by Kyoko Mori
The veterinarian shook her head. “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but there’s nothing we can do for this little guy. Nighthawks don’t do well in captivity. The only fair thing to do is to put him down.”
“OK,” I said, though I was stunned. “Are you going to do that?”
“No,” she said. “Our arrangement with the sanctuary is that they have to use their own facility for euthanasia. I only volunteer my time for examinations.”
“So I should take the bird back to the sanctuary and talk to Mike, and he’ll take care of the rest.”
She nodded.
I put the bird in the carrier, got in my car, and shut the door. Immediately, the bird began whistling and hissing and running toward me. Even from inside the carrier, he could see me. That bird recognized me as his caretaker. Birds can distinguish between one person and another. The robins that had stayed in our yard flew down from their perch when they saw me and begged for worms, but they paid no attention to Chuck or my neighbors. The nighthawk, too, knew me. I began to feel pretty bad.
It was a fifteen-minute drive from the veterinarian’s to the sanctuary. I pulled over twice on the shoulder because I was crying too hard to drive. I thought of calling my friend Diane from a pay phone and asking her to take the bird to the sanctuary—I knew she would do that for me, but then she would have to feel bad about the bird. I pulled myself together and drove into the sanctuary, parked my car, picked up the carrier, and headed for Mike’s office. I kept my sunglasses on so no one would see my red eyes.
I had forgotten that it was Thursday, the day some of the volunteers and interns got together for their weekly potluck lunch in the big room next to Mike’s office. A dozen people were sitting down around the table eating. There were salads and casseroles and loaves of bread.
“Hi, how did it go with the nighthawk?” one of the interns, Maureen, asked me.
“Not so great,” I said. My voice came out wrong.
“What’s the matter?” Maureen asked, standing up from the chair where she had been eating. “Are you all right?”
A few other people stood up quickly and walked toward me. I put the carrier on the floor, took off my sunglasses, and started to cry. I had gone past the point where I could stop and pretend that this was not happening. There was nothing to do now except to keep on crying.
“Where’s Mike?” I asked, barely able to speak. “The nighthawk has to be put down because his beak isn’t right. I need to talk to Mike.”
“I’ll go get him,” someone said, and I heard her leaving.
In the meantime, Maureen had put her arms around me, another woman was handing me some paper towels—apolo- gizing that she couldn’t find any Kleenex—and a couple of other people were surrounding me, all looking very concerned. I knew everyone there from the training sessions we had attended together, but except for Maureen, whom I saw almost every day when I came to pick up a new bird to care for, I didn’t know them that well. I blew my nose and got myself under control, feeling stupid and embarrassed.
One of the women said, “Hey, sit down. Help yourself to some food.”
I turned toward her, and I’m sure I looked none too grateful. What is she talking about? I thought. Why would I want to eat? I’m upset, not hungry.
“Really,” she insisted. “Here, have this piece of cake.”
“No, thanks,” I said, as politely as I could manage. The sight of the cake—a yellow sheet cake with pink frosting—made me sick. Eating is the last thing I want to do when I’m upset and can hardly breathe. “I’m not hungry.”
“Well,” the woman said, “if you change your mind, here are the plates.” She pointed to the stack of plastic plates.
“Thanks,” I said, still sniffling a little.
When Mike came back, I went into his office and told him what the veterinarian had said. I’m sure he could see that I had been crying. He handed me some more paper towels, and I managed to listen to his explanations—he agreed with the veterinarian—without further tears.
“Why don’t you just leave the carrier here?” he said when we were done talking. He had taken the bird out to look at the beak himself. Now he was absent-mindedly petting its feathers. “I’ll take care of this.” I knew he had to put the bird in the carrier and take him to the other building, where they euthanized animals.
I was grateful that Mike was letting me leave with some semblance of dignity. I walked out the door, through the big room where people were still eating. Most of them looked at me in silence—in such a way that I knew they were sorry for me—but the woman who had offered me the cake said, “Look, if you want to talk about it, I’ll be home tonight. My number’s in the phone book.”
“All right, thanks,” I said, and walked back to the car.
The woman who offered me the food meant well, but I had no intention of calling her: I scarcely knew her and didn’t want to discuss my feelings with her. After wishing that my Japanese relatives would give me a hug and acknowledge my tears, I was wishing that this woman had left me alone and saved my dignity. I was completely inconsistent, but I didn’t care.
