Finding Frida

There she was. In an art museum. In Nashville. On a Tuesday.

Sobbing like an idiot.

The security guard surveyed her with exasperation as she hiccupped and sniffled, while attempting a small wave in a half-hearted display of sanity. His eyes widened with the expression one uses when dealing with the slightly unbalanced, he gave her a wan smile and nodded back.

It wasn’t even a painting that had gotten to her. In an art museum that would have been understandable. It was that damn quote on the silver plaque next to a damn photograph of Frida Kahlo that sent Laura into an existential tailspin. It read,

“I insist that Frida was a special being, not a person one ran into every day. When she spoke, when she moved, when she painted, when she expressed herself, she was already inspiring something. To me, she was like birds and flowers and knitted quilts, a Mexican mood concentrated in an epoch and all expressed through her. She was like that.”

In a forgotten cabinet somewhere in the back room of her being, Laura’s heart expanded like hot glass under ice cold water until, with a slight popping sound, it shattered.

Longing welled up inside her chest. She desperately wished to be that woman; to be the musical, free, almost ethereal soul that Frida embodied in her own broken outer casing. Her heart flooded with rapid-fire flashes of coffee shop women breezily uplifting the entire room with a single radiant smile, visions of Frida dancing as she described her next painting to her husband Diego, and fantasies of herself floating through life’s drudgery surrounded by an irresistible aura of pure joy and light.

For an instant, it was intoxicating.

…But then Laura remembered that she was not Frida. She was not ethereal, or vivacious, and she certainly didn’t have the ability to light up a hallway, let alone a room. She wore Old Navy jeans and grey t-shirts, not flowing skirts that spoke for a revolution.

If her thoughts had ended there, she might have accepted defeat and left with her dignity intact, but that wasn’t Tuesday’s plan for her. In the span of 4 minutes, her mind and body were filled with an alternating barrage of outrageous inspiration and hopeless despair to the point that she could no longer articulate her own thoughts to herself. She cowered. She was seized by an overwhelming urge to drop to her knees. She needed to rip open her chest and scream up to the sky and at the same time to rake her fingers back through her hair until she was covering her whole head, crouching in the “earthquake drill” position right there in the gallery.

But that, of course, would have looked utterly insane, so her ego and her soul reached a compromise. They settled on loud, wet hysterics instead.

The security guard placed a calm hand on her shoulder and said gently,

“Ma’am, could you please step back behind the yellow line.”

Laura gained some control of herself, pulled out a Kleenex from her sensible black purse and moved on. How could she be such a complete basket case? Who has a psychotic breakdown in the damn Frist? And why couldn’t they at least be those calm, I’m-so-moved tears! Now she was blotchy and millennials were starting to stare…

She escaped into the next room, which gave her some relief from that haunting quote; then she saw the painting.

Shit.

The female Universe swirled as day and night in the Mexican desert merged to cradle Mother Earth with her green skin and mossy dreadlocks giving her a vaguely primal wildness. In her untamed mother’s arms was Frida, hair left uncharacteristically loose and flowing to match the Earth’s styling. Frida, in turn, held Diego, who was painted naked, laying across Frida’s arms like an infant about to feed while the three women sat upright facing forward, staring ahead into the viewer’s eyes. As if to redeem the baby-husband, he was painted with a third eye in his forehead, acknowledging a spiritual knowing or connection that would give him greater merit.

In Laura’s mind, it didn’t.

Her eyes drifted back up to notice that Mother Earth’s chest was gashed open into a valley that ended in a trickle of life-giving milk from her breast. Frida’s image had a similar wound across her chest, except it spurted with bright red blood. All while her husband lounged in her arms expectantly.

The tears returned but this time her chest burned. She bled for you! She BLED you bastard!- Laura’s inner monologue raged as she suppressed the urge to shake the painting an attempt to reach the little man-child inside- You…You fat ugly frog-looking bastard! She loved you! She gave you her life and you cheated on her! She gave you life and you took hers! She’s bleeding you dipshit! She’s bleeding and all you can do is sit there and wait for dinner and wonder what she’s bleeding about!

By this time, she was beginning to consider herself an expert in public outbursts and had reined in her blubbering to a poised series of single teardrops. This served to create the illusion of a dignified display of righteous feminine anger- though what there was to be angry about on this particular Tuesday was anybody’s guess. She wasn’t really sure herself. Laura’s rage seemed to bubble up inside from depths deeper than the morning’s argument with her husband that had sent her driving aimlessly through the side streets until she found herself in this museum of psychological torture. At least it had a decent gift shop.

