Inappropriation Read online

  “I’m blue, Thursday, banana, Paris.”

  “I’m green, Friday, kiwi, Rome.”

  In a brave attempt to be known Ziggy declaims: “I’m purple! Tuesday! Mango! Cuba!”

  Both girls give her a glare of intense irritation.

  “Cuba is not a capital city,” says Lex.

  “Then I’m Rio!”

  “You can’t just choose one,” Tessa snaps. “You have to take the test.”

  “Can’t you just tell me what I am?” pleads Ziggy. “Do I seem more like a weekend or a weekday?”

  Lex shakes her head, eyes fixed to her phone. “No idea.”

  Ziggy storms off into the kitchen. Her friends don’t follow her. She can tell they are now playing with a celebrity face-swapping app. Tessa is doing an American accent and Lex is just making duck faces and flicking her hair. Ziggy feels alone in a way that makes her think of vacuum cleaners in deep space—something she knows she’s misunderstood from physics. Tessa and Lex claim they don’t ultimately want to be objectified, yet they strive to be famous people—the most unattainable objects of all.

  After an indefinite period of time in which Ziggy may have eaten three sobering oranges, her friends wander downstairs to the TV. Now Tessa wants to watch music videos. Observing black female dancers in booty shorts brandish chainsaws, Ziggy tries very hard to understand the feminist message.

  “They’re reclaiming the ass,” Tessa explains. “White women got to reclaim words like cunt and slut, but black women have to literally reclaim their butts.”

  Ziggy watches Lex cringe but remain peaceably mute, staring at the television, where a line of perfect brown butts bounces in formation. Ziggy doesn’t think the chainsaws are undermining the attractiveness of their asses. In fact, the fleshy gorgeousness of these asses seems to be reclaiming the chainsaw. Ziggy isn’t sure it is possible to reclaim the female ass. She slides the words around in her brain—subjective objectivity—but now she can’t remember what they mean. The forgetting makes her anxious, and Ziggy checks the microwave clock to see how many more hours she must be stoned. It is only nine thirty, which means many. Ziggy knows her mother would say just be in the moment, but the moment is suddenly squeezing her skull. It pounds through her ears and presses on her lungs. Ziggy needs Time to keep marching forward, quickly and away from this terrible feeling. Maybe if she can tie her shoelaces in under three seconds.

  Sure, say Hitler Youth. Knock yourself out.

  So she does, and she was right. Hitler Youth are very goal-oriented. Ziggy has completely forgotten why she was panicking.

  That’s because you have Israeli amnesia.

  Ziggy considers retying her laces. Eating another orange. Then she looks at the clock and sees that only one minute has passed.

  “Guys.” Her voice is distant, subaquatic. “I think I’m having a heart attack.”

  Her friends crack up. Their mouths gape meanly, lips curling with cruel delight. The whole room seems to buckle and skid into the television. But the dancers keep grinding. Ziggy turns frantically to the window, looks out at the calming jade of the pool, and remembers Rowena. Perched on the edge, tracing her long pink toenails through the water.

  “I’m just going to get something!” Ziggy says too loudly, then starts for the staircase.

  Tessa and Lex share a look. They probably think she is going to go masturbate. But Ziggy forges on up the steps. The only thing that can save her now is the soothing two-tone of Rowena’s voice. As she’d hoped, her mother’s ancient, leather-bound address book is there on the bedside table. Ziggy finds the number and dials.

  “Hello?” Rowena sounds impatient. Ziggy considers hanging up. “Tim, is that you? I’m just leaving the parking lot.”

  “No, um, it’s Ziggy. Ruth Klein’s daughter.”

  “Ziggy!” Rowena’s exuberance emanates from the phone speaker and all through Ziggy’s brain. She relaxes and, to confirm it, checks her pulse.

  “Are you there, love?”

  “Sorry,” says Ziggy, her mind suddenly blank. “I can’t remember why I called you.”

  “That’s okay! I’m very happy to hear from you!”

  Rowena’s kindness has a calming effect on Ziggy’s nervous system. She feels she can be totally honest. “I was just worried I’d given myself brain damage.”

  “Oh my god, what happened?”

  “I smoked too much pot.”

  There is a pause. A little giggle. “Ziggy, you definitely don’t have brain damage. Pot just makes you paranoid.”

