Another miracle is the lack of nausea. Just a very, very mild queasiness that passes. Though in the back of my mind somewhere this troubles me. I think I read somewhere once that the lack of nausea is not always such a good sign. I avoid finding out the miscarriage statistics. Over forty. I don’t think I would advise anyone to wait this long.
I resent the distraction of having to have a job now. Helen: Don’t be a prima donna. I cry myself to sleep.
Another fight: You should be able to write and have a job. Everyone works!. I call this the little philistine in her ear. It’s her therapist speaking.
And I’d like to burrow deep into the ground with her and wait this out, hibernate, quietly, without any distraction — that is how mesmerizing this is. How beautiful it is — the calm, the dark. We could paste a few stars on the top if she’d like. I could tell stories of the sun.
I have never even come close to this much happiness. What is going on?
I love them for saying nothing, nothing will, nothing can go wrong. My grand dames, my guides: Aishah, C.D., Rikki, Bunny, extraordinary godmothers whispering not too old.
The few I have told.
Angela Carter was forty-five after all, Rikki offers.
This white room of all possibility, all that ever was and ever shall ever be, which I inhabit now. Days of grace.
Practicing in the gloom my Czerny and Chamanade. Another lesson on Friday. A girl at the piano. Why does it come back now?
I see it as the final blow to men — that they can’t bear children. Excluded in the end. And that nasty bit about never even being certain you have really fathered anyone.
Easier somehow all of a sudden to understand their melancholy, their rage, their insecurity. Yes, maybe.
Have I subverted myself after all in typical feminine fashion and at the most crucial and last moment? I almost got away.
These thoughts from a zone of the brain far off and yet from time to time so alarmingly close.
The pressure to conform is enormous. In ordinary and not-so-ordinary ways. I have pressed back against it my whole life: the pressure to make books that look like other books, to write more legibly, to give up what is mine, and quietly.
This child is freedom even now. Detached from its cumbersome accouterments: husband, siblings, minivan. Its blandness, its arrogant directives. All that smug heterosexual clubbiness — its pleased-as-punch self-congratulation. This child was created outside the usual constraints and enclosures, without the usual prescriptions, hierarchies, sentences leveled on her head.
I pray, should she come to be, that she will not hate me for it.
Drank a hot chocolate this morning before class and about an hour later while listening to final projects felt a very, very strange sensation inside — a kind of heaving or turning or sloughing away, and tears ran down my face. Luckily we sat in darkness in the Russell Lab’s black box theater… How many times in the last three months have I lost this baby?
Frida Kahlo motions at the very end of her life for the wet nurse as she falls back at the end into infancy or death. Having returned to the women. That zone of comfort and peace where she is gluttonous in her desiring toward — what?
Circles within circles
swollen
engorged
targeted
to hold your mouth just so —
suckling one.
Working on my little Frida book, or trying to. Another strange project — part biography, part autobiography, part fiction, part poetry. A dialogue of sorts between Frida and me, I suppose. Thinking all week about her desire for children. And her ambivalence. It’s getting closer, I think.
My students comment on how otherworldly I am looking these days. And how quiet I seem.
Votive: Child.
Because I wanted you with all my blood, but it was not to be.
In a 1930 drawing of herself and Rivera, she drew and then erased a baby Diego seen as if by X-ray vision inside her stomach: the infant’s head is up, his feet are down.
Three more times she will try to have a child.
Frida had all kinds of dolls: old fashioned ones, cheap Mexican dolls made of rags or of papier-mâché. Chinese dolls are propped on a shelf near her pillow. Beside her bed is an empty doll bed where she once kept a favored doll, and three little dolls are enclosed with Rivera’s baptism dress in a vitrine in her bedroom. One that she treasured, a boy doll that had been given to her beau Alejandro probably shortly after her accident, when she was hospitalized.
The earth is a grave and the earth is a garden. Poor child, rest there, poor child, play there forever. The earth holds his tiny hands, his eyes, his little genitals. Rest.
Its birth certificate filled out in elegant scrolclass="underline" His mother was Frida Kahlo.
sorrow: child
Her journal, 1944:
My painting carries within it the message of pain… Painting completed my life. I lost three children… Paintings substituted for all of this. I believe that work is the best thing.
The cupped butterfly, painted black.
The city and bay are overwhelming. What is especially fantastic is Chinatown. The Chinese are immensely pleasant and never in my life have I seen such beautiful children as the Chinese ones. Yes, they are really extraordinary. I would love to steal one so that you could see for yourself.
The central Frida is armless
come to me
the useless umbilicus
I sell everything for nothing… I do not believe in illusion… the great vacillator. Nothing has a name. I do not look at forms…drowned spiders. Lives in alcohol. Children are the days and here is where I end.
The mute blue testimony. Dark afternoon that never ends. She sits at the end of the bed smoking, utterly alone. Beside her a grinning doll — together on a child’s bed. Misery without end.
The dead baby, all dressed up and nowhere to go. The soles of his feet facing us — the milky eyes, the dribble of blood, Christ flagellated on his pillow — poor tiny loser, impossible, the never-to-be, poor thing. Holding a last gladiola — most funereal thing. Dressed up for Paradise.
She watched other people dance…
The only thing I bought here were two old-fashioned dolls, very beautiful ones. One is blonde with blue eyes, the most wonderful eyes you can imagine. She is dressed as a bride… Both are lovely, even with their heads a little bit loose. Perhaps that is what gives them so much tenderness and charm. For years I wanted to have a doll like that, because someone broke one that I had when I was a child, and I couldn’t find it again. So I am very happy having two now. I have a little bed in Mexico, which will be marvelous for the bigger one. Think of two nice Hungarian names to baptize them.