggy’s brain.

  When she gets off the bus, Ziggy goes straight to Victoria’s Secret. It is unlikely that her father is at this particular store in this particular mall, but not impossible. She scans the shop then runs up to the fitting rooms on the second floor. Implausible notions ping through her mind. Jeff has struck up an affair with some sun-browned C-cup he met swimming on the Gold Coast; Jeff is buying his wife a present to atone for the affair. Ziggy pumps adrenaline into several flimsy theories, peering under each stall for a pair of men’s leather loafers shuffling around two lurid, stiletto flip-flops. Of course, her father isn’t up here. But it doesn’t matter. Tessa and Lex hover in her mental periphery, and each dramatic head-swivel and ominous narrowing of eyes is a theatrical offering to them. Her father’s deviance nicely maligns Ziggy’s sense of security in a white, patriarchal world, and she marches around the lingerie store in a light, pleasurable panic. Finally, she returns to the changing rooms for a forensic investigation of the floor debris, discovering a feminine wasteland of plastic hangers, discarded knickers, toxic scrunchies, and wide nettings of hair. As Ziggy rises to her feet, a shop assistant in a feathered corset bats her turquoise lashes and smiles like a giant, kindly peacock.

  “Have you lost your mum?” she says sweetly, and holds out a hand.

  Ziggy recoils and moves quickly to the exit. Everything around her—the cornucopian displays of padded bras and panties, the wall-sized TV screens where supermodels stomp raptor-like down catwalks—makes Ziggy feel mocked. The whole store seems designed to bully you into dressing like an emu in a push-up bra. It is a store for Israelites, for the internally patriarchied. Ziggy doesn’t believe Jeff was just buying his wife some undies. Everything she knows about her parents contradicts this possibility. Ruth may have stripped for Jeff but it was out of dingy yoga pants into the fullness of her untamed bush. Ziggy’s mother is always schooling her father in the isms of capitalist pornography. Every ad is sexist and ageist and designed to make men want to have sex with little girls. Ruth sees a vaguely homosexual misogyny in the depictions of lithe females with invisible genitalia. “All the single and sexually neglected mothers have produced a surplus of vaginally phobic men,” she has heard Ruth lecture. “To the enmeshed male, anything untidier than Barbie feels like the jaws of death.” Ziggy makes a final survey of the shop floor then concedes defeat. If her father was ever here, he has already fled Victoria’s Secret with his diabolical bounty.

  Outside, the white glare of the mall is shrill and mingy. On Saturdays, the lower levels swarm with schoolkids and elderly people. Despite their shared habitat, the two demographics take great pains to ignore each other’s existence. In fact, Ziggy often feels like the only member of her generation who knows an old person and has to be seen with them in public. Ruth encourages Ziggy to treat afternoons with her grandmother as an opportunity to practice mindfulness. Old people live in the past, Ruth tells her. Young people in the future. If you can meet your grandmother in the present, you might actually have a nice time. But to be present with Twinkles is to risk dying of embarrassment. You must keep her moving at all times or else hidden away in a restaurant booth. Ziggy’s grandmother is a tiny, richly painted Hungarian who dresses exclusively in shiny animal print. Her real name is Eva, but because 70 percent of her body is always covered in sequins, the sobriquet has erased her birth name from the collective memory.

  It is no surprise then to see Twinkles wading through a sale bin outside Zara. Regardless, the sight of her grandmother triggers a fierce coursing of cortisol.

  “Pippekeh!”

  Ziggy waves discreetly. Already she knows what is coming. If Twinkles isn’t actively shopping, the tireless mall rat will want to sit in a crêperie booth and get orgasmy on chocolate.

  “We get palacsinta!”

  Her grandmother ushers Ziggy to the food court, where they order crepes. When her pickup buzzer vibrates, Twinkles’s hand makes an ecstatic convulsion and she lets out a little squeal. Her grandmother has told Ziggy before that chocolate is what awaits an unmarried woman after seventy. Ziggy might have room for sympathy beside her revulsion if it weren’t for the fact that her grandmother always has a boyfriend.

