Inappropriation

by Lexi Freiman

  As the workshop wraps up, Ziggy’s gaze drifts from the iPad to the bats flying overhead toward the botanical gardens. It is a comforting sight. And strange to think she shares it, daily, with everyone in her city—the sky darkening with that coursing wave of black. Their bodies blink against the vast white like a visual reminder of the cosmic particles that connect us, and when outdoors to always wear a hat.

  Buzzing with vicarious workshop vibes, Tim and Ziggy pack up their equipment and take the bus home via Bondi Junction. On Saturday afternoon, the mall is swarming. Ziggy takes Tim to her favorite bench by the Japanese water feature. They gangle over the railing, critiquing the swirling masses below. Tim has a latent talent for pointing out the insidiousness of mainstream trends. Or what some might call a queer eye.

  “It’s like metrosexual men need shredded T-shirts to prove they have straight sex.”

  “And that thing women say, ‘I don’t dress for men, I dress for other women,’ does not make you a Buddha.”

  “They all need to be constellated,” Tim agrees.

  Then from behind them at the cold-pressed juice counter, Ziggy hears a familiar request.

  “Hold the romaine, hold the spinach.”

  She spots his silky golden flop just as Lance turns back to his friends.

  “One thing beta males are good for: they start faggy juiceries and really care that you get your nutrients.”

  Along with the camera, Ziggy directs Tim’s gaze to Lance and the other Randalls seniors, enjoying their Saturday afternoon at the mall. Lex is not in attendance—Ziggy imagines she is self-inflicting last-minute hair removal among other female tortures. Lance’s clique appears to be unsubtly encircling a group of Kandara seniors. The girls sip smoothies by the fountain. Their full figures cut a primal image against the faux-rock waterfall and surrounding bamboo. Ziggy has often spied on enigmatic Lucinda Chambers and her posse of platinum heiresses. Lucy has de Kooning’s demented femme fatale sex-face—that bug-eyed sultry smudge of last night’s makeup and shared bodily fluids. The unvirginal senior has the transgressive air of a girl already graduated and is most often seen perched on the low wall by the school gates, sipping a Diet Coke and pining for adult freedom. Ziggy is certain Lucinda and her friends all have boyfriends at university, but still, they are being polite to their male peers. You never know who might grow up to be the next sexist prime minister.

  Soon one of the boys is baiting Lucy with questions about her new beau. From his taunts, Tim and Ziggy glean that Lucinda is seeing some British guy who went to Eton with Prince Harry. When Lucy tells the boy that she recently met Harry on a yacht in Greece, he seems to get annoyed.

  “What was he like?” the boy demands, eyes slitty with contempt.

  Lucinda shrugs. Ziggy is moved by the older girl’s urbane world-weariness.

  “Come on,” presses the boy. “It must have been cool?”

  “It was boring,” she says. “Harry’s a dick.”

  Now the boy staggers back theatrically. He tells her to calm down; leave poor Harry alone. Lucy gives him a tight smile then turns back to her friends. Polite, diplomatic. The boys retreat, laughing at her—specifically at the unblended bronzer on the backs of her calves. As if her very dismissal of them is evidence of some larger female flaw. Ziggy leans in to Tim. “Prince Harry once wore a Nazi uniform to a fancy dress party.”

  Then a loud sucking sound gurgles from Lance’s cup. The other boys turn to face him, falling silent.

  “It’s a terrible shame,” Lance says dryly, “that date rape became so taboo.”

  His friends giggle and Lance continues.

  “Things were much more efficient in the old days. Everyone agreed that women needed liquoring and men needed a yielding corpse, and people just got on with it. Even frigid girls could have a go.”

  The boys erupt into a hybrid laughter—equal parts aghast and titillated. They clearly relish their friend’s wry, timeless misogyny.

  “And now our ‘empowered’ girlfriends want us to love them hairy and unwashed! Preening is natural—even clown fish understand the rules of attraction! Date rape at least brings back some of the drama to a rigged game.”

  The thwarted boy glares bitterly at Lucinda’s group. “And if we stopped flirting and making eye contact and doing all the things feminists call ‘assault,’ the human species would die out.”

  “If they don’t want to make eye contact,” says a severely acne-faced boy, “Rohypnol’s a good option.”

