Inappropriation Page 7

  Ziggy hears loud footfalls thudding into the room. Heavy, with a soft thwappy underside like a large fish dying against a deck. Rowena’s gargantuan ballet slippers. Ziggy makes the quick, thrilling decision to stay and watch through the doorjamb, to see what shapes fill Rowena’s underwear—what exotic, hybrid organ might hang or petal there. But the woman moves straight to the sink. She has spotted Ruth’s self-portrait. The explicit nude that hangs over the vanity; two thick, parted thighs framing a series of concentric ovals in dirty pinks; an icon glowering, openmouthed, over every morning shave. Rowena shakes her head and giggles, and Ziggy feels vindicated. She wants to be on the outside, mocking the smug anatomical superiority of her cisgender mother. The urge is very strong. Ziggy grabs a tote bag full of old toys and backs out of the closet.

  “Sorry,” she says, fussing with the bag. “I was just getting these.”

  Rowena seems pleasantly surprised to see her. She observes the bag’s opening: a silent orgy of reaching Barbie doll arms and snarling dinosaur beaks. Ziggy worries Rowena thinks she is going to play with them.

  “We’re writing origin stories at school.”

  Rowena cocks her head. “In English?”

  “Science.”

  “Wow, that’s liberal.”

  Ziggy’s school is vaguely protestant and scientifically rationalist, and their principal never honors the traditional custodians of the land. But she can’t quit now. “Our teacher thinks the Rainbow Serpent could have been a T. rex.”

  Rowena grins. “And which landscape feature did T. rex create?” She is being droll. Which is nice. Adults are never droll with Ziggy. It makes her feel like Rowena has missed the whole drama of Ziggy’s flat chest.

  “Probably Rose Bay.”

  Rowena laughs. “And Pyrmont. And Darling Harbour.”

  There is a warm, smiling hiatus before Rowena glances up again at the painting. Ziggy studies her face. The blue eye liner has sweat into Rowena’s sockets, forming dark, marsupial rings. Her features are coarser up close—the bulbous nose, square jaw, jutting brow. A huge Adam’s apple bobs anxiously above a fine, silver chain. Rowena sighs and raises a hand to her chest—a movement so delicate, it seems to refine her larger features. She is more feminine than anyone Ziggy has ever seen.

  Rowena nods at the painting. “It’s very expressionistic.”

  Ziggy looks up and is irked anew by the vagina’s dramatic chiaroscuro.

  “My mother thinks her vagina is a magical netherworld.”

  “Well, it kind of is.”

  “My point is that she thinks you can have a primeval vagina that men are then supposed to find sexy in Victoria’s Secret.”

  “Ah yes, the sacred and the profane . . .”

  “Are men really equipped to handle those kinds of contradictions?”

  “Definitely not.”

  Ziggy’s heart leaps; she has an ally. “And don’t you find the Magnetic Poles too binary?”

  “Personally, I quite like binaries.” Rowena smiles, adjusting a hair clip.

  Ziggy feels disoriented and then very hot in the face. She sits on the edge of the tub. “Sorry, I’m sure sometimes they’re helpful.”

  “But I absolutely agree there’s got to be some room for ambiguity.”

  “What kind of ambiguity?”

  “All kinds.” Rowena faces the mirror and now properly attacks her hair. “Of course men aren’t always a certain way and neither are women, but when they want to trigger one another romantically and sexually, the Magnetic Poles can be useful.”

  Rowena forms a perfect center-part with her fingernail and Ziggy instinctively checks her own reflection. She didn’t straighten her hair this morning and the curls are returning in kinky chunks. “But how do the Poles work for gay people?” Her voice sounds frantic. “Or genderqueers?”

  “Dualities usually arise naturally between most couples.”

  Ziggy still thinks Ruth means to wipe out all queer, nonconforming people like her. She nods, disappointed but deferential.

  Rowena speaks gently. “Do you identify as genderqueer?”

  “I don’t know. Sometimes I hear voices telling me I’m a boy.”

  “Do you feel like a boy?”

  “No.”

  “Then you’ve probably just got a strong self-critic.”

  “It doesn’t feel like me. The voice is German.”

  “That sounds very critical.”