  Now Ziggy remembers the anodyne Tessa devised in the event of a panic attack. “Paranoia is just an overactive death drive,” she recites, hopefully.

  “Sure,” says Rowena. “Or life force on steroids.”

  Ziggy likes this. It makes her feel better about needing to do the soap twice each time she washes her hands. Now she can hear Rowena humming. The tune is familiar, but Ziggy can’t place it. The melody runs like warm lights along her ear canal.

  “I’m going to have to get off in a minute. . . .” Rowena says, a smile creeping into her voice. “I’ve got to get dressed for my show.”

  “Which show?”

  “My drag show.”

  Ziggy imagines a small, glittery room full of Rowenas, and her mind dilates with happiness. She urgently needs to be there. “Can I come?”

  “Now? Sure . . . if you think that would be cool with your mum?”

  Cool with your mum. Ziggy doesn’t care what is cool with her mum. And she has an acute desire to be in Rowena’s presence. To behold her onstage.

  “I’m with some friends,” says Ziggy. “Can they come too?”

  “Of course! Ooh, here’s Timmy.” There is a muffled squeezing sound, like the phone is being hugged to death. “Ziggy, love?”

  “Yes?”

  “The show’s at Dong Dong and I go on in an hour!”

  Ziggy hangs up and runs straight to the door. She looks down through the railing at her friends, catatonic on the couch below. There’s no easy way to say this, so she barks it loudly over the landing. “We’re going to Dong Dong!”

  “The drag place?” Tessa asks.

  Lex looks confused. “Why are we going to Dong Dong?” She rises slowly to her feet, hunching over as though the ceiling might be suddenly very low. “Is it because you’re a purple mango?”

  Tessa sputters. Ziggy can’t tell if Lex is making a gay joke. Whether this means her friends don’t want her to be male or gay or if gay jokes are just part of the package. But right now, Ziggy can’t access the requisite humiliation or anger. She just needs to be near Rowena. Right now, it feels like the only way she might not have another panic attack and die is to see Rowena standing on a tall stage under the silver spangle of a disco ball. Her mind has pared to a slim arrow aimed solely at Dong Dong.

  “Come to Dong Dong,” Ziggy says. “Or America thinks you’re frigid.”

  In ten minutes, they are on a bus.

  THE GIRLS GET OUT at the five-fingered intersection with the big gay pub throbbing on the corner. Rainbow flags flutter out windows; disco balls throw spears of light from pharmacy doors. Boys in shredded denim shorts with lurid abdominals streak through the pedestrian traffic. Just beyond the jet spume of a public fountain, several Aboriginal men sit on the skimpy strip of grass. They drink from brown paper bags, squinting at the preened fuss tearing past.

  Dong Dong is in the lane behind this hub of activity. Its pink neon sign peeks through the chimneys, and when passing it on school excursions, Ziggy’s peers always fling the bus windows open, hurling their laughter like eggs. The sign is a vestige of the storefront’s former incarnation as a karaoke bar. Driving past, Cate Lansell-Jones will inevitably shake her head and drone “Yaysian.” Then she’ll smile at Fliss Kunchai-Wells and Fliss will smile back as Cate says, “Not you, Fliss,” dropping her head onto Fliss’s shoulder before Fliss tips her own head onto Cate’s head and they both close their eyes and purr. All the other girls usually chant “dong”
until a teacher starts screaming.

  But Lex says the neighborhood is gritty and very New York. The converted factories have fire escapes, the old apartment blocks have stoops, and outside the tobacco stores meth-heads sit fizzing on empty milk crates. This, says Lex, is how Australia would look if it was actually cosmopolitan. Inside every building Ziggy pictures junkies scrunched along stairwells, rats gnawing chicken bones, syringes tinseling up the corners. She acknowledges her insomniac CSI phase may account for some of the stereotyping.

  The three friends slip into Dong Dong’s snaking line. They have dressed up. The girls figured they’d have to dupe a doorman, so made a hasty sacking of Ruth’s wardrobe. Their loot amounted to a lot of tie-dye and much distressed lace. Also, ethnic patterns on skirts with wool pom-poms and bells. Tessa and Lex look like menopausal neopagans. Ziggy found a pair of crushed velvet tights and a dark purple pleather vest, shooting for leatherman but landing somewhere closer to pirate.