  At their table, Ziggy watches Twinkles carve along the crepe’s rubbery folds, Nutella oozing out fecally. She wants to get home to focus on the feelings of disgust for both her father and the French rape scene and move swiftly in to the next phase of cyborgism. But her grandmother talks a lot between mouthfuls.

  “You know they now thinking God live in the large intestine?”

  Most of her life, Twinkles was a gastroenterologist and indomitable prankster, playing colonoscopy footage nightly at the dinner table. Ruth has never really recovered. She doesn’t cook for the family, and an ongoing battle over food rages between Ziggy’s parents. Ruth is always telling Jeff that foodie culture is shallow pseudo-classist crap for hedonists. Which seems to hurt his feelings. Whenever Ruth’s cooking amounts to something she calls a “deconstructed salad,” Jeff gets a forsaken look, grumbling that salad is already a deconstruction.

  “It true, my darlink,” her grandmother continues. “They saying we all connected through the same bacteria. The mummies pass the fart.”

  There is always a stack of Gastroenterology Today on Twinkles’s coffee table, and Ziggy has been avoiding eye contact with the magazine’s gruesome cover photos for most of her childhood. She assumes this bit of gut trivia is sourced from its pages. Ziggy glances around the food court to see if anyone under age fifty is within earshot. “Pass the fart?”

  “In her womb the baby get it mother bacteria, which stay in the stomach for the rest of it life. That mean you fart smell like you mummy’s. And that—”

  “Okay.”

  “—Mummy fart like mine.”

  Ziggy nudges her plate away.

  “And it not just mummies. We get the germ from everyone. Our gut is full of other people. Some bacteria make us happy, some angry. Explain why so much irritable bowel syndrome.”

  “What has this got to do with God?”

  “The stomach like a universe.”

  Ziggy decides to ignore her grandmother’s metaphysical nonsense, and there is a brief, restabilizing silence. Then Twinkles presses a hand to her gut and releases a long hissy burp.

  “It all contraction and expansion,” the gastroenterologist extrapolates. “This how the rabbis knew about the Big Bang—they understood digestion.”

  “But the rabbis didn’t talk about the Big Bang.”

  “They did, Pippi! ‘God empty himself into a vacuum then exploded into light.’”

  Ziggy draws a little frowny face in her ch
ocolate sauce. “Rabbis are sexist.”

  “Why?”

  “How they won’t shake your hand in case you have your period.”

  “Because a woman body is the source of life.”

  Ziggy rolls her eyes. Twinkles could be gang-raped by a group of rabbis and call it a clever teaching moment.

  The doctor continues. “When a woman menstruate, it dangerous—the forces of life and death in conversation. Same with kosher—that why you can’t eat the meat in the bottom. Too much life force.”

  Ziggy thinks of Lex and blushes.

  “Why you mad with the rabbis, Chibby?” Her grandmother sits up suddenly, her face a beaming powdered moon. “Did you get you period?”

  Ziggy regurgitates a ball of crepe. She can do these things around her grandmother—the woman is more interested in the behavior of the human digestive system than its emotional corollary.

  Twinkles speaks with medical seriousness. “What happen?”

  “Bad bit.”

  Ziggy considers the possibilities of others in her stomach. How close that sounds to the unbounded inclusivity of cyborg theory. But Twinkles is only accidentally progressive. Really, she’s so far back in the past, she’s still stuck on Genesis. Her grandmother is always molesting science with God.

  “So if a Jew eats baklava, will they get Muslims in their stomach?”

  “Pippi, now you being facetious.”

  “It’s a serious question. And why does God hate gluten so much?”

  Twinkles flicks her wrist dismissively, harassing the long sleeve of silver bracelets, and Ziggy catches sight of the faded number underneath. Twinkles often checks her granddaughter’s arms for tattoos. It seems nothing could be worse than inked Rumi or butterflies on her skin. But Ziggy doesn’t subscribe to the idea that Jewish bodies are sacred. It isn’t just because her new friends are cyborgs; Ziggy has a long-standing feud with her own skin cells. She doesn’t believe that the vast inventory of Jewish dermatologica, including her eczema, is just Hashem’s loving calligraphy.