  “Correct, Mulvaney!” enjoins Lance. “This is where the caliphate has it right.” His eyes twinkle with malice. “Women secretly want to be slaves.”

  “Jesus, Fairfax,” comes a quiet protest.

  Lance looks wolfishly at the handsome Asian boy who has dared to speak up. “It’s true, Yee. The lie of equality is only possible in small countries with low immigrant quotas. And when you pretend that all Western wealth is not built off global poverty.”

  “He’s right,” says Lucy’s harasser. “You think all those Scandinavian feminists would want equal opportunities for every brown person on Earth?”

  “Some of my family are brown,” says the isolated challenger.

  “Feminists,” sneers Lance, “would still be chattel without imperialism. Sorry, Yee, but global communism isn’t going to work.”

  “And women prefer to be dominated,” smirks the zitty one.

  “Yes,” says Lance. “But by men who wear Brooks Brothers.”

  The laughter rekindles, jocular and brotherly. Ziggy’s arm has gone numb where Tim is squeezing it. The blood pounds viciously at her temples, reminding her—with exhilaration—that the camera is recording. She feels the tiniest tug toward Lance and his disdain for liberal hypocrisy. But then there is universal equality, aka Oneness. And the fact that Ziggy is a woman. She looks at Tim. His face is white.

  “That boy needs to be raped,” he says in a voice like a dragged shovel.

  Ziggy thinks her friend must be joking. Every day is consent day. Tim also owns the T-shirt.

  “I’m serious,” he says. His eyes look glazed, the quick obsidian slurred a murky brown. “He needs a rape trauma.”

  Ziggy’s heart cants toward Tim—deeply and psychically her friend. “We could drug him?”

  “How exactly?”

  Now she feels faint. They are going to poison Lance Fairfax. Then she remembers. “I have one dose of ayahuasca.”

  “What is that?”

  “It’s the mother drug.” Gerhard’s voice drones in her head. “It brings up mother issues and is meant to be as traumatic as a constellation.”

  Tim looks down across the lower food court. He nods, comprehending. “So he’d be traumatized and we wouldn’t even need to touch him?”

  “Exactly,” Ziggy says, noticing her disappointment.

  “He’d be traumatized out of the trauma of patriarchy.”

  Ziggy’s brain offers up the pain pornography of Lance and Lex regal under strobe lights. Her voice trembles with excitement. “We could spike his drink at the after party?”

  “Which after party?”

  Ziggy has never even mentioned the formal to Tim. So now she backtracks. Telling him a much longer story about three girls who met pressed against a famous action hero’s car and then again in line for a punitive HPV vaccine. How the two who were already friends tortured the third into thinking she was a transhuman of color then abandoned her when they decided to be white people. How she misses them and how she hates them. The story goes on and on, and as she tells it, Tim and Ziggy wind all the way down through the mall, out onto the street, and back along the arbored avenues to Ziggy’s house. Finally, she asks him. “Do you want to be my formal date?”

  Tim nods eagerly; Ziggy wonders if formals are egalitarian at public school.

  “The after party is at a nightclub in Double Bay,” she warns him.

  “Don’t they have a golf course there that doesn’t allow Jews or Muslims?”

  Ziggy nods apologetic
ally.

  “I can’t wait.”

  AMPED ON ADRENALINE and all Ruth’s sugary new after-school snacks, Tim and Ziggy sit on the Sofa of a Thousand Tears and map out their plan. It should be easy to shadow Lance around the club then tip the wine-colored liquid into his drink. Ziggy thinks his friends will be dipping their pinkies into plastic baggies of MDMA, but she knows from her research that Lance would never harm his body with synthetic chemicals. He likes his liquids cold-pressed or heavy on the antioxidizing polyphenols. Tim and Ziggy’s plotting moves between chilling logistics and giddy hilarity. Soon they become enamored with a vision of Lance on the dance floor ducking from hallucinations.

  “Maybe he’ll strip naked,” Ziggy speculates. “Maybe he’ll start apologizing to all the unpopular girls.”

  Tim giggles up from the rug as Ziggy paces around him, relaying bizarre scenarios. Lance’s psychic transformation is the general theme, but Ziggy’s story lines sprout weird cinematic tentacles. Lance swinging from the bathroom stalls like a monkey; mermaid-bathing in the urinal; stealing someone’s lipstick to paint a giant blooming vulva on the wall. The room gets fast around her as Ziggy stomps in demented circles, her head tight and molten—a mental acuity she associates with bathroom closets and Method acting.