  “Evening, ladies,” says the doorman in an adenoidal singsong. He sports a thin mustache and orange-tinted aviators. Ziggy recalls the reflector aviators she’d wanted so badly the previous summer. She had tried them on in the store with Miriam Rosenburg, enjoying how the Blob recoiled from her own reflection in Ziggy’s lenses. The glasses bestowed a sense of power that Ziggy felt might push her more confidently through puberty. A place to hide while exposing the flaws of others. Later that summer, Ziggy had slipped her request into the Wailing Wall. Secretly, she felt a prayer for cool sunglasses was not completely ignoble. With a little boost in self-esteem, she might be the person to cure cancer, discover alternative energy sources, usher in the matriarchy.

  “Where did you get those?” she asks the doorman.

  He smiles and leans toward her. “Actually, they’re just bargain bin at Price Attack.”

  Ziggy nods, watching her own face reflected back in the grungy sepia. “They’re so cool.”

  “Thanks, darl,” says the doorman. “Just the three of you?”

  “Yes.” Ziggy’s friends inch closer. In the mirrored lenses, she sees the two of them press in on either side of her, merging into one enormous head with a wide melon slice of grin. The doorman raises the rope. Ziggy is a natural.

  Inside, Dong Dong looks like an old postcard she once saw of an AusLink dining car that gave her recurring nightmares about living in the Outback. The ceiling is lowly chandeliered, and the pleather booths are covered in clear plastic. Ziggy knows the aesthetic is retro but can’t separate the feeling of despair from the kitschy fun part. Which might mean she isn’t actually gay.

  But she loves it here. The crowd is a mix of twinks, leathermen, and drag queens. The latter perch at the bar; everyone else writhes on the dance floor. The girls sit to the side of a low stage, where a microphone stand braces against the thrusting tide of short shorts. The pot is wearing off and Ziggy is feeling serene. Her friends also seem happy to be at the drag bar, watching the explicit dancing from inside their giddy huddle. After a few minutes, the curtains billow portentously, the dance music dies, and the room hushes. A familiar piano solo begins just as the curtains part—revealing a towering queen in a skirted yellow leotard with the translucent ruff of a frilled-neck lizard.

  Tessa nudges Lex. “It’s that scene from Priscilla, Queen of the Desert,” she says, smugly.

  The lizard flicks her tongue and hisses at the crowd. She lip-syncs listlessly to the first verse of “I Will Survive,” stops, then taps the microphone. “Testing, testing,” she says flatly. “So, frilled-neck lizard. Scientific name: Chlamydiosaurus.”

  The audience laughs and a queen in a sequined muumuu drones: “Everybody, run.”

  “Shut up, Luke,” says the lizard. “No need to fear Chlamydiosaurus anymore. There’s a pill for me.”

  Ziggy likes this droll MC—how mean she is, how stingy with her smiles.

  “By now I’ve got everything,” she says, sighing loudly into the mic. “Clap, chlamydia, crabs, warts, herpes, that new strain of late-stage autism you get from swallowing. I’m a bitch, but they call me Frank.”

  People boo lovingly.

  “Frankie Frankenfurterstein. It’s German for transgender.”

  Ziggy hears herself gasp in delight.

  “You know, I got the surgery,” Frankie continues. “But my boyfriend doesn’t like it. Says my pussy smells too much like pussy, not enough like MacBook.”

  Someone throws a coaster and misses.

  “So I tell him: the internet is made of pussy! You’ve got Happy Cat, Anxiety Cat, Existential Cat. At least my pussy is a meme.” Frankie peeks in under her own skirt. “Not-Fucked-Enough Cat.”

  Another coaster flies stage-ward and grazes the MC’s thigh.

  “All right, all right,” she says. “I will survive. Hey, hey.” Frankie lifts a leg as if to fart, blows a raspberry into the mic, and struts offstage. The crowd cheers. Ziggy is astonished. That someone who wears false eyelashes and six-inch heels can also make fun of being female.

  “I want to be a drag queen,” she blurts to her friends.

  “Why?” says Tessa. “That was sexist.”

  “And ablest,” adds Lex.

  “And transphobic.”