  An ache bobs at the back of Ziggy’s throat. “It says I’m not female enough.”

  “Well that’s different from feeling male. Sounds like this German voice is very immature.”

  Ziggy nods, relieved. “I think it’s adolescent.”

  “Don’t worry about the labels. There’s no need to rush yourself.”

  “Yeah,” says Ziggy, fortified by their shared defiance. “I’m definitely not ready to commit to a flag yet.”

  “Forget the flags. Unless you’re marching for something.” Rowena smiles. “I take a more Taoist approach to gender, you know: ‘Am I me dreaming I’m a butterfly or am I a butterfly dreaming I’m me?’ I’d just try to stay open—sometimes mansplaining actually feels like foreplay.”

  Ziggy feels lightheaded. Everything seems permissible in Rowena’s presence. Ruth’s shrill opposites hang in tranquil lunar orbit all around her. As Ziggy meets her gaze in the mirror, Rowena’s eyes are suddenly deep and syrupy with solicitude. She nods at Ziggy’s head.

  “I think there’s a very rowdy mob in there trying to shout you down.”

  A sob hops up Ziggy’s throat. She holds it in, her whole body tight and steamy as a wonton.

  “Don’t let them do it.”

  Ziggy nods gratefully. She would like to ask how the Magnetic Poles apply if you’re not a boy but you don’t have breasts or high estrogen levels, if you enjoy rough imaginary sex with women and also get aroused by Aryan men in jackboots. But she is still choking down her feelings. Rowena walks to the door, daintily waves, then glides back out to the other women.

  Chapter 4

  Between classes, Kandara’s hallways hemorrhage girls, and Lex, Tessa, and Ziggy make a game of bucking the current. They smash shoulders and shout and shoot furious stares at the big-boned country girls. Their school’s busy tributaries are transformed into the gropey red streets of a coal mining town, while the three friends embody their fiercest cosmopolitan stereotypes.

  “What are you looking at!” Lex barks at an approaching wall of boarders, flushed and sweaty from rowing practice.

  “I’m-a walk-en hee-ya!” Ziggy yells. Her accent adenoidally Jewish.

  “Very Seinfeld,” Tessa congratulates her. “Or, like, early Woody Allen.”

  The larger girls dodge her aggressive elbows, and Ziggy sails along on the amazement of being a physical threat. Which is confusing. Ziggy and her friends are supposed to be the victims. In their acting game, they are the ones being eye-raped and catcalled and sneakily felt up.

  Now Prue Fielder—the most box-jawed and perpetually sunburned of the seniors’ rowing squad—flings an arm out like a boom gate, blocking their path.

  “What the eff is wrong with you, Cameron?” she bellows at Lex. Ziggy observes that Prue’s thighs are thicker than her own torso.

  Lex steps right up to the rower’s broad, muscular chest. “What, Fielder, are you going to sexually assault me with your canoe paddle?”

  The epic girl-span shakes her blockish head. “You seriously need help.”

  “And you need to go back to England and return that loaf of bread.”

  Prue gives Lex a long, sickened look, cinching it with an “ugh.” Then she turns and walks away.

  Ziggy and Tessa beam triumphant at either side of their ruthless friend. Lex hates the country girls. She knows their parents’ politics. If it were up to them, the nation’s borders would be closed, the mines open, the sprinklers on, the clocks set back to 1955. These are the people who would prefer that brown girls stayed in brown countries, that advertising had rema
ined in neat, preordered catalogs and not clogging up their inboxes. All the spam pouring into their nice, spacious nation is muddling everything up. Algorithms and Asians are taking their jobs; their golden girls can no longer get into the best university courses. Too many Chinese. Too many desperate, striving people with no interest in after-school sports. People with no feel for leisure. Unbalanced people. UnAustralians.

  “The cyborg revolution is coming,” announces Tessa. “And Prue Fielder is going to be up shit creek. Which is probably an actual creek somewhere out near Wagga.”

  As Prue is swallowed back up in the girl-crush, Lex turns to Tessa, her eyes poppy with scandal. “She just checked out my ass.”

  “Conservatives are always secretly gay,” Tessa sneers, and the two of them keep charging down the hall.