  “I don’t get what’s so good about being Jewish.”

  Twinkles shrugs. “Nothing particularly good.”

  “We don’t even have a heaven.”

  “Not all about rewards, Pippi. It also about how to live. The chosen people have a big responsibility.”

  “That chosen thing is gross.”

  Twinkles returns to rigorously devouring her crepe. Ziggy focuses on moving the food around her plate, carving out white space, squishing the carnage into compact pieces; her grandmother cannot tolerate waste. The woman spent much of her childhood starving and has subsequently developed a designer shoe fetish. Ziggy’s grandmother has filled three wardrobes and a garage with stylish footwear, and at seventy-nine, she can still walk elegantly in a four-inch heel. Shop assistants applaud her and assure Ziggy her granny is super-cool.

  Twinkles leans in bosomy over the tabletop. “Disgusting,” she spits, eyeing something just beyond Ziggy’s head. Twisting around, Ziggy spots the large woman in a gold velour tracksuit flipping through the Telegraph while her pudgy toddler licks a dripping Bubble O’ Bill. The popular confectionary features a ball of gum gripped in the pink ice cream cheeks of Cowboy Bill, on which is printed Go for Your Guns. A bullet hole winks through his Stetson.

  “Right before dinner?” Twinkles gasps.

  Ziggy sees the hypocrisy dangling from her grandmother’s fork but chooses to keep quiet. She knows this is less about bad parenting than the right-wing newspaper. Populism is a scary idea to a Holocaust survivor, and her grandmother has no respect for the poor and uneducated. To Twinkles, empathy is not innate but rather a learned behavior. Something they teach you in literature studies, Ziggy assumes. At her old school they read a lot of books about oppressed Jews, and at her new school it is all oppressed women. Ziggy wonders what they read in the Western Suburbs, aside from the Daily Telegraph.

  “Ice cream on a cold day?” Twinkles continues, incredulous. “What then you look forward to when the weather warm?” She is taking the Bubble O’ Bill snack very hard.

  “Maybe on hot days the kid gets heroin.”

  Her grandmother chuckles, but Ziggy can tell she has slid into a dark mood. The only thing to pull her out will be talk of boyfriends.

  “Can I see your dating profile?”

  Twinkles whips out her gigantic, glittery slab of phone. “Which one?” she says, poking her nails at the screen with focused precision, as if conjuring web pages through the magic of sparkly acrylic.

  Ziggy scoots in beside her grandmother for a closer view of the SeventiesMatch home page. Attractive white people in billowing white linen smile their obviously early sexagenarian smiles. In the sidebar the real septuagenarians grin humbly in an endless column of sagging gray faces. Twinkles clicks on her own thumbnail and is admitted into her profile. She swipes to her paramours. Or the men who have sent her rose emojis at three dollars each and been granted a single line of conversation. Twinkles’s written English is inferior to her spoken, and Ziggy races hungrily down the dialogue boxes, glimpsing responses like

  I already give you my password

  and

  no thank you too many wrinkle.

  A stirring mix of pity and hilarity rouses Ziggy to pilot her grandmother’s phone.

  “Delete this guy,” Ziggy says, clicking on someone called Islam69 with a head shot of George Clooney. “Where’s the nice one with the sailboat?”

  “He died.”

  “Really?”

  “Probably.”

  “Probably?”

  “He had an operation, and I haven’t hear from him since. So probably die. He was eighty-seven.”

  Ziggy pictures a spotty gray head, tearful behind an oxygen mask. “Why don’t you call him?”

  “If he alive, he call me. Otherwise, I’m not interested.”

