by Lexi Freiman
Cate’s voice drops straight through Ziggy’s stomach. “What. The. Actual. Fuck.”
The girls break apart, rushing to inspect their dates.
“Matty!” yells Kate and kicks him lightly in the ribs. Cate shakes her boyfriend’s shoulders and whimpers his name. It is hard to know if she is genuinely distressed or just pretending she’s in a movie. The MDMA is making Fliss move over Declan with the jerky lyricism of a contemporary dancer. It appears she is trying to wake him with the whipping motion of her hair. Lex watches Lance cross-legged on the floor, swaying and gaping at the ceiling.
Fliss whips her head back, and blinks up at Tessa. “Are they sleeping?” she asks hopefully.
“We think they accidentally roofied themselves,” says Tessa, brilliant as ever.
“What?” Kate snaps, her face wizening with deep sarcasm. “Why would they want to date-rape us if we’re already having sex with them?”
Kate makes a good point, but Ziggy is sure the Cates are not that naïve. These girls are familiar with the eternal power struggle between heteronormative Man and Woman. Ziggy runs with Tessa’s theory.
“They probably put the drugs in the wrong water bottle,” Ziggy says. “Weren’t you all sharing a bottle of Mount Franklin?”
Kate takes a menacing step toward her. “So what?”
“So, so were the boys—Lance bought them one.” Ziggy gives him an affectionate nudge. “Didn’t you, Lance?”
“Aqua?” he says serenely. “Yes, please.”
Kate eyes her brother anxiously. “Lance, what happened?”
He shrugs. “Smacky pills?”
“What’s wrong with my brother?” Kate glares murderously at Ziggy, her jaw rotating at alarming speed.
Now Ziggy falters. “I’m not sure,” she says, glancing around for help. She sees Lance lick his cuff link. “Maybe someone put acid in his Blue Blood?”
Kate’s “Ha!” cracks across the parking lot like a skimmed stone. “So Lance’s drink was spiked and the other three accidentally roofied themselves and you four just happened to be walking past?” Kate’s hands meet her hips at the tulle spray of skirt—giving her the look of a furious human pom-pom. In their sheer formal gowns, the other girls rise like vengeful ghosts above their dates. Their euphoric high quickly slips into dippy hysteria.
“What did you do to them?” Cate rasps, grabbing Fliss and squeezing her like a teddy.
“Nothing!” Ziggy pleads, inexplicably, with Lex. Her old friend hangs back strangely quiet, chewing on her lip.
“Oh my God!” screams Kate. “The drama freaks were date-raping our boyfriends!”
“Your boyfriends were trying to date-rape you!” Tessa shouts back.
“What part of boyyfriend,” slurs Cate, “don’t you understand?”
“Rapists!” yells Kate.
Tim looks helplessly at Ziggy as he gnaws on the yo-yo string pulled taut from his pocket. She feels the soft tug of fidelity to Lance, but promptly defeats it.
“Wait!” Ziggy cries, whipping out her phone. “I’ve got proof!”
She holds the phone up, scrolling frenetically to the clip. The Cates step over their boyfriends and shuffle in toward Ziggy. The video plays, and as Lance’s voice comes barking through the speakers, he giggles then lays out flat and absorbed on the floor. The Cates glare at him, gasping and squealing “ohmyfuckinggod” at every pause in the dialogue. “Yielding corpse,” Lance recites after himself. “Hairy, unwashed girlfriends,” he whispers, enthralled. The rape eulogy is even more offensive than Ziggy remembered. With impressive economy, Lance managed to include sexism, sexual assault, white imperialism, and Islamophobia, and his tart delivery added a nasty classist after-kick. Cate and Fliss shake their heads, grimly comprehending their boyfriends’ misogyny, while Lex growls a sickened “white supremacist,” then starts typing feverishly into her phone. Now Ziggy feels bad for throwing Lance to these furious, albeit infrequent, feminists. And then, as the clip finishes, Lance again begins to giggle.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Kate yells at her brother, hiking her skirt and stomping violently toward him.
Lance ducks away from her. “It was a joke,” he says, eyes aglow with mischief. Ziggy almost believes him.
“What kind of fucked-up joke is that?” Lex hurls her corsage at his head. “And ‘the caliphate has it right’?”
