I suppose some people can weep softly and become more beautiful, but after a real cry, most people are hideous, as if they’ve grown a spare and diseased face beneath the one you know, leaving very little room for the eyes. Or they look as if they’ve been beaten. We look. I look. Once, in fifth grade, I cried at school for a reason I cannot recall, and afterward a popular boy—rattail, skateboard—told me I looked like a druggie, and I was so pleased to be seen I made him repeat it.
•••
Ovid would prefer that I and other women restrain ourselves:
There is no limit to art: in weeping, you need to
be comely,
Learn how to turn on the tears still keeping
proper control.
•••
The length of the cry matters. I especially value an extended session, which gives me time to become curious, to look in the mirror, to observe my physical sadness. A truly powerful cry can withstand even this scientific activity. You lurch toward the bathroom, head hunched over, tucked in, and then gather your nerve to lift your gaze toward the mirror, where you see your hiccoughing breath shake your shoulders, your nose like a lifelong drunk’s. It may interest you for a while to touch your swollen face, to peer into one bloodshot eye and another, but the beauty’s really in the movement, in watching your mouth try to swallow despair. It is not easy, after looking, to convince the crying you mean it no harm, but with quiet and with patience—you are Jane Goodall with the chimpanzees—the crying will slowly get used to you. It will return.
•••
To cry or not to cry is sometimes a choice, and no telling which is the better. Not true—if you are alone, or with only one other, cry. To cry with more people present, concludes the International Study of Adult Crying, can lead to a worsening mood, though that may depend on others’ reactions. You can be made to feel ashamed. Most frequently criers report others responding with compassion, or what the study categorizes as “comfort words, comfort arms, and understanding.” If you are alone, comfort arms are still available; you hold yourself together.
•••
It is fortunate to have a nose. Hard to feel you are too tragic a figure when the tears mix with snot. There is no glamour in honking.
•••
Once I was unexpectedly dumped in public. A campus parking lot one afternoon. I put all my crying into my mouth, felt it shake while I stalked to the car, inside which I let the crying move north to my eyes and south to my heaving gut. The car is a private crying area. If you see a person crying near a car, you may need to offer help. If you see a person crying inside a car, you know they are already held.
•••
Twice I cried hysterically while driving. Once, sixteen, and without money for the toll or a sense of how I might live the next day. Once, twenty-one, and mid-move, with a car full of belongings and the sudden apprehension that I had driven an hour in the wrong direction. If you cry in the car while it’s raining, it feels like the windshield wipers should tend too to your face. Comfort words, comfort arms, comfort swipe.
•••
I cried when I heard Alice Oswald recite Memorial, her excavation of the Iliad, marking each warrior’s death. I cried while a friend held her new son and told me about a conversation she’d had with her own mother, Sheila. My friend had realized that one day she’d no longer need to wash her boy’s feet, and the thought wounded her. “Mom,” she asked Sheila, “do you still miss that?” Sheila replied, “I’d give anything to wash my son’s feet.” As I write this down it sounds utterly servile. At the time I could not help but weep. Motherhood gets me. I cry whenever I watch a representation—whether fictional or no—of birth. I have also cried at the gym, on the elliptical, watching a trailer for some dumb and heartbreaking movie. I waited until my sister’s car was one hundred yards into her move to Maine, and then I cried. I cried in front of a crowd— mortifying—while reading a poem I wrote for my dead friend Bill. He would have laughed. He would have liked it.