  Ziggy hangs back. Like the cheerleaders and the Cates, her friends also seek intra-school objectification via the more masculine girls, which for Ziggy is both homophobic and self-loathing. But mostly, a risk. She doesn’t want to end up on the wrong side of the male gaze. Tessa and Lex’s game extends to every sphere of life, making Ziggy’s role feel very unstable. Her friends objectify themselves in the underpass and at the mall, colliding with the sporty girls in campus thoroughfares, and also, she now notices, on social media. Instagram is where they go to get catcalled alone in their bedrooms. Ziggy scrolls through hours of smoochy lips and deep cleavage. Tessa posts a lot of vampy bed-hair shots; Lex prefers a classic bath towel. Ziggy doesn’t get it: If you are constantly inviting boys to look down your top, how can it be eye-rape? Hitler Youth congratulate her for applying the standard argument used in rape culture. Welcome to the club, they tell her. Ashamed and fearing further scrutiny, Ziggy temporarily disables her account.

  That week, e-vites go around for Cate’s Valentine’s Day party at her harbor-front mansion, and Lex gets one. Ziggy is shocked to learn that Cate doesn’t despise Lex as much as Lex reviles her. The girls are old family friends, and Lex’s exotic skin color and extreme beauty have inspired a mythical fascination among the Randalls boys. Tessa tells Ziggy that they call her Rihanna and beg Cate to bring her to all social gatherings. In fact, Lex always gets invited to Cate’s parties. Occasionally Tessa and Lex even attend, though mostly for anthropological reasons. Tessa tells Ziggy that the debauchery is so excessive, it promotes egalitarianism across the social strata. One year, the very zaftig and deodorant-averse Patricia Katsatouris gave a hand job to Randalls’s head prefect. Or that’s what she said. The boys get blackout drunk and conveniently forget their conquests.

  Hearing this, Ziggy senses a political opportunity. “It’s like the white settlers with the Aboriginals.”

  Lex looks offended. “The Aboriginals were prettier than Patricia Katsatouris.”

  Tessa pats their diminutive, in-earnest friend. “It’s okay, Lex,” Tessa placates her. “Jews are just very metaphorical.”

  Ziggy isn’t sure how to take this. “You mean the Old Testament?”

  “Yes, and how God gave you a ‘promised land.’”

  Israel is too complicated for first period so Ziggy lets this go. She knows Zionism is a dirty word but still feels, in some deep preverbal place, that Jerusalem is not just a metaphor.

  After lunch, Ziggy is informed that the three of them will be attending Cate’s party. This time the purpose of their social outing is not to imbibe the low-level female trauma and make nuisances of themselves. Engagement rumors for the rapper are rife, and Lex might need to find an alternative formal date. Tessa thinks her friend could get lucky with Randalls’s first African American exchange student—if he deigns to show up. Tessa has her eye on a brilliant scholarship student rumored to be autistic. Nobody mentions finding a date for Ziggy, which comes as a great relief.

  ARRIVING THAT SATURDAY at Cate’s gated mansion, the girls are buzzed through two electric fences and into an elevator. Descending to the pool deck, Ziggy avoids the reflective glass. Her friends are, like all the other girls, wearing short skirts and crop tops. Ziggy has tied her hair back in a ponytail and borrowed one of her brother’s dark navy dress shirts. She feels like an awkward Bar Mitzvah boy but hopes the overall ambiguity will be socially intimidating.

  The doors open on a pulsing hive of bodies, pink under gel lamps—everything bouncing, even the palm trees. Ziggy weaves through jungling limbs, along the gooey lick of pool. She senses there are girls here getting fingered. Her friends stop at the deep end. The black exchange student is nowhere in sight, and Tessa’s potential paramour also appears to have skipped the event or else been less popular than she thought. Then three pink-shirted, loafer-heeled blond boys sidle up and engage the girls in adult conversation.

  How’s your night going? Been a good night? Having a good one?

  Ziggy can feel them tamping down on darker instincts with their hollow stock phrases. She doesn’t appreciate how close they are standing to her friends, and one of the boys is grinning at Lex with a rapaciousness that could be considered sexual harassment. Ziggy feels protective and jealous and alarmed by the sensual way her friends are leaning into their hips. Ziggy is cut off from their quorum; she occupies a cool, lonely space tinged with despair. What she would like to call “the void” to Tessa, but her friend is busy responding to these little CEO disguise kits.

