Open To The Feel Of It
You issued the invitation to Sarah because the exhibit ad was bold, with Frida Kahlo’s face showing both vulnerability and strength. This, you thought, could speak to the dark event. Your friend’s loss—the baby she birthed that wasn’t breathing—could be discussed without the thin words, because Kahlo’s art could do all the work. In her brush strokes, the feminine load could be aired.
But you thought there’d be nuance, a play on all sides, with fruit, animals, and figures from the forest. You didn’t remember Kahlo being so direct. You forgot the canvases with the fetuses and blood-soaked sheets. How insensitive—like a sharp squeeze of the cheeks as a greeting, or worse. “Art is not this namby-pamby thing,” the writer George Saunders once said.
You and Sarah became close three years before she lost her baby. Lost—as in, an object once hers, once quite tangible, changes into a memory whose intangibility feels like a rock inside a heart and lung.
You became close because you were both experiencing the effects of a miscarriage, and both in first pregnancies.
Though she had only been an acquaintance—the wife of your husband’s friend—you felt compelled to contact her. And she came to your house, with almond cake, ready to talk. But you spoke first, which was out of character for you. And you didn’t even eat the cake. Instead, you told her about the trail of blood spots on your blue tile floor, and she nodded. The stranger in latex gloves, and she sipped from her teacup. The cold tool that lodged into your center, as you listened to the fluorescent light buzz overhead and envisioned a younger you floating away like a ghost. You didn’t move your body until the technician’s strange statement: “Your husband can now enter.” The man who half-made the baby had been asked to sit outside the room.
Sarah was a trooper, listening to you. She even helped herself to a second piece of almond cake when you went on about the blue tile floor and how good it felt on your cheek after the largest blood gush.
“Will our bodies ever give us children?” you asked Sarah.
A year later, yours did. You had a son in a hospital bed that overlooked a parking lot. When they placed his naked body on your chest, you watched him wail, unaware that he was crying for you. You looked at him, thinking his fingers were too long to be a baby’s; and then you looked away, toward your husband who was messaging someone far from here. He seemed so able to be far from here.
Sarah’s son was due this past summer. But during labor, he lost the ability to breathe and died.
And so, you invited Sarah to the Frida Kahlo exhibit to help her place her spinning grief into a round hole—away from the square of all other situations.
But sometimes, when you try to be good, you are a flawed and dangerous person. Sometimes your goodness outflanks you. It laughs at you because it reveals your weakest points.
Of course you didn’t realize this when you greeted Sarah at the museum entrance. You smiled and looked past her eyes and breasts, where remnants of the event were. You gave her a hug when she said it took her some time to decide whether she was ready for this, not understanding the full scope of what she said, that she knew more about Kahlo than you did, because you were only fuzzy about her art, as you are with most things. Fuzzy—as in, inclined to see things from a distance; attracted to vague understandings and indirect light.
But art is not this namby pamby thing, the great author said. So when the first painting appeared, you lost your breath. Lost—as in, something you once had faculty in escapes you; something that was once easy, is no longer simple.
The first painting, A Few Small Nips, showed a naked female body splayed out on a bed. The woman’s large breasts sagged. There were blots and streaks of blood on her, the sheets, the floor, the painting’s frame and the shirt of the man standing beside the bed. The blood, which dominated the scene, had no pattern.
After, came Broken Column, a painting of Kahlo in tears, with a fractured column running through the middle of her naked torso. Nails pierced all the skin parts of her, including her face. Polio, you knew, damaged Kahlo’s spine at a young age, but you didn’t know a bus accident broke her spine and pelvis in three places, and tore the left lip of her vagina.
And so, in the painting, you saw a woman whose maternal parts never had a chance; a person consigned to wearing a body brace, or scaffolding, to support internal failings—and forced into a state of awareness of it every day.
Naturally, one of her body braces appeared in the exhibit, and on its belly was a half-painted fetus. This caused you to ask Sarah, with your eyes elsewhere, “Do you hate me?”
You assumed she was also looking at the floor when she said, “Weirdly, this is what I need right now.”
Kahlo once said: “Many things prevented the fulfillment of the desire all consider normal. And nothing seemed more normal to me than to paint what I had not achieved.”
Paint what you had not achieved, meaning: stay with what is lost; organize it; source its substance; venture into its endurance. And transfer it outside of the body, onto a flat surface with colors and images that’s giving of shared emotions and questions.