  When she is out of breath, Ziggy collapses onto the floor and the spell breaks. Now the air cools and the consequences crowd back into the room. She eyes Tim anxiously.

  “So the best and worst thing that could happen is Lance has a bad trip?”

  Tim’s voice wavers. “Yes,” he says. “I think that’s right.”

  The friends comfort themselves with dark chocolate raisins and costume ideas. Eventually Tim leaves with the promise of returning in eighteen hours, dressed and ready for the Kandara year-ten formal. As Ziggy shuts the door behind him, the night gets very crisp and loudly silent. The sky in her window has never been blacker; the light inside is a shocking white. Ziggy bumps against each moment with the same yawning astonishment. She will be there tomorrow night, with all the other girls.

  WHEN SHE WAKES, it is late and to her brother’s taunting. He has found a Pokémon on Ziggy’s shoulder and is laughing hysterically at the top of the stairs.

  “That’s abusive,” Ziggy says, tossing a uterus-shaped pillow in his direction.

  “It’s not like I caught it at Auschwitz.”

  “Someone caught a Pokémon at Auschwitz?”

  Jake nods gravely. Ziggy giggles.

  “You think that’s funny?”

  “It’s all just ego-identification and concepts of mind, Jake.” Ziggy experiences the unfamiliar puff of elder siblinghood. “I can send you some links.”

  “Why don’t you send Twinkles some links?” Jake hurls the pillow hard into Ziggy’s knees. “We’ve got lunch there in an hour.”

  Ziggy had forgotten. She still hasn’t apologized to her grandmother, and will now have to sit in an intimate, aggressively tchotchke’d living room with her parents, Jake, and the slut-shamed septuagenarian. Her grandmother is going to make Ziggy suffer. Everything Ruth knows about emotional manipulation was gleaned from Twinkles’s arsenal. Many times, Ziggy has watched her grandmother swan around a room, parading her hurt with the grim ostentation of haute couture.

  But remarkably, before she’s even gotten the fly screen open, Twinkles forgives her granddaughter’s transgression. “Pippi, I love you. We forget the leopard print and have a nice lunch.”

  Ziggy nods, relief rising in a hot fizz at her eyeballs. She hugs her grandmother, the tears absorbing into Twinkles’s poufy shoulder pad.

  They sit straight down to eat. Twinkles has made a series of brown, chunky dishes with potatoes. “Last time you ask vegetables, this time I make vegetables.”

  Ruth scoops a mound of gravy onto her fork. “This would go well with a colonoscopy,” she teases her mother.

  Mercifully, Twinkles misses the joke. “Sorry, darlink. My VCR broken.”

  The meal continues pleasantly for a few minutes. Then Jacob jumps up and lunges toward the glass cabinet, making a swiping gesture with his phone.

  “Pippi, what you doing?”

  “I caught a Caterpie under the photo of Auntie Magda.”

  Ziggy scowls at her brother. “We’re having lunch with our grandmother.”

  “What’s ‘lunch’?” teases Jake. “What’s a ‘grandmother’?”

  “Shut up.”

  “Isn’t everything just ego-identification and concepts of mind?”

  Ziggy gives Jake the finger.

  “Including Auschwitz?”

  Twinkles squints at her granddaughter. “You think Auschwitz just a concept?”

  “Isn’t everything?” Ziggy asks weakly.

  “Who says this?” Her grandmother spits. “Jeff Koons?”

  Ziggy giggles and gently corrects her: “The GoPro is actually less about art than Eastern philosophy.”

  Ruth sighs in mock exasperation. “So all this time the camera was just the third eye?”

  “More like the objective observer.”

  But Twinkles isn’t following. “So you become a Buddhist and start denying the Holocaust?”

  “I’m not saying the Holocaust didn’t happen,” Ziggy says carefully. “I’m saying that Time is an illusion.”

  “No illusions.” Twinkles wrings the word out like a soiled rag. “Look at your auntie Magda.” She points to the photo of a middle-aged blond woman in a Guns N’ Roses T-shirt. “See her blue eyes?”

  Ziggy strains at the photo. “Yes.”

  “You know why they blue?” Twinkles speaks with aggressive calm. “Because Auntie Magda’s grandmother was raped by Magyars.”

