Inappropriation

by Lexi Freiman

  In the vast, carpeted room, a wide circle of fit middle-aged people sit in placid-faced silence. There is an audiovisual station where an Aryan yogi with a deft, managerial ponytail adjusts the sound levels on a Hindu chant. A pile of abused pillows slumps against the back wall; a samovar whistles down the front. It takes Ziggy a moment to recognize the guru. She sits among the people, eyes closed, the tip of her nose tracing tiny arabesques in time to the music. She wears her skullcap, no sunglasses, and a loose guayabera shirt with a complicated tangle of microphone equipment curly at her chest. Ziggy spots her parents seated beside each other, staring off around the room.

  When the chanting fades, the guru opens her eyes. She looks around the circle, making sincere eye contact with each of the participants. Ziggy watches every single one of them melt under her gaze. Then Shuni begins, disturbingly, with gender.

  “Men,” she says, “you are suffering terribly. Feminism has hurt your pride and caused you to question your God-given natures.” The guru stands and walks across the circle to an older man whose T-shirt is printed with a hyperrealistic illustration of a polar bear. “Why are you wearing this?” she asks the man. “You are sad for the polar bears?”

  The man nods. “I am.”

  “Are you? Are you sad for these creatures with white fur and black skin that live in the snow and would rip your head off if you came anywhere near them?”

  The man nods less energetically.

  “You are not sad for polar bears. You are sad for yourself. That is obvious to anyone. You are a healthy man who lives in a comfortable house and hardly ever gets out into nature. Who hardly ever screams or shouts or ravishes a woman in unbearable ecstasy. Be sad for yourself. Be sad that you think you are sad for a wild creature because you don’t know how to be alive.” Shuni shakes her head and walks back to her seat. The man begins diligently taking notes.

  “Women,” the guru says, warmth returning to her voice, “you are also suffering. Feminism has split the men into women and lumberjacks. Everyone is too sensitive. Even the lumberjacks.”

  “I guess she is an essentialist,” Ziggy whispers to Tim. “Sorry.”

  Tim shrugs diplomatically. “It might get more spiritual.”

  Shuni points to a white-haired woman sitting beside the man in the polar bear shirt. Her face is youthful and plain and her gray eyes gaze somberly. “Do you also like polar bears?” Shuni asks her.

  “Yes,” says the white-haired woman. “We both love the Arctic.”

  “And why is that?”

  The woman looks affronted but hides it behind a tepid smile. “Because it’s breathtakingly beautiful.”

  “Isn’t it all just white?”

  The woman nods. “It’s like an alien landscape.”

  “And it’s endangered.”

  “Very.”

  “And you like this place, you love this beautiful white place that looks like an alien landscape?”

  “I do. We do.”

  Shuni nods and then turns abruptly to the man in the polar bear shirt. “Polar Bear?”

  “Yes,” the man says sheepishly.

  “Does this woman like to make love?”

  Polar Bear peeks at his wife and then looks back to Shuni, mortified. “Yes, of course.”

  “I don’t believe you. I think this woman wants to die. She wants to be in the Arctic. She even looks like the Arctic. I would get away from her very fast if I were you. This woman no longer wants to be among the living.”

  Tim is grinning wildly. “That’s so mean,” he says. “But it’s true: she’s overidentified with the Arctic Circle.”

  The couple sits there, insulted, despairing. Shuni returns to her seat and begins calmly untangling her microphone cords. “You godless liberals, wasting your lives.” She shakes her head. “Always looking for an identity; always seeking meaning in causes; desperately trying to be as separate and distinct as possible before you are swallowed back up by existence.”

  Shuni squints intensely at her cords and takes a long, focused moment to tease out the knot. “Miracle of miracles.” The wires flop back into her lap and she looks up at the group, smiling. “So now we are going to reveal your delusions and dig up your pain and then we are going to hold these things to the blowtorch of pure presence. Equality is just an idea whose only real proof is Oneness.”

  Ziggy tries to dismiss the intense feeling of identification she is having with this overidentifying godless liberal. Tim is also having an emotional reaction.

  “Do you think she means gender is a delusion that Westerners can transmute into dance?”

