Cry Baby

I'm a crier, always been a crier. I cry at the typical things, like in the movies: the end of Charlotte's Web always gets me. Sappy ones, too -- like in Jerry Maguire when Tom Cruise bursts into the house to win Renee Zellweger back and when he tries to speak she interrupts him to say, with Bruce Springsteen’s “Secret Garden” playing in the background, “You had me at hello.” Sometimes I cry when I watch the news, when young people that could have been your brother or sister are killed and it seems like the world makes no sense at all. I cry when my mom cries, when my dad cries, and especially when my brother cries. I cry in doctors’ offices, at weddings, when reading books on airplanes. I cry in crowded shopping malls. Sometimes I cry because frankly it seems to be the only thing to do. I am good at crying – a pro-crier, if you will.

When I was a kid, adults talked about it in euphemisms, always dancing around those words kids on the playground never bothered to: Cry baby.

"She's just sensitive," my mother apologizes to our neighbor, Mrs. Witt, when she comes after work to pick me up and finds me in tears. In 2nd grade I walk to Mrs. Witt’s house every day after school. Mrs. Witt has three sons whose names all start with W: Warren, Wayne, and Wesley Witt. Warren is the oldest, a sophomore in high school. He wears a spiky dog collar around his neck and spends most of his time in his room, playing Limp Bizkit loudly on a boom box and doing other mysterious high schooler things. He lets me go in his room once, which smells like sweat and cheese puffs, but I start crying when he coaxes me to feed a mouse to his pet snake. I vow never to step foot in his room again.

"She'll grow out of it," Mom reassures a vaguely concerned Mrs. Witt, and they proceed to talk about coffee machines and crock pot recipes.

Wayne is the second oldest, a seventh grader in junior high. He is tall and has thick hair and big teeth. He tells me one day that he is going to be an NBA star, a Sacramento King.

"I don't know how to play basketball," I reply. My brother Hannon -- who in 5th grade also wants to be an NBA star -- tried to teach me once, but quickly became frustrated with my inability to remember the rules.
“Stop traveling! You have to dribble the ball!” Hannon yells as I run towards the basket, hugging the ball to my chest. When I begin to cry, Hannon sighs and suggests that we just go ride our bikes and try to spy on the neighbors like we usually do.

"That's okay," Wayne says. "You can just watch me shoot."

So Wayne shoots baskets and I rebound the ball back to him until it is too dark to play outside anymore. Sometimes he lets me try to shoot, but in 2nd grade I am small and underweight for my age and can't even make the ball touch the net.

"You'll get bigger," he says and rubs my head, messing up my hair. I decide then, quite simply and definitively, that I love Wayne Witt. I will cry in 3rd grade when I learn that at the 8th grade dance he kisses Tala Tillery not on the hand or on the cheek but on the lips and that now they are “going out” and even went to the movie theater to see “The Sixth Sense” which I am not allowed to see because Mom says it’s too scary for nine year olds. I will wonder if they drank blue raspberry slurpies and ate junior mints. I will hope that they didn’t. I will hope that they instead ate chocolate covered raisins because I hate raisins and in that case would have had a lousy time if he had asked me to go, anyway. The candy is the best part.

Despite my desire to marry Wayne Witt throughout elementary school, Wesley Witt is my best friend. We are the same age and in 2nd grade we sit next to each other in the back corner of Mrs. Bates’ class next to the window that looks out onto the big oak tree that we like to climb at recess but aren’t supposed to. I like Wesley because he doesn’t talk a lot but always lets me borrow his crayons when I lose the best colors in my pack, like magenta and sky blue. When I cry after falling off a branch of the oak tree or because John Park the Bully -- who in my memory had facial hair and looked to be a full-grown man at age ten -- called me toothpick, Wesley never laughs or calls me baby like Josh and the other kids. He just waits for me to stop.

Wesley has big ears – I mean, really big. In high school he will have surgery to have them pinned back, but in 2nd grade the mean kids at school call him Dumbo or Elephant Boy or simply Freak. Wesley never cries like I do, but I think sometimes he wants to.
When we are walking to his house from school one day I ask him if he ever cries when no one is around. He won’t look me in the eye but says, “Boys don’t cry.”

I know it isn’t true because I’ve seen Dad cry, if quietly and only when he thinks I don’t see. It is during the time of the Ing case, a murder trial he is working on in Orange County, about nine hours away. He is home for a weekend and sits in the kitchen on the phone with Grandma and his face is all pinched up and red and I can’t hear anything but his shoulders are moving up and down in that way that happens only when you really cry.

“That’s a lie,” I say to Wesley.
“No, it’s not,” he insists, his ears growing red like they do when he’s mad.
I am overcome by an urge to make him cry, so I slap his face as hard as I can. I guess that’s pretty hard because his cheek turns as red as his ears. But he doesn’t cry. He doesn’t hit me back, either. I start to cry and, as always, Wesley is quiet. That’s how it is the rest of the walk to Wesley’s house: I cry and Wesley is quiet.

After the trial is over, Dad quits his job as District Attorney and we move to Sutter Creek, a town about an hour away. I won’t see Wesley again until we are in high school, when his ears are fixed, and he is the point guard for the opposing basketball team. He looks like Wayne, with the thick hair and big teeth, but his eyes are the same – quiet.

As Wesley seemed to have always known, by high school I learn that crying is against the rules –particularly in public. Crying, I am told, means you are weak and silly and pathetic. I am also told it makes people uncomfortable. It makes them squirm, twitch, and get defensive. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings,” they say. Or, better, “You don’t have to take things so personally.” So I stop crying. When I am sixteen I go for months without crying. I am feeling pretty tough, pretty hard. For awhile I scoff at other people’s tears, even those of children. “There’s no crying in baseball!” I quote from A League of their Own when one of the children I babysit tears up watching Charlotte’s Web. When, near the end of the movie, Charlotte gives birth to the baby spiders and dies, I feel that familiar tightness in my own throat that usually precedes tears and quickly flee to the kitchen to get ice cream. I do not cry.

Then in English class one day Mrs. Martin reads Sylvia Plath’s poem “The Moon and The Yew Tree” and it is so sad and beautiful that I cry right there at my desk, behind Ricky Anderson’s head which keeps bobbing up and down as if he is resisting sleep. It is a flood. I cry for days. I cry in the shower, I cry brushing my teeth, I cry in restaurants over pancakes and in glasses of orange juice, I cry in cars, I cry when I talk and I cry when I laugh. Then I begin to laugh when I cry.

I told you before. I am a crier.