“PANPHOBIA”
A limited edition hybrid story-zine made for FEMME SOUP, an all female mixed media art and music festival taking place this Saturday, April 6 at Nomad Studios in Los Angeles.
The “Panphobia” zine will be available for sale at DUM DUM Zine’s table at the event, and will be displayed in the gallery alongside art from local female artists until April 12th.
My neighbors have parakeets. Three of them, one a little powder blue; a second yellow like the color of a fern by a river, and a third, pinkish like country mornings. They live in a large white cage that I imagine they keep inside at night and in the morning. I only hear them in the afternoon. For the longest time I didn’t bother to see what they looked like, I only appreciated their sound, acknowledged their existence through my pleasure at hearing them. My neighbors hang the cage on the end of their laundry lines beneath a fig tree. A breeze from the ocean (I live only three miles from it) drifts up in the afternoon and makes the whole world seem larger, freer.
Once I listened for them for an entire day. I woke up and went to sit in my living room, to wait. I sat completely still with the apartment door to my back, the windows open on my left and the one on my right open too.
At first I only hear the morning, soft and sleepy. The lemon tree and grape vines flutter in the breeze, off in the distance planes from LAX like comforting thunder. And then I hear a crow laughing.
My husband sees me sitting there and asks what is wrong. I tell him I’m waiting for the neighbor’s parakeets in the afternoon. I’ll hear them soon.
A little past nine my younger sister calls. I have two sisters. Margaret who is older and asks herself, is this it? Am I content? Isn’t there something else? And the younger, Letty, who wonders Do I have identity? What is my identity? She thinks everyone has identity and she searches alone.
Letty wants to go to lunch and pretend. “Let’s go to tea.” Her voice sounds foreign over the telephone. “I love to go for tea. Don’t you just love tea? I want to get a big fancy hat and gloves and a parasol. Let’s go to the Huntington Tea Room.”
I tell her I am busy today, maybe tomorrow, tomorrow.
I speak differently when I’m with Letty. I hardly know why.
If I were with Margaret I wouldn’t have to do this. We’d eat at some Indian hole-in-the-wall, eating papadams, and drinking beers that make our hands look small.
Just before eleven and the breeze is beginning to taste like salt and sea and freedom when Margaret, my older sister, Skypes me. I hear the ringing on my computer and go quickly to it.
I nearly shout, “Yes hello, Margaret? Are you there? The connection is bad.”
Static but somewhere far off what I think is my sister’s voice.
“I miss you Margaret,” I say. “Come home Margaret. Come back.”
I disconnect and try to connect again, static, Margaret’s voice sounding like chimes in a wind tunnel.
I can only make out a few words, “You met someone? You are on an adventure? Yes I am happy for you, so very happy. But I am unhappy for me. What? Can you hear me? I think the connection is bad. That sounds fun. Ok, well, enjoy yourself. I said, enjoy yourself! I miss you Margaret. Goodbye.”
When I disconnect, it is the hottest part of the day and outside the crow is still laughing. He’s perched on a telephone wire, I can see him from the desk, black and sleek as a cat. I go to the couch and watch the light shift and change across the living room rug. I try to sit perfectly still but it’s like I’m vibrating. My mother calls. I don’t answer it but listen to the voicemail. She is having trouble with father.
She says my name phonetically: FRAN-ciss. It’s like a slap in the face.
At two o’clock the crow is gone, I check to be sure and then email my girlfriends. I have two girlfriends. My single New York girlfriend who wants to go under water and hear stillness, be touched and asked for nothing in return; and my married-with-children girlfriend who lives in Vegas and thinks she’s missed something, wants to go back, wonders what it is she missed and if others have it. I finish my emails my head filled with their lives and problems as if I were an extension of them each.
It is almost three when I hear the parakeets. Their song is simple, it repeats, rising and falling. They sing with and against each other. The late afternoon light spills across the living room floor, slashing diagonally. That sea air comes through one window and out the other, sweeping all the old air out with it. The whole apartment smells as fertile as the ocean, like orchids pregnant with fruit under a nurturing sun, their roots deep in the earth.
I have a work girlfriend. She goes to see her mother a lot who lives in Ohio. Her mother is getting old and does not like to go outside much. She lives in a suburb somewhere outside of Cincinnati and refuses to get on a plane to see her daughter. So my work girlfriend must save her vacation time to fly home. Her mother is scared of everything: she is deathly afraid of the bus driver and will not ride public transit, she fears the mailman, her second ex-husband, her first husband’s ghost, the dentist, and especially the mall. She couldn’t take care of her big house so my work girlfriend took two weeks off and flew out to help her move into an apartment. My work girlfriend came back thinner and nervous about everything. She could barely type a letter. Her mother had sold her car and refused to drive.
When my work girlfriend asked, “How will you get to the grocery store, to work, to the doctors?” Her mother said she didn’t know, she hadn’t thought of that. My work girlfriend cries at night, in the morning, in the afternoon, when my parakeets are singing into the ocean breeze. She is scared this will happen to her. I wonder when it will happen to us all.