  Ziggy assumes Tim is thinking of the Whirling Dervishes. “I guess dancing is kind of like presence.”

  Tim sighs in awe. “This is pure Michael Jackson.”

  The workshop continues in a similar fashion until lunch. Shuni walks around criticizing people’s clothing and telling them their thought patterns are insane. She homes in on their likes and dislikes, explaining that all affinities belie a complicated ego identification schema. On an exposed shoulder blade, Shuni sees the sanskrit word for impermanence and brings the tattoo’s owner to remorseful tears. The guru scolds the proud vegans and tells the PTSD sufferers to loosen up: existence itself is a trauma.

  By lunch, Ziggy is anxious: her parents remain ideologically unharmed. She wonders if Shuni is avoiding Ruth because she is a former devotee. “My mother identifies as a premenopausal sex-witch,” Ziggy groans. “Why isn’t Shuni going after her?”

  Unsurprisingly, Tim has no answer for this. “And I thought you said there would be constellations?”

  But Ziggy understands the procedure. First you expose everybody’s weakness, and then you utilize that data to direct the constellation. “There will be. I’m just worried that Shuni won’t constellate my parents if she hasn’t humiliated them first.”

  “She’s definitely running out of time.”

  After lunch, the group dribbles back in slowly—teacups nestled between palms or phones out, already exchanging contact information. The Hindu chanting quiets and Shuni stands and walks around the circle, slowing at Jeff’s chair then stopping directly behind Ruth’s. She places her hands on Ruth’s shoulders.

  “Shunya Rutie.” Her voice is like a kiss on the crown of Ruth’s head. Ziggy feels it too. “Why don’t you tell the group why you are wearing those shoes.”

  Ziggy squints at the screen. Her mother has chosen the red velvet kitten heels inherited from Twinkles’s collection. They might be vintage Valentino.

  “They go well with these pants?” Ruth tries.

  The guru makes a disappointed clicking with her tongue. “Come on, Rutie. You can do better than that. Why those shoes? Who are they for?”

  “My husband.”

  “Good. Now, why?”

  “Because I think they look sexy.”

  “You want to look sexy for your husband. I remember: the Sacred Feminine, the gender polarities, how to keep the sex alive in a long-term relationship. Tell me, is it working?”

  Ruth shakes her head.

  “There isn’t enough sex?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  Ruth shoots a lethal look at her husband. “You’ll have to ask him.”

  Tim nudges Ziggy. “Are you sure you can handle this?”

  Ziggy nods, though she isn’t.

  Shuni clicks her tongue again. “You know that’s not how this works, Rutie. I’m not going to ask him why you’re not having enough sex. We don’t need to ask your husband what he thinks.” The guru tips her nose up and sniffs, as if for a sign of inclement weather. “The person we need to ask,” she says ominously, “is your mother.”

  Shuni points to the white-haired woman and tells her to stand in the middle of the circle. Then she summons four men to rise and form a circle around the Arctic Circle.

  “Rutie, what is your mother’s name?”

  “Twinkles,” Ruth says simperingly.

  “Twinkles,” Shuni addresses the Ar
ctic woman. “How do you feel being surrounded by these men?”

  “It’s a little claustrophobic,” says Twinkles’s avatar.

  “You are afraid of them?”

  “Not afraid. I’d just like them to move a bit farther back.”

  “Ruth, does this make sense to you?”

  Ziggy’s mother nods, transfixed by the human tableau. “Yes,” she says shakily. “My mother never remarried. For forty-five years she’s just had boyfriends. A new one every few months. Even now at seventy-nine.”

  “Good,” says Shuni, smiling elusively. “Very good.” She points to the Polar Bear. “Mr. Twinkles, please come and stand next to your wife.”

  Polar Bear moves dutifully into place beside proxy Twinkles.

  “How does it feel to stand next to your husband?” Shuni asks her.

  The white-haired woman frowns and places a hand to her heart. She frowns harder. “I feel numb.”

  Polar Bear hangs his head and Ziggy wonders if this is just the chill of the Arctic Circle or else something profound about her own grandparents’ marriage. Shuni also seems unsure.

  “Rutie, did your parents divorce?”

