Frida’s Visits

by Dia VanGunten

The first three or four times she showed up it surprised me, but then I just got used to seeing her in my living room. Frida; with her eyebrows stitched protectively across her face, over her brain, guarding against entry, but inviting you in.

The first time she came, she was wearing her velvet dress. She was beautiful in it and she knew it. Her mocha lips had shadows beneath them and I counted all my painkillers to make sure I hadn’t taken too many by mistake.

“Even if you had,” she said, “who cares?”

“You might not be real,” I told her. “I’ve made a career out of imagining things.”

“That’s nothing,” she said. “You should see my bath water.”

She came again with a photo album. The photos were oily and seemed to be touched up.

“That’s his blue shirt,” she told me, “and his brushes.”

“That’s my red shawl.” She pressed the tip of her finger to where the shawl gathered at her hand.

“Ow.” She pulled her hand away.

“Ow.”

Her finger came away with a prick. A drop of blood swam to the tip, bead of scarlet against her skin. She put it in her mouth and sucked it. A red-skinned newt crawled from the corner of her lip.

We both pretended that nothing strange had happened.

On her third visit, I found her on my bed, in the dark, propped against the moss green pillows. Tears fell silently down her cheeks. They looked like wine glasses. I tried to brush them away and they shattered -- cutting her face.

I knelt before her and cried. “Forgive me, Frida.”

She didn’t seem to notice or to care. Clutching the remote, she motioned towards the dark screen of the T.V. “Did you see ER tonight? It was so sad.”

Another night, she showed me where five nails had been inserted into her upper arm. You could see their hard barrel shape beneath her skin.

“No babies.” She explained.

She seemed to mourn her hips.

She had a real butterfly for a barette. That impressed me. Every once in a while, if she was late, she’d lift her skirts and hurry for the door. Sometimes the butterfly would slip off and it would have to flutter hard to catch up.

One day it wasn’t a butterfly anymore but a moth. She likes it better that way.

“Look!” she called to me one night, “It doesn’t work!”

She smacked the remote on the base of the lamp. I walked over and fiddled with it a while. Finally, I opened the back to go after the batteries. She snatched them up and stuck them down her dress, into her breasts.

“I still love them,” she told me.

“But they don’t move the channels anymore,” I said.

She shook her head. “I still love them.”

The next time she came, I was in the kitchen, plunging my spoon into the cheeze-whiz. I was wearing my paint-stained osh-koshes and had blown my nose on the baggy pant cuff.

She took my spoon away and glared at me. “He’s not worth it,” she said, “Go to Texas. Don’t say goodbye.”

I beat my head into the kitchen floor twenty or more times.

She was disgusted.

“This is Diego,” she finally told me. I’d seen him sitting in the middle of her forehead before but she was lousy with introductions.

“Do you know what your problem is !? “ I reared at him like a snake.

He spit red paint at me. His head was tiny. His mouth tinier. It left only a small dot on my shirt.

“You macho idiot, I could kill you!” I raised my fist to him.

“Hey.” Frida pursed her lips. Her white lace fell across her face. “That’s no way to treat Diego.”

She didn’t come for a long time. Days and days and days. Maybe even a month. I came home early from a Women’s Psych class and she was sitting cross-legged, watching Oprah and munching tortilla chips.

I went into the kitchen to smash some avocados up with salsa when I heard a golden “POP!”. Then breaking glass. I stepped out to see that she had rammed a Greek column into the T.V. -- shattering it into pieces.

We sat there and stared at it until the column cracked apart. She fell into a heap on the floor, sobbing. I set down the avocado and it rolled back to the kitchen.

“Don’t cry,” I whispered.

She looked up at me, snot running down her chin.

“That fucker cheated!” she cried, pointing to the T.V.’s glassy tears.

I dialed my mom’s number.

“What should I do?” I asked, “Frida’s freaking.”

“I can’t talk right now!” my mother shrieked. “I wrecked the car driving past the motherfucker’s house. The cops tried to cuff me. I hate you all. I hate you fucking all! I’ll kill myself! I’ll kill myself!”

“But Frida’s really freaking,” I said, beginning to whimper.

“Tell her to snap out of it!” Mom screamed, slamming her phone into the table top so hard that it came through my wall and turned into a lime-green parrot who gnawed off its coiled cord with its knife-like beak.

“Oh great!” I screamed, motioning to the parrot. “Now look!!”

Frida sucked all the snot into the back of her throat.

I broke my computer screen with a thumb tack and tore up every poem I’d ever written. The scraps turned into dirty socks that laid on the floor, waiting for lazy men to pick them up.

This completely enraged me so I ripped my favorite dress -- hanging from the toilet with Frida’s blue ribbon -- to shreds.

When she tried to call Diego, I took the phone away and hung up on him. I crawled beneath the desk with it and called all my old lovers.

“I hate you,” I spit. “You’ll suffer.”

I beat the phone against the desk leg, engraved with a rattlesnake. “You made me take the pill and now I’m fat. Now I’m crazy.”

“You were always crazy,” said one, his voice completely calm.

“I wasn’t fat!” I defended.

“You look good fat,” he told me, “But hey--”

“I’m not fat,” I snarled.

“That’s right,” he said, “You’re not fat. Not even close. But hey, listen, I gotta go.”

It was a while before I realized that Frida had used her blue ribbon to drag the green parrot into the bedroom. She’d plucked seven of his feathers to ring Diego.

I found her like that, whispering raggedly into the parrot’s beak.

“How could you want her?” she begged.

Two hours later, I decided to cut the avocados into crescent moons rather than smash them. I drizzled olive oil and lime wedges onto them and took them to her on the orange plate.

The parrot flew up and yanked out one of my hairs. Gesturing towards the plate, piled with sliced-up green, it squawked, “How could you do that to me!? How could you!?”

Frida wasn’t hungry.

Instead she furrowed her eyebrows together until they burnt off her face ... curling into a black hummingbird.

The next time I saw her, the hummingbird was hanging from her neck -- a necklace of twigs and barbed wire.

“I still love him,” she told me.

Just then, a black cat sprang from nowhere and snapped the barbed wire with her teeth. The hummingbird flapped away.

Frida watched it hum towards the sun and then asked to borrow a suitcase.

I’ve never seen her since.

But she did send a postcard once -- it read: “Dragonflies have paintings in their eyes.”

I’ve since disconnected my service with the phone company and my mom has snapped out of it.