Unbeknownst to Laura, she was more deeply connected to Frida at that moment than most art historians ever will be. Standing in the expertly lit gallery, facing a painting that would be gone in a few weeks to be replaced by some Picasso or Rembrandt, Laura was experiencing the rage and frustration of every woman in history. She knew the silent howl, and the anguish it caused every woman who gave her light to someone outside of herself only to have it calmly dimmed with one dismissive finger on the wall switch of life. She, like Frida, was now containing the energy coursing through her so forcefully that only a few drops leaked from her eyes. For one unnoticed instant, Laura’s energy did fill the room. If an artist had been present, they would have scrabbled for the nearest pencil and begun furiously sketching whatever they could on whatever surface was available in an attempt to capture it.

But the artists of Nashville were all busy painting trendy murals downtown during this moment, so the only effect of Laura’s awakening was that the security guard who witnessed her earlier breakdown felt an unusually sharp itch on his left eyebrow. He rubbed absentmindedly at it, and the moment was gone.

Another hand lightly touched her. This time it was an elderly hand with petal-soft skin and thick, slightly ridged nails painted red. It was a kind feeling hand, almost lovingly wrapped around Laura’s stiff forearm.

“I don’t like it either.” An old voice whispered conspiratorially from somewhere near her shoulder.

Laura started for a moment, glanced at small woman who had materialized beside her, and turned back to the painting, revising her expression to one of thoughtful reverence. It was the sort of expression she assumed was expected in an art museum.

“Oh! Uh, I... I do like it…I mean, it’s beautiful…”

“Beautiful… yes…” The old woman continued, “The greens are lovely, I quite like that Frida painted her dog curled up in the bottom corner there. It makes me smile.”

“Then why..”

“Why don’t I like it?”

The stranger seemed to consider her own comment and find it amusing.

“Well, firstly, I’m going on eighty, and I don’t have the energy anymore to like things that don’t actually please me, that sort of mental diplomacy is best left to the young. Secondly…”

She sighed, and looked into the painting rather than at it,

“Secondly… I lived in that painting for most of my life, and I have no desire to return to it, much less to see that another woman knows it well enough to put it down on a canvas that big.”

The old woman broke her touch, which brought Laura’s attention back to the fact that the cool, wrinkled hand had been there the entire conversation. Now that she was actually looking at her companion, Laura registered the soft, grey-blue eyes that looked knowingly into hers from behind large wire rimmed glasses. Her hair was charcoal with white streaks softly curling through her brushed perm. She had a pleasant round face and was dressed sensibly in lavender slacks and a cream blouse with pretty florals embroidered along the collar. She could have been the neighborhood grandmother who baked cookies for whomever wanted to drop in on Sunday.

She certainly didn’t seem to match the oddly carefree voice that had snapped Laura back into the present. The two women stared quietly at the painting for a moment, then Laura broke the silence.

“She was beautiful, she had such…life in her… why did she let herself…?”

“You’d have to ask her yourself, honey. Any of these old coots,” the woman gestured to a droning docent “would probably tell you that she loved him.”

“Why did you?”

The woman chuckled, then looked at Laura with a look of…well…it was impossible for Laura to describe what it was. It was a look that skipped the eyes and went straight to the achiest parts of one’s soul and soothed them, as if empathy alone could heal the body itself.

“Oh honey, when you do finally step out of your own picture frame and take a walk around the world, you reach a point where you look back, and a funny thing happens. You find that you really can’t remember what made you stay in that silly little still-life for so long. Like an old joke that ran its course decades ago. You forget what made it amusing in the first place.”

“That’s a good way to put it...” Laura conceded.

“Well, when you’re old and senile like me, you can speak in cryptic gibberish and people think you’re sharing wisdom. Now If you’ll forgive me dear, I’ve taken enough of your time, it’s far too precious to be trapped inside on a day like today. Besides, if I stay any longer they’ll accuse me of harassing the patrons.”

With a sly wink and an affectionate squeeze of Laura’s arm, the stranger strolled off. She grinned and nodded to the entry guard as he tipped an imaginary hat back to her, leaving Laura and Frida to figure out the truth for themselves.