  “It’s going good,” says Tessa. “How amazing is the view?”

  “I can see my swimming pool,” says one of the boys.

  “Me too,” says another.

  The deeply tanned boy in salmon-colored shorts points to a cluster of tall ships. “There’s my granddad’s yacht.”

  Thankfully, Ziggy’s friends aren’t very skilled at small talk. When Lex remarks that big boats are compensation for small penises, Tessa stewards the conversation toward the depressingly elaborate snacks prepared by Suze Lansell-Jones, and gossip about attractive male movie stars. After she assigns sex addiction and domestic abuse to all their favorite action heroes, the boys start to agitate. They quickly turn on one of their own, mocking his Cartier watch.

  “Well,” the boy rebuts, “your parents’ beach house is in Wollongong.”

  “What’s wrong with Wollongong?”

  “A holiday house needs to be in the actual bush, not just the outer suburbs.”

  “Whatever mate, your dad drives a Porsche SUV!”

  Now the connoisseur of vacation homes gets very red and relays a nasty little story about the boy with the Wollongong beach house—how he got his Islander nanny arrested at Fratelli Fresh when he slipped a bottle of artichokes into her handbag. “Because they looked elegant!” he screeches.

  The boys start to scuffle—a series of light slaps and one long, painful-looking ear-pull. It is a relief that they would rather bicker over status symbols than seduce Ziggy’s friends. Sabotage may not even be necessary—men seem quite capable of undoing themselves.

  Ziggy places a puny arm over each of her friends and guides them away from the boy-skirmish. She can feel their shoulders relaxing, softening into the clammy undersides of her arms. They like being led this way. Ziggy walks them to the far end of the pool; from here she plans to start a scathing social commentary, mocking the heteronormative bluster all around them. But before she can begin, a boisterous drinking game materializes on the other side of the water. Two thick, squarish boys are swilling beer and thrusting their pelvises at the girls with vicious specificity.

  “Rugger buggers,” scoffs Tessa, eyeing them nervously.

  “Roid ragers,” Lex concurs.

  “Or just medium-high testosterone levels,” says Ziggy, casually damning the whole gender.

  The song is “Roxanne,” and each time Sting says her name, the boys take a swig. Watching them hump and stumble under the reddish light, Ziggy remembers the lyrics.

  “He’s talking about a prostitute,” she informs her friends, then watches them scowl harder. At her feet, Ziggy notices a discarded plate of sushi rolls. She picks off a California roll and holds it up in front of Lex.


  “Dare me?” Ziggy asks her.

  Lex’s eyes go soft and dreamy. Ziggy feels her chest broaden, the muscles get tight. Taking aim, a cool current runs up her arm, like she is partially machine. The sushi roll shoots over the pool, splats into the bigger boy’s face, then plops off onto his loafer. He spins around and sees her.

  “Little fag!”

  The boy hurls a pool noodle that falls short, belly-flopping into the water. Tessa and Lex hoot in triumph. Elated, Ziggy swipes up the noodle and thrusts it out in front of her, aiming it like a sword.

  “She’s got a dick!” someone yells, and Ziggy freezes. She drops the noodle and edges back toward her friends.

  “They’re just jealous,” she says, then clarifies: “That I’ve got better aim.”

  But her friends are transfixed by a sudden massing of male bodies around the sushi roll victim. The boys are scrumming together—slapping one another’s backs, gulping their mixed drinks and plotting.

  “Uh-oh.” Lex seems to know what’s coming. She holds her hand out to Ziggy. “Give me your phone.”

  The boys split off into two packs. The twin lines make a barbarous dash around either end of the pool, whooping and growling toward her. Ziggy watches limply as their foisty chests close in; their rough hands grip her shoulders (almost tenderly—treating her like a girl, which she almost takes personally) and raise her up over their heads. For a moment the elevation feels like victory, and then Ziggy is being shunted toward the blue. Her screams are drowned in the primordial bellow of the Randalls school song. The boys pause at the edge, count one, two . . . then toss her into the water.