It was your husband who woke you and told you Sarah lost her baby. You were surprised at how upset he was and how quickly he left the room. You stayed in bed for the better part of the morning, listening to the muffled eruptions of things happening in the house—lower doses of slamming cupboards, running feet, clanging pots, your son’s cries—until you left, without breakfast, to see the lake. You’d rented the house so you could see the lake, which looked like an ocean, and sat, without much fanfare, across the street, behind another small house. The lake wasn’t visible from the house you were renting, but that was ok. You could smell it and sense it was nearby. Plus, when it did appear, you didn’t take it for granted. You found it unfolded everything inside you. Which is what it did then, a few hours after you learned about Sarah’s baby, it unfolded your heart. And when that felt too painful, the view became earth touching sky—a complete illusion.
Kahlo’s Henry Ford Hospital was a clear picture of trauma and production. In it, you saw Kahlo weeping and naked in a bed, with bloodstains beneath her hairy middle. There were also red ribbon umbilical cords that stretched out from her hand—and at the end of each cord: a fetus, a female abdomen, a flower, a pelvis, a snail, and a medical device. The bloody fetus, the largest figure on the canvas, hovered over the female body like a spirit. In the background, there was an industrial cityscape. You discovered, when reading the small print, that she painted the piece while recovering from a miscarriage in Detroit.
What did you do next? You watched a small crowd peel away from the painting. Their detachment seemed clean and swift, which you envied, and so you joined this crowd and swept through a series of paintings with your head hidden behind other people’s shoulders. You only looked back when you realized you’d left Sarah alone, a room or two away.
You found her at The Two Fridas—a painting of two depictions of Kahlo sitting side-by-side and holding hands. One Kahlo was in a white traditional dress with a ruptured heart exposed. Blood pooled at her lap, which came from the heart vein she was cutting with surgical scissors. The other Kahlo wore modern clothes and had a healthy-looking heart. You saw two women, in equal measure of joy and despair; two women, accepting the heart’s extreme conditions.
You discovered, early on in your friendship, you and Sarah shared similar mental patterns. You were both prone to intellectualizing, rather, gumming up emotional experiences into a set of ideas or themes over which you could have agency. And you relied on this that year of baby loss and then pregnancy. But when your baby came and hers didn’t, your interactions lost their grounding. Your maternal state could no longer be intellectualized. There was, instead, the feeling of infinite compromise, rather, the binding together of hormones and wildness, generational baggage and the fierce need for independence in every new or newish activity. You were acutely aware of it when your child drank from your breast and wrapped his small fingers around your thumb, which caused your entire body to warm and connect in love. It also made your airways constrict.
You found a way out. The exit sign and gift shop. You waited for Sarah by the Mexican plates and organized something to say, something like: I’m so sorry…I didn’t realize…It was horrible…But you stayed.
When you reached the museum café, she was calm and forgiving. She even told you she joined a Facebook group called “Dead Baby Mamas” and that it, like the exhibit, did the difficult work in getting her connected again, plugged back into the rhythms of humanity, open when she wanted to close off.
You sipped your coffee to avoid responding, and burned your tongue with the kind of pain that sizzled, that was easy to place, easy to be patient with because you knew it would pass.
You imagined your friend’s pain meandering into endless situations and thoughts, sometimes feeling heavy (so heavy) and impenetrable. And she showed you that day that she was open to the feeling of it. Feeling—as in, the transformation of an event into a seemingly unstoppable vibration that runs through the body and mind.
After coffee, you exited the museum and walked into the dense sounds of people laughing, an ambulance wailing, buses squealing, a man without shoes shouting. Sarah’s voice was a whisper against the big city noises. “Bye,” she said and something else you couldn’t make out, but you thought you heard the word “sisterhood.” You found it hard to turn away from her—you still weren’t sure the exhibit was healing; you still thought you inflicted a lashing of some kind on her delicate state.
When she became a body in a crowd, like all the others you could see from the museum steps, you left. You walked away, with the experience still swimming through you. You descended into the subway station, walked to the platform and waited. When the train glided in, you stepped inside, found a seat and watched the doors close. You felt the shuffle of other people, the grunts of the subway car parts, and then, as the lights flick on and off, a burst of rapid forward motion.
Guest essay written by Nadia Shahbaz. Nadia lives in Toronto and is a mother to three boys. She's been published in the Tahoma Literary Review and is currently enrolled in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Toronto. She also works with Story Planet, a non-profit that runs story-making workshops in Toronto's newcomer communities, which is part of the 826 Writing Network co-founded by author Dave Eggers. You can find her on Instagram and Twitter.