A fragment from Sappho tells us, “Leto and Niobe were beloved friends.”24
I have no sons and no daughters. I have many beloved friends, some with one child or two.
I have not wanted to approach the subject of the crying infant, because my husband, Chris, and I are trying to create one of our own, but my research keeps listing in that direction. Last night, in bed, I read of how parents in various cultures try to stop the wailing of their babies. Some tell them to stop their shouting, a command the babies eventually obey. Some shout more loudly than the baby’s own cry, and then laugh until the baby is too confused or distracted or entertained to continue.25 A colicky baby is simply a baby who cries excessively, in some cases eighteen hours a day.26 I worry I will be a colicky mother. I worry I will not be a mother at all.
I worry I will be a colicky mother because I am periodically overcome with complete, encompassing fear and despair, and when I am suffering thus, my crying can go on for hours. I rock myself on the floor and keen. I don’t know why. It is one of the things my body does, like sleeping or making poems.
Around this Ohio house we rented to take the job to support the existence of the imagined baby, very few cars drive by. For the first time since we adopted our cat, we feel safe letting him explore the outdoors. A few moments ago I heard him meowing to be let back inside, and when I opened the door I saw the evidence of a fight with the neighbor’s cat: a scratch beginning just beneath the corner of his left eye. A red path for where a tear might run.
I have begun in our new house to gather what Chris has dubbed a “crybrary.” Crying by Tom Lutz. Pictures & Tears by James Elkins. The latter begins with my new favorite table of contents. I’m drawn to its gentle teasing, its naming without judgment: Chapter 1, “Crying at nothing but colors,” Chapter 5, “Weeping over bluish leaves.”27
All this reading could prove a mistake. What if—to use an example from the crybrary—just as James Elkins’s years of study in art history interfered with his ability to cry at paintings, my meager months of tearful research alter the way I weep at my life? Or should I be glad for the change? The summer is ending and the darkening evenings—which in other years brought me fatigue and sorrow—now close over me lightly. There have been seasons of such tears I thought myself lost. Mad. Maybe these books are a protection.
Sometimes suspicion of tears—an intellectual detachment—is warranted. Consider the actor who told his friend Tom Lutz that “whenever he needed tears for a scene he conjured up a daydream to elicit them,” most recently imagining “he was on the Titanic as it was sinking . . . and that he was handing his wife and baby son into a lifeboat.”28 Lutz, curious about the actor’s explanation that “the image produced the most intense feeling of loss he could imagine,”29 probed further, and at last his friend
realized that the scene’s effectiveness on him was based on the fact that others were watching and approving of what he was doing—the captain of the ship, the first mate, the other men taking charge of the situation. This daydream, this mini-melodrama, makes him weep because in it he consummately fulfills an iconographic social role.30
Of course an actor’s tears are purposefully generated. I know this, though I can set the knowledge aside when I watch a movie. But the artifice does not end there. It goes on, it spreads, so that even the one crying—the one to whom the tears ought to be legible—achieves at first only a superficial understanding. “Boy, why are you crying?” He does not know. He cannot say. And when he can, the reason is embarrassing.
When one director needed the young Shirley Temple to cry for a movie scene, he told her that her mother had been “[k]idnapped by an ugly man! All green, with blood-red eyes!” Temple wept, the camera rolled. Both Temple and her mother were angry when they learned of the director’s unnecessary deception, as the young performer already knew how to cry on cue, so long as the scene was filmed in the morning, before events of the day could “dilut[e her] subdued mood.” “Crying,” said Temple, “is too hard after lunch.”31
One afternoon the test says yes, pregnant, good job, very clever. I do not cry. Chris does not cry. I call my mother, who says, “I’m going to cry,” and who does. My faithful throat lump shows up. I notice it. I begin to accept its invitation, when it occurs to me that I am fulfilling an iconographic social role, and my slide into tears abruptly stops. “It’s okay,” I tell my mother, “It’s a big deal. You’re allowed to cry.”
Weeks later, on a plane, a terrible tanned businessman drops a full bottle of water on my head. I’m bruised, surprised, tired, and his apology is inadequate. He does not feel bad enough. I do not want to cry, but I do, or I think I do not want to cry, but the unthinking part of me does, or perhaps, as the books say, these tears are a form of communication, an instruction to the man to feel worse. I summon up all my theories, trying to place them between me and the crying, trying to slow my breath with reason, but nothing helps. If I want to cry now I cannot. If I do not want to I cannot stop. Perhaps I ought to have surrendered to it, the wave of oncoming of tears. The empty seat next to me I count as a blessing.
People often cry on planes. A survey of Virgin Atlantic passengers found that 41 percent of men “said they’d hidden under blankets to hide their tears,” while women “reported hiding tears by pretending they had something in their eye.”32
Why planes? Perhaps it is the stillness of the ride, after all the stress of motion: you get to the airport, part from loved ones, half undress and unpack yourself through security, huff and sweat to the gate and onto the plane. The body at rest suddenly finds its feelings have caught up, and—as you’ve neglected them in favor of more practical concerns—they arrive loudly, demanding immediate physical expression. Or maybe it is the blankets. Online one person tells me, “i cried in the airplane when my twin sister told me i was ugliest when i smiled. i threw a blanket over my head and cried.” Lately, when I get on a plane, I imagine the blanket the flight attendant hands me is still damp with the last passenger’s tears.
Maybe they are the tears of Mary Ruefle, the poet, who—in an essay on making poetry by erasing books—writes of a moment when she told her airplane seatmate about her work, which the woman kindly and sweetly
