reading the “crying expert” Ad Vingerhoets’s deeply researched and meticulous book Why Only Humans Weep, for what feels like his aggressive lack of compassion or wonder, but then am intrigued by a sudden pronouncement: “All tears are real tears,” he says, though some may be “insincere.”10
We scrutinize the tears of other people for their sincerity. We can even doubt the sincerity of our own. In Letters to Wendy’s, Joe Wenderoth writes of a child’s strategic crying at the fast food restaurant:
His mother explained to me that this was no true grief—this was pretend grief. This was grief, she said, designed to get something. And I thought, have I anything but pretend grief? And I asked myself what I meant, in these daily excretions of pretend grief, to acquire? And I couldn’t answer. And I felt true grief.11
Here is another term for pretend grief: cry-hustling, coined by the poet Chelsey Minnis (a nom, by the way, de plume, or perhaps de guerre).
A woman is cry-hustling a man & it is very fun.
You have to cry-hustle because it is good to cry-hustle . . .
And there’s nothing else you can do.
Because no one will agree to any of your reasonable statements . . .
And they have to counter-argue . . .
Then you just have to break down and cry-hustle . . .12
The tears of white women are subject to specific scrutiny, because their weaponization has so often meant violence toward people of color, and black people in particular. The tears could be real, by which I mean physically present, or imagined, metaphorical. Whether they exist on the face or in the mind, the tears of a white woman can shift a room’s gravity. They set others falling to help her, to correct and punish those who would dare make her weep.
As far as words go, crying is louder and weeping is wetter. When people explain the difference between the two to English-language learners they say that weeping is more formal, can sound archaic in everyday speech. You can hear this in their past tenses—the plainness of cried, the velvet cloak of wept. I remember arguing once with a teacher who insisted dreamt was incorrect, dreamed the only proper option. She was wrong, of course, in both philological and moral ways, and ever since I’ve felt a peculiar attachment to the t’s of the past: weep, wept, sleep, slept, leave, left. There’s a finality there, a quiet completion, of which d has never dreamt.
In his poem “Weeping,” Ross Gay traces the etymology of the word from the proto-Indo-European root wab- through an imagined progression, pretending it
means the precise sound of a flower bud
unwrapping, and the tiny racket a seed makes
cracking open in the dark . . .13
Some mornings I awake with an enormous sensation inside me and cannot identify whether the urge is to cry or write a poem or fuck someone. All at once? My body has cross-indexed the impulse.
I have not cried for some days when one morning I wake much earlier than usual. We have just moved into a new house and—because I am not yet accustomed to the skylight above the bed—the sound of rain against it stands between me and a return to sleep. In the kitchen, while I wait for coffee to brew, the BBC World Service tells the story of a man, L.D., whose ship capsized during World War II. Their distress signals mistakenly ignored, the surviving sailors floated for days in their life vests. When the sharks arrived they fed first on the dead, then the living. L.D. says there was nothing you could do beyond hoping you weren’t next.
It’s still so dark out that there’s no real point in pulling back the curtains, but I do anyway, making the lit room visible to anyone else awake at this hour, and at the same time locating within myself the knowledge that I could not have reached such acceptance. Knowing that I would have given up.
After days of dehydration, one sailor slipped out of his life vest and swam down into the Pacific, believing in his delirium that the ship’s water supply was within reach. He surfaced, ecstatic with having satisfied his thirst, and soon died, the brown foam at his mouth a mark of the salt water he’d swallowed.
At last, after four days of misery, a navy plane spotted the men. I wonder whether when the rescue crew at last pulled him to safety, L.D. wanted to cry with joy, whether his body would have had any water left for tears.14
One night in the nursery, a boy sits crying. He has found his shadow and is desperately trying to re-adhere it to his body with soap, but cannot get it to stick back on again. When the sleeping girl wakes, a series of questions leads her to realize the boy is motherless. This shocks her into utter sympathy.
WENDY. Peter!
(She leaps out of bed to put her arms round him, but he draws back; he does not know why, but he knows he must draw back.)
PETER. You mustn’t touch me.
WENDY. Why?
PETER. No one must ever touch me.
WENDY. Why?
PETER. I don’t know.
(He is never touched by any one in the play.)
WENDY. No wonder you were crying.
PETER. I wasn’t crying. But I can’t get my shadow to stick on.15
The denial of crying by a tear-streaked person is such a commonplace that it has become a joke. Look up “I’m not crying” on YouTube and the first few hundred results display people—very often children at a school talent show—singing the comic song by Flight of the Conchords, in which they blame their tears on the rain. I am growing to hate this song. It is in the way of my finding evidence of people actually crying, actually denying it. However hard I look all I find is this unfunny music.
When I was five, I auditioned to play Wendy in Peter Pan, a part the children’s summer theater company predictably assigned to an older girl. The announcement brought me very close to tears. Then they declared that the part of Tinker Bell would be played by my younger sister. I was to be “a fairy.” I was to be a very sad, very wet fairy.