  Her grandmother can be brutal like this. Despite her dread of scarcity, Twinkles has very little patience for men. If they stooped too much or wet their pants or lost their driver’s licenses, she dumped them. I like brave men, she has told Ziggy numerous times. Brave and strong and straight as a stick. Ziggy hopes she was referring to their posture.

  Returning to her seat, Ziggy decides to wrap things up and get home to her gender studies. “I have a geography test tomorrow,” she lies.

  “Which countries?”

  “Europe.”

  “Easy,” says Twinkles. “All our family there.”

  Her grandmother gazes a little forlornly across the food court. Twinkles has always hated Australia. After her husband died back in Hungary, she visited many consulates. America didn’t want communists, even ones that looked like Zsa Zsa Gabor with PhDs; unfortunately the Australian consulate was much more welcoming. Not because they liked foreigners, but because of the natural slur to Australian speech and upward lilt at the ends of their sentences, which to monotonic Hungarian ears sounded friendly. Twinkles had taken a pamphlet, salivating over the cover image of a huge snowy mountain sweeping down to a turquoise sea. Australia. They said they could probably fit a few more white people. But when Twinkles got there, the avid skier/sunbaker discovered there were no magnificent mountains, the snow was mostly man-made, the ocean full of sharks. Also, they’d made her retake her medical exams, a policy designed to hold immigrants back. And then there were the men. Swaggering and laconic, they were not lovers of women. As Ruth described it, they had the primal reflexes for Twinkles’s animal print and purring, and short-term, the language barrier created a false sense of mystery and mutual illusion. But Twinkles had found no real romance here.

  “Well, thanks for the crepes.”

  Twinkles leans forward, breasts pooling like skeined milk in her décolletage. She speaks softly, one eye winked, nodding at Ziggy’s chest. “They come, my sweetheart. Then you’ll wish you still as free as a child.”

  Ziggy’s face flames as she leaps up. “Going now.”

  “Study hard, little pillangó.”

  Eve
n halfway across the food court, Ziggy can hear the wet gnashing of her grandmother’s enormous plastic teeth.

  WHEN ZIGGY GETS HOME, the women are gone. She hurries upstairs to the home PC, and there on the Sofa of a Thousand Tears, Ziggy sees a small, ribbon-tied pink box. Printed all along the sides are tiny Victoria’s Secret logos. Ziggy sits at the computer and tries to understand her parents’ sex life. Just from a hazy distance. Whether Jeff’s new machismo is enabling Ruth’s gaudy sexuality, whether her lap dance has inspired him to go out and dress her like a slutty butterfly. At least there is no mistress. The only other explanation is that the underwear is a gift for their svelte Slovenian cleaning lady with the flat hair and three young children. Sometimes the perfect symmetry with which she arranged objects in their house moved Ziggy to tears. Simple things like the alignment of computer speakers perpendicular to the mouse gave the whole room a quiet beauty that nearly overwhelmed her. Ziggy had had a passing paranoia that the Slovenian’s elegant arrangements of her mother’s chaotic decor were visual love letters to Jeff. But even now this seems extremely unlikely, and Ziggy decides to abandon the gift box with all of its mysterious significance.

  Finally, she sits down at the computer to watch Irréversible. The narrative is presented in reverse chronological order, obscuring causality and lulling Ziggy into a disengaged stupor. Until the rape scene. Watching the eleven-minute torture in the Mètro underpass, she feels a wincing sick, spiked with hot jolts of pleasure. Ziggy knows that the film is art house and must have a larger social conscience, but her body is still aroused. Sadistic misogynist, Hitler Youth clarify. The Nazis explain that Ziggy is just like all the men around Monica Bellucci who objectify her, the camera making everyone who enjoys her curvy ass complicit in her rape. Which means Ziggy is failing Tessa’s test: if she wants to be gay and still squish up under the covers, Ziggy must experience female objectification from the victim’s perspective. She focuses on the sinking in her stomach—the deeper sensation she has while watching the brutal scene—and now it starts to work. Ziggy feels a churning nausea, as if the cogs are spinning backward—reversing the psychic damage of her internalized misogyny.