“That was a character!” Lance says with a deranged smile. “We’re all just playing characters!”
Ziggy can’t help feeling, uneasily, that this is her influence.
“It’s not a character,” Kate shouts. “You’re a sexist!”
“I’m only playing a sexist!” Lance cries, gesturing to his fallen comrades. “Just like them.” He grins, his eyes rounding. “None of this is even real.”
“Whatever, you freak,” Kate screeches. “Should I tell everyone how you punched our old nanny in the vagina?”
At this the Cates erupt into hysterical cackling. Kate makes a splashy flick of her skirt, enjoying the attention. “It’s true. He used to whinge to Mum: ‘Analisa pulls her chair too close to mii-iine.’”
Cate and Fliss collapse together laughing, and even Lex chuckles softly against the pillar. Tessa also seems pleased with the sharp swerve toward their new target.
“What else did he do?” she coaxes the loose-lipped Fairfax sibling.
“Oh, lots of things,” says Kate, bunching the organza up around her hips as if preparing to squat over her brother’s head. “He spat juice in the maids’ faces, but they were so scared of our mother they just laughed and called him ‘funny boy.’”
“Our mother,” Lance repeats, “ . . . is perfect.”
Now the laughter is unanimous and mean. Ziggy crouches down beside her baffled confidante.
“What do you mean ‘perfect’?” she asks him.
Lance stares straight ahead, breathless at the vision unfolding before him. “She’s a hologram,” he says, “just an outline of a human being . . . with a little clutch purse . . . a woman.”
“Uh, that’s called misogyny!” bays Tessa.
Eamon glowers at his former tormentor. “Just because you love your mother doesn’t mean you don’t hate women.”
“He only loves her because our mother is obsessed with him,” Kate announces, reclaiming her mantle as primary persecutor. “She’s always touching his arms, and telling him how muscly he is.”
Ziggy wants to pat poor Lance’s shoulder, but manages to restrain herself. “It sounds like mother enmeshment,” she says sympathetically.
“What the hell does that mean?” sneers Kate.
“That she treats Lance like her husband.”
Kate’s eyes go poppy. “Yes!” she squeals. “She texts him all day long, and if there’s a spider in the house, she always gets Lance to kill it!”
Ziggy is filled with a strange, maternal warmth for both brother and sister. She knows the family dynamic well. Lance’s mother might be perfect but her engulfing love has made him revile the female body.
“Lance,” says Ziggy, “is your mother the most beautiful woman in the world?”
He gives a dreamy nod.
“But does her breath also smell funny?”
“Sometimes,” he admits.
Kate grins wildly, and then points a fierce, anointing finger. “Ziggy’s like a therapist!”
The others agree in similarly shrill tones of delight. It seems they all want Kate to have therapy.
“Tell us more about Lance and my mother,” she commands, her jaw struggling to keep pace with her tongue.
Tim has raised his hand. “Sorry to interrupt,” he says, “but I don’t think you’re meant to blame the mother.”
“That’s right,” says Ziggy. “You can only ask the mother how she feels.”
Kate rustles her skirts in frustration. “But how can we ask her?”
“Simple,” says Lance in a distant, mystical voice. “She’s right here.” He looks out across the gray expanse of
parking lot.
“Where?” says Ziggy gently.
“She’s everywhere.”
“Ask her if she wants to have sex with her son,” teases Kate.
Lance ignores her. He listens. “There,” he says. “She’s in the dripping.”
“The dripping?” Ziggy looks anxiously at Tim.
“There.”
Everybody quiets. A soft tinkling at the far wall. Either a leaking pipe or trickling rain. Doubtfully Lance’s mum.
“Why don’t you get someone to channel Mrs. Fairfax?” Tim suggests.
“What are you two,” Kate says, “witches?”
“It’s called a constellation,” Tessa snaps. “You can ask dead people and Nazis why they were murderers and rapists.”
Tim speaks kindly to Kate. “If you want to know why your mum favors Lance over you, Ziggy can just ask her.”
“Ask a drip?”
“Ask your ancestors,” says Tessa, already arranging Tim and Eamon on either side of her. “Everyone make a circle.”