  “My father died,” Ruth says without emotion. “When I was two, back in Hungary.”

  Shuni’s nose tilts up, sniffing again. “When did your mother’s father die?”

  “When she was five.” Ruth’s voice is small. “They were all in a concentration camp.”

  The guru places a hand at her own sternum and taps her fingers. Her eyes flutter whitely.

  “What’s happening?” whispers Tim, captivated.

  “She must be intuiting something,” says Ziggy, her own fingers digging painfully into her thighs.

  Now Shuni freezes and her eyes pop open, crazed with insight. “I want a line,” she says. “All the men behind Jeff.”

  The menfolk shuffle awkwardly into a long, curving line. When they are assembled, Shuni wags her finger at them with slow, implicating deliberation.

  “You are all the Jewish Hungarian men.”

  Tim’s jaw drops. “Amazing.”

  “Twinkles,” says Shuni, “how does it feel to look at these men?”

  Twinkles’s avatar squints at the Jewish Hungarians. She presses a hand again to her heart and stares harder. Then she looks brazenly repulsed. “They seem weak,” she spits. “Pathetic, really.”

  “Fantastic,” says Shuni. “Now look at your daughter.”

  The white-haired woman turns slowly to Ruth. Seeing the younger woman’s face—trembling and red-eyed—a violent shudder racks her whole body, coursing up her throat and pouring out in a long, deep wail. Tim clutches Ziggy’s wrist so tight, even she can feel his feelings.

  The guru squeezes the Arctic woman’s shoulder as she speaks to Ruth. “When she was a child, your mother suffered a terrible trauma, and these men couldn’t protect her.” Shuni glares, recriminating, at the bewildered line of Hungarians. “But she married one anyway, she had a child, and then the man did what all the men in Twinkles’s life do—he failed her, he died. So she took you, her child, and left for a distant land where there were new and different men. And Twinkles met these men and she castrated them. Every single one. Now why do you think your mother did that?”

  Ruth shakes her head in frantic perplexity.

  “To make sure, Rutie, to be absolutely certain that every one of these men were too weak to be loved.” She places a hand on Ruth’s arm. “So that they would never be allowed to fail her child.”

  Ruth sobs openly. Tim sniffles. Ziggy waits for the punch line, but everyone is quiet, feeling the emotions, experiencing the universal pain. Slowly, Twinkles moves toward Ruth, and the two of them embrace. Then the Arctic Lady sits back down beside her husband and kisses the top of his head. Shuni smiles and watches with a swollen look of satisfaction. Ziggy worms her hand free of Tim’s. The guru’s constellation was just like all the other ones: they located the suffering, everyone cried and forgave their parents and now seem ready to move on with their lives. Her mother wasn’t even berated for the sexy shoes.

  “This is bullshit,” she tells Tim. “So we inherit our mother’s digestive bacteria? So we already knew that.”

  Tim nods, collecting himself. “Yes, it definitely seems like your mother is identifying with the pain.”

  Hitler Youth emerge from the depths to rejoice in Ziggy’s misadventure. She just spent her Saturday witnessing the origin story of all her mother’s feelings, which everyone—including the renegade guru—has received with open hearts. Everyone except Ziggy, who Hitler Youth maintain has always had a biological problem with empathy. Demoralized, Ziggy looks back at the screen where a peculiar silence has seized the room. Everyone has returned to their seats, and only Shuni remains standing in the center of the circle. The dopey contentment has drained from her eyes; her mouth is screwy and mean.

  “But when you castrate your husband,” says Shuni, “he becomes a dyke. You become a dyke. You are now two dykes who are still married under law. Well, why should you get special treatment? No same-sex couples can marry in this country. You should stand with your gay allies and get a divorce.”

  Polar Bear chuckles politely. No one else moves.

  “Drop this suffering,” Shuni barks at Ruth. “It doesn’t even belong to you. Let the man be.”

  Ziggy’s mother is silent. Jeff looks pale. A tickly elation creeps up Ziggy’s spine.

  “And you.” Shuni stares fiercely at Jeff. “You need to stop swimming so much in the ocean. After a certain point it is philandering.” The guru clicks at her assistant, and the slick ponytail whips swiftly toward the sound desk.