  Jacob is, as usual, first to do the math. His eyes get very round. “Isn’t that your mother?”

  Comprehending, Ziggy feels herself dissolving back into the chair.

  Twinkles ignores the question. “You think that just a concept? That genes. That DNA.”

  “Mum,” says Ruth, “Ziggy is just experimenting.”

  “And brown the dominant gene for eye color,” Twinkles continues with icy, medical formality. “So there must have been many rapes, going back many, many generations.”

  Ziggy hangs her head. “I’m sorry,” she says to her lunch plate. “I just thought it was funny that they caught a Pokémon at Auschwitz.”

  But saying it only confirms how unfunny it is. In this room. The gravitational pull of her grandmother’s body makes a Holocaust joke feel pesky and void. Maybe because she was physically there while Ziggy is decades removed. Oddly, it is Lance’s politics that pop into her mind. Like a wealthy nation, Ziggy’s irreverence is built off her grandmother’s pain.

  “I’m not saying the Holocaust wasn’t real,” Ziggy tries again.

  “Then what you saying? It doesn’t matter? Because you learned how to meditate?” Twinkles shakes her head. “You used to be a very sympathetic girl.”

  “You’re right, Mum,” says Ruth, “it’s all just ideology. But Ziggy is learning. Please . . . don’t get offended.”

  Twinkles leans back exhausted in her chair. Ziggy watches her grandmother. Twinkles is right: Ziggy used to be a very sympathetic girl. Which means that, despite her efforts, Ziggy’s emotions have always showed. All the stories Twinkles has told her that made Ziggy’s heart squeeze like a hot sponge; her grandmother must have seen or known—from the temperature of her skin—exactly what Ziggy was feeling.

  “Even the fat little baby eating ice cream, you pity him. I saw it.”

  Ruth looks alarmed. “Which fat little baby?”

  Twinkles waves her daughter away. “It doesn’t matter.” She looks at Ziggy. “Please. Pippikem. No more adolescence.”

  Ziggy nods tearfully at her grandmother. “Okay,” she says. “No more mean jokes.”

  The whole room presses in hot and squishy on Ziggy’s eyeballs. Ruth starts to clear their plates. Ziggy’s mother has a talent for shifting the energy. And casually getting the last word.

 
; “It takes courage to be ignorant,” she says.

  Twinkles gasps.

  “I’m not talking about books, Mum. You can read all the books in the world and still practice ignorance as a form of humility.”

  “Can I practice ignorance on my biology test?”

  Ruth ignores her son. “Ignorance is a type of letting go,” she says, balancing five plates on a slender forearm. “There is courage in letting go of your ideas because so many of them come from your pain.” Ziggy eyes the trembling crockery. “It’s terrifying to drop your suffering, drop your identity, but it’s the key to psychic freedom.”

  Ruth stabilizes her load, squeezes her mother’s shoulder and steps safely into the kitchen.

  Twinkles shrugs. “My new-age children.”

  After lunch, Twinkles wants Ruth to see the kaftan they bought that Ziggy is refusing to wear to the formal. While the men loiter out in the hall, Twinkles ushers the women into her boudoir. The walls and carpet and ceiling are all powdery shades of pink. The bed is piled with salmon- and peach-colored throw pillows. It seems harder to breathe in here. And also, it always makes Ziggy feel sleepy. She has spent many hours watching Twinkles tearing through her wardrobe, searching for something that might fit her twiggy granddaughter. In the beginning Ziggy is usually irritated, but she soon succumbs to the pink room’s soft, enveloping dermatitis and the hypnotic notes of Bal à Versailles. Twinkles claims this is the fragrance Princess Diana and Elizabeth Taylor and Michael Jackson all wore. What Ziggy thinks of as the deathly notes of celebrity.

  While they wait for Twinkles to find the kaftan, Jeff and Jacob lean in curiously from the doorway—making the room seem smaller, smothering, and a little obscene. The boys are strangely reverent in this space, as if bearing witness to something sacred. When the garment is located, Twinkles whips it out with a violent flourish and everybody pretends to like it.

  “It’s very funky, Mum.”

  Twinkles nods, breathless with vindication. “She looked really cool.”

  Ziggy studies the kaftan. She can’t possibly wear it. But she can pretend to. “Can you find me some matching shoes?”