The girls are surprisingly obedient. Kate plops down onto Matty’s rump, surrendering to the vague promise of psychic matricide, as well as an intense desire to vigorously massage her own scalp. She scratches luxuriously beside Cate and Fliss’s giggly human pretzel. Lex squats on their other side. Tessa quickly scurries around to close up the circle, and Tim sits crosslegged next to Ziggy. Her three friends smile up eagerly. It can’t be that hard. You just get a few people to stand inside the circle and talk about their feelings. The game plays itself.
“Come on,” says Kate. “I want to know why my mother still cuts Lance’s toenails.”
“Okay,” says Ziggy, buoyed by peer esteem, adrenaline, and the knowledge that her camera is recording. “So who wants to play Mrs. Fairfax?”
Fliss leaps up, disturbing Cate’s repose and more grievously, her chignon. “I’ll do it!” Fliss squeaks.
“Thank you, Fliss,” says Ziggy, her voice suddenly low and remote as if it is coming from her feet. “Mrs. Fairfax, would you please come and stand beside your son.”
Fliss swishes over to Lance’s side.
“Now close your eyes,” Ziggy instructs. “And tell us how you feel.”
Fliss squeezes her lids closed and sways on her feet. “I feel love,” she says, smiling.
“That’s just the drugs,” heckles Kate.
“Hang on,” says Ziggy. “Lance, how do you feel sitting beside your mum?”
He rolls his head back sensually against her dress. “Like I don’t have a body,” he says. “Like we share the same skin . . . and everything else is just . . . molecules.”
“Good!” Ziggy’s neck tingles. “That’s your boundary issue.”
“Oh my God, gross,” says Kate. “Like she’s a child molester?”
“No,” says Ziggy, “she’s just too affectionate, which makes Lance feel engulfed.”
“He looks happy,” says Kate, grimacing at her brother.
“He said he feels like he doesn’t have a body. That’s called engulfment.”
Tim chimes in softly. “Which is why he says all girls smell fishy.”
“It isn’t his fault,” says Ziggy. The language spurts expertly from her mouth. “Lance is just the Oedipal victor because your mum hates your dad.”
Kate puffs up, red and demonic. “I have the best dad in the world!”
“That’s because you have father issues.”
Kate’s friends break into vicious jeers of “Daddy’s Girl.”
“I’m sorry my dad looks like Harrison Ford, you bitches!”
“Enough,” says Ziggy. “We’re here to resolve Lance’s mother issues. Try to stay focused.”
Tim gives her a gentle nudge of approval. The others settle.
“Okay,” says Ziggy, regaining her gravitas. “I need someone to play the grandma.”
“Me!” squeals Cate, bounding up and into the circle, her dress trailing across Little Matty’s face.
Ziggy requests the grandma’s maiden name and then tells Mrs. Potts to please stand beside her daughter, Mrs. Fairfax.
“Mrs. Fairfax,” Ziggy says to Fliss. “How does it feel being beside your mother?”
It is immediately obvious that Fliss is having a negative feeling, and that she doesn’t want to offend their group’s punitive leader by sharing it. Ziggy watches Fliss fidget, her forehead gleaming with sweat. Defeated, Fliss mumbles, “I guess I feel stuck.”
“What about now?” says Cate and pokes her in the rib.
Fliss dodges sideways, stumbling over onto Lance’s crouched back. He wraps his hands around her shins.
“Don’t be afraid,” Lance says, squeezing. “We’re just quarks, dancing in a field.”
This instigates riotous laughter, and Cate takes the opportunity to attack the mother-son tableau, poking Fliss and flicking Lance with her tulle train. Ziggy watches, unamused, as her constellation quickly comes apart. Cate has not dropped into the universal grandmother, or else Grandma Potts is a terrible bully. Watching Fliss stand adhesed to her son while fending off the jabbing matriarch, Ziggy is reminded of the heavier women in Ruth’s workshops; the ones who use the word “stuck” when describing the bodily sensation that subdues their life force and hinders them from routine exercise. In constellation theory, it seems stuck is synonymous with mothers who demand too much and immobilize their daughters with self-loathing. Ziggy has watched these participants return late from lunch and blame the women who bore them. Observing Fliss, Ziggy’s brain fizzes with high, cosmic purpose.
“Kate,” she says, “is your mum a bit chubby?”