  “All the women, standing inside the circle,” Shuni instructs. “Except for Rutie.”

  The women rise and join the guru. Ziggy observes that all of them are dressed in loose-fitting pants and T-shirts. Their makeup is light or absent, their hair mostly tied back. They look degendered in the way of seasoned bushwalkers. Clearly, the only one of them who came here to be sexy today is Ziggy’s mum. Once the women are assembled, an angelic harmony pours forth from the speakers. The sound bursts lush and golden through the room like music spawned from an ocean sunrise.

  “Enya,” Tim says in an almost spiritual whisper.

  Shuni tells the women to dance. At first they are shy and rigid, swaying and bopping with sexless Western reserve. Then Shuni ushers them in around Jeff and they begin to animate. Their bodies loosen, shaking free from the flat gray room—swimming their hips and snaking their arms with elemental sass. Now Shuni summons Ruth to the edge of the group.

  “Jeff,” says the guru, “you need to put your wife back in the ocean.”

  Ziggy’s father nods obediently.

  “Take her hand,” Shuni tells him. “And lead her into the water.”

  Jeff clasps his wife’s hand and guides her into the tangle of gyrating female forms. Ziggy watches her father’s arms make cobra jabs mid-air while her mother shimmies underneath them; Ruth caresses his face. Their affection is a little nauseating, but it fills Ziggy with sweet nostalgia. And a specific memory of being at the beach. The four of them in the water, Ruth on Jeff’s back and her and Jake in their dad’s arms. Where Ruth’s chest met Jeff’s shoulder, the temperature of their skin told Ziggy how her parents loved each other. It was different from their love for her and obscured by a dark, adult enigma that made the world seem secure. Ziggy’s feelings are interrupted by the thought that Shuni’s ocean dance makes her an essentialist. She is about to apologize to Tim again, when the guru steps between Ruth and Jeff, taking their hands in hers.

  “Being speaks through us,” she says, “but you cannot get attached to the forms it takes.” She waggles Ruth’s hand. “Rutie’s soft essence attracts her husband—not these little red shoes with a pointy heel like the clitoris. This is your delusion, Rutie. That the clitoris is a little shoe or a little handbag or something red and dangerous to empower you. There is no female empowerment in a love relationship. There is only
the energetic integration of two physical beings seeking God.” She sweeps Jeff’s hand up above his head. “The ocean might make you feel like a Viking, but this woman is your key to the divine.”

  It isn’t a total evisceration, but Ziggy feels vindicated. She can see how the polarities might be a useful system for exploring the true human condition of nothingness. If it brings people into a deeper state of being, that can’t be bad. She looks at Tim. “I’m sure it works the same for gay couples.”

  Her friend nods, unfazed. “Even the Koran, read in a certain way, makes it clear who the wife is in a gay marriage.”

  Ziggy adores Tim. “And were you okay with the dykes thing?”

  “Yes, I understood the metaphor and appreciate the solidarity with same-sex couples.” He pauses thoughtfully. “But I don’t think this should ever appear on the internet.”

  Ziggy agrees. Some jokes are better left in therapy.

  The remaining constellations are performed in the usual way, without the comic epilogue. It seems this is Shuni’s preferred mode of working: first make fun of the delusions and then constellate the pain. As she watches, Ziggy begins to understand why. And how she got it wrong. Shuni’s jokes might help dissolve some layers of identity, but transcendence only occurs when Polar Bear stares straight ahead, telling them all in a soft, trembling voice how his mother turned him against cuddles. Now Ziggy is moved. And by nothing more than the crying part of a constellation. Polar Bear’s pure, surrendered feeling washes through her, stretching Ziggy out into a shimmering expanse of empathy. A field of energy without form, the eternal thrum of the present moment. Tim has a more succinct way of describing it.

  “It’s like she traumatizes people out of their trauma.”

  With queasy pride, Ziggy remembers that this is her mother’s work. A kind of reverse storytelling; where the Nazis are absolved and the Jews are saved and everybody is subsumed into what feels—even from the chilly fire escape—like the boundless grace of being. In her living room, there is often lots of laughter. Maybe jokes are always part of the traumatic de-traumatization process.