  But how can it be transphobic if the person is transgender? Ziggy shakes her head in exasperation. “I think she was joking.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” says Tessa. “She’s a white man, and they aren’t allowed to make jokes about oppressed people.”

  “But she’s a woman.”

  “We don’t know that for sure.”

  “She said she’s transitioned.”

  “That might’ve just been a joke.”

  Ziggy’s shoulders feel heavy; her whole body is burning up.

  Tessa leans in and lowers her voice. “Gay men love divas, but they can be really mean to normal women.”

  “And when the divas get cellulite,” says Lex, “they can be mean to the divas, too.”

  Ziggy had no idea her friends were so critical of gay men. “So they’re basically misogynists?”

  Lex resists the pejorative. “Well, they control the beauty industry.”

  “Which means they are benefitting from white patriarchy,” says Tessa. “And profiting off black female bodies.”

  “But I thought gay men were women of color?” says Ziggy.

  Tessa chortles. “They were,” she says. “In, like, the eighties.”

  When “A Cyborg Manifesto” was written. Ziggy didn’t realize Haraway’s text was in need of a new edition.

  “Now they’re basically just white men again,” says Lex.

  “What about the black ones?”

  Tessa gives Ziggy a scalding look. “What do you think, Ziggy?”

  Ziggy has no idea. She sinks back in her seat and tries to understand what is happening. Who she is allowed to be. Ziggy objectifies women like a gay man but wants to penetrate them like a straight one. She likes the phallic pounding of a jet stream and the pelvic spaciousness of tailored pants. The only category she can hold in her mind without immediate counterargument is “patriarchal vaporstream.”

  The music starts again and the three friends turn back to the darkened stage. A tall female silhouette stands still in the center. Ziggy recognizes the song. “Life on Mars.” What Rowena was humming on the phone. As the lights come up, Tessa gasps. “A cyborg!”

  Rowena wears a tight silver bodysuit and a helmet with one huge googly eyeball jiggling on a wire. Her pelvic mound is as smooth as Barbie’s. It might just be a coincidence that Rowena is singing a David Bowie song, but it feels significant. Ruth says Ziggy’s name comes from the Latin, Ignatius, and means, “unknown,” but her father says she’s Ziggy Stardust. Jeff claims Bowie changed his life and taught him it was okay to have a softer, feminine side. Which must be why Ruth started emasculating him in the first place. (Ziggy’s shameful origin story: sixteen years ago, a manly woman and a girly man had stripper sex in a chair, producing Ziggy So-Flat-the-Walls-Are-Jealous Klein.) Ziggy has n
ever really understood David Bowie—the petrified red hair, cosmic eye shadow, and enigmatic snaggletooth—but there is some comfort in encountering him here, now, in the form of Rowena. Ziggy listens to the words. He seems to be saying the world is savage and stupid and maybe it would be best to just start over again on another planet. To forget this place, all our parents, penises, and vaginas. Ziggy wonders if Tessa is right and Rowena really does identify as a cyborg.

  When the song ends, Rowena bows and then dedicates her performance to “Ziggy Klein and the Seekers.” She winks at the three of them and strides offstage.

  Surprisingly, Ziggy’s friends are excited to meet Rowena. She explains that Rowena is Ruth’s client and nice but mostly just weird and funny to talk to. When she appears at their table in her customary pink tunic with pearly hair clips, a warm rush of affinity floods Ziggy’s body. Rowena is proof that white people with pronounced Adam’s apples aren’t always the enemy. Her friends smile up mutely at the woman’s sweetly expectant face. Ziggy knows what to say. From Tessa’s dance recital she learned that after the performance there is a certain line the audience is expected to deliver.

  “We really enjoyed your work,” she says earnestly.

  Tessa’s voice burns in Ziggy’s ear. “You only say werk to people of color.”

  “I thought transgender women were people of color?”

  “Ziggy, there are people of color and then there are people of color.”

  Ziggy can feel herself getting angry. “I said work anyway.”

  Tessa turns back to Lex, and the two of them presumably collude against Ziggy. But she is more focused on Rowena. The cyborg eye has made transhumanist feminism clearer in her mind. Ziggy wants to know if the eye is a bygone penis or something more abstract like “man’s dominance over nature.” From her queer subreddit, Ziggy knows you aren’t supposed to ask these sorts of questions, but “A Cyborg Manifesto” might be her way in.