Kate wants to be offended, but she also wants to hate her mother. The maternal bond is, as Ziggy predicted, very weak. “Yes,” says Kate. “And so is my grandma.”
“Gross,” whines Cate. “Can I play one of the cousins?”
“Get her to play the granddad,” Tim suggests.
“Why don’t you play the granddad, pajama pants?”
Enlightened, Tim ignores Cate. “Ziggy,” he says. “I really think you need to start blaming the patriarchy now.”
“Uh-oh!” says Cate. “Here comes the feminist dissectionality!”
“No, he’s right,” says Ziggy. “If all the women are chubby, we probably need to talk to a grandfather.”
“Grandfathers!” cries Lance, releasing his mother, and rocking forward in a tight, contemplative ball. “But grandfathers are just vapor,” he says, brows knit in astonishment. “And grandmothers are tetrahedrons. Mums and Dads and even my penis has zero reality.”
The group laughter bounces around them like a violent hurling of basketballs. Ziggy notices that Lex has doubled over in a fit of giggling, but she barely collects herself before she is once again typing giddily into her phone.
“Who are you texting?” Ziggy says, reaching for curious but falling just short of annoyed.
Lex doesn’t look up. “I’m not,” she says. “I’m just writing these lyrics before I forget them.”
“Our lyrics?”
“My lyrics.”
Lex is making fun of them. Ziggy’s body feels light, a faint heat burning at the edges. Like a hologram, like Mrs. Fairfax the outline of a human being. Buried within the floating layers is a bright flint of pain.
Now freed from Lance’s grip, Fliss pleads with Ziggy. “Can I play Grandpa Potts?”
“No,” barks Cate. “None of us are playing an old man.”
Lex’s voice lobs violently into the air. “Can you please stop being such a diva?”
Cate’s face quivers and falls. Ziggy feels a weird glitch of sympathy.
Lex bounces up, unperturbed, onto her feet. “I’ll play the old white man,” she says, smirking to herself. Then, as Lex steps in beside her proxy wife, Cate flinches.
“What was that?” Ziggy asks her.
“She scared me,” Cate says innocently.
“I didn’t do anything,” says Lex.
“I know,” says Cate. “You just looked scary.
”
Ziggy can feel where this is going. The girls don’t understand psychic energy. That Grandma Potts was probably afraid of her husband. They are instead going to make this about skin color. Ziggy could start a fight between them. She could expose the Cates, at last, as racist. But she wants the constellation to work. Ziggy wants everyone to be friends.
“You felt fear,” she tells Cate, “because Grandma Potts was probably her husband’s sexual slave.”
Lex squints disbelievingly, but Cate seems intrigued. “So why was the grandma mean to her daughter?”
“Because she’s fat,” says Kate.
“No,” Eamon says gruffly. “Because women have to hurt one another in order to survive within a system of patriarchal oppression.”
Tessa kisses her boyfriend’s slender bicep, and Ziggy feels happy for them. Eamon really is Tessa’s perfect formal partner.
“Fine,” says Kate, “but my mother is still a bitch.”
“Yes,” says Ziggy, “because her mother is a bitch.”
Kate looks confused. “Hey,” she says, “your grandmother is a bitch.”
“I know!” Ziggy cries triumphantly. “Because the patriarchy made her that way!”
Kate stalls, processing. Then she looks across the circle to Lance. Her eyes are suddenly wet. “Yes!” she screams. “You should never, ever tell a girl her farts smell like sulfur!”
Kate bursts into tears, and the other Cates rush to their friend. They huddle in around her, hugging her and stroking her hair. Ziggy hears Fliss consoling Kate: “You don’t even fart.”
Lance looks genuinely sorry. He rises and wobbles toward his sister. “I’m sorry, Katie,” he says. “It’s my farts that smell like sulfur, not yours.”
But Kate isn’t done. “And when I try to tell you some good gossip, you always say you don’t care.”
“I’m sorry.” Lance’s eyes are dewey. “You know I care; I love gossip.”
The siblings stare at each other intensely. “Fine,” says Kate. “But when the drugs wear off, you have to stay nice.”
“I promise,” says Lance. “But now I really need to be in a small enclosed space.” He blinkers his hands at the sides of his face. “Lex,” he says, finally noticing his girlfriend. “Where’s my car?”
“We took a limo,” she says coolly.