All that afternoon, I could think of nothing else. My own feelings scared me. When I went into the outdoor cage in my yard to feed the waxwings and robins that were still left, I felt sad remembering how the nighthawk used to sit on the log on the ground, making a faint whistling noise and blinking his eyes. I had been fooling myself all summer, when I thought I was so much tougher than my friends, so much more reasonable. That wasn’t true at all. I had felt a strong attachment, even a crazy kind of love for that nighthawk. I loved the way he would sit on the palm of my hand as I held out my arm at shoulder-height. Slowly, I would lower my hand, making him open and flap his large wings that had a bright white spot. I was training him to use the muscles he needed for flight. I wanted to release him some late summer night; I would launch him on his first all-night flying feast, and he would go away free but remembering me in a small corner of his brain. There was nothing rational about my attachment to that bird.
As the waxwings and robins crowded around me in the cage, all of them screaming to be fed, I wasn’t sure if I should continue caring for them. I had enjoyed my work because I thought the whole process proved that I was capable of both devotion and detachment: I could act like an anxious and overprotective mother for a few weeks and then let the birds go without regret because I respected their independence. In a small way, I thought, I was practicing an ideal kind of love, caring but rational, devoted but not possessive. After I cried about the nighthawk, I was forced to admit—yet again—that there is nothing rational about love and devotion. I didn’t like that realization at all.
For a few days, my eyes would get wet every time I thought of the nighthawk. Watching the robins splash around in their birdbath, I didn’t laugh at their antics. Wet birds looked so pathetic. Going into the bird cage gave me a helpless and vulnerable feeling. I didn’t talk about my feelings with anyone. I didn’t even want to think about them too much. In the end, I got over my sadness because time passed and I learned to ignore it.
That’s the only way I know to get over the strong feelings that scare me. When I lose something or somebody, whether it is a friend who has to move far away or an animal that dies, losing them seems to bring me back, temporarily, to feeling like a helpless child. The only way I can deal with the panic and desolation that comes with loss is to learn to ignore it. I practice the Japanese way of stoic perseverance and denial.
In most situations, I am a big believer in acknowledging and talking about painful issues and dealing with them step by step. At different times in my life, I saw therapists and found them very helpful. I agree with them that talking is the first step to understanding and overcoming the negative events in our lives. But there are just a few things I don’t ever expect to understand or overcome. The panic I feel about loss, the fear I have about dying, the love I feel for people or animals who are doomed to leave me—these feelings belong in that cate
gory. With feelings like these, talking doesn’t do any good. I already know that my feelings are irrational. There is nothing more to understand. All I can do, to go on, is to treat these feelings as aberrations from my otherwise smooth life—to politely and stoically ignore them in the way I was brought up to do. None of us can reason our way out of terrible fear or despair, any more than we can reason our way into faith and hope. But there comes a moment when I can will myself to stop thinking about the feelings that terrify me. It’s like turning off a switch. The harsh light that was glaring in my face simply goes off, and that is that.
After the nighthawk had to be put down, I took in several more birds, and a few of them died. The sanctuary had a policy that if an animal died in our care, we had to bring in the body. We worked with the Department of Natural Resources, and they wanted everything accounted for. A few weeks after I cried in front of everyone, I had to bring in the body of a chipping sparrow. I had expected the bird to die—it had crashed into a windowpane and smashed its head. The bird was in my care for only a day before it died.
I drove in with the bird in a small plastic bag and handed it to Mike, who was outside repairing a hole in one of the cages.
“The chipping sparrow died. You know, the one with the head injury.”
Immediately, he looked up from what he was doing. The way he was frowning but trying to smile, I knew he was worried about me.
“Don’t worry about it,” I assured him. “I’m not stressed about this in any way. I knew this bird was going to die. I’m not going to start crying or anything.”
“OK,” he said, smiling.
“I want to apologize for what happened the other day,” I said. “I don’t make a habit of crying in front of people. I’m not going to be weird about dead birds. I’m not like that. I only cry three times a year, if that.”
“Oh, I’m sure I cry more often than that, myself,” Mike said. “I’m not worried about you.” Mike examined the dead sparrow, turning the plastic bag around in his hand. “Yeah,” he said, “most of these birds that hit windows, if they don’t get up and fly away right away, they usually end up dead.”
I nodded, updated him about the other birds still in my care, and left. I was touched by what Mike said about crying more often than I did, even though it was probably a polite lie to save my pride. After telling me that he wasn’t worried about me, he had tactfully changed the subject and talked business, so we didn’t have to dwell on what was a painful and embarrassing recollection for me. I felt good about our conversation. For once, someone had found a happy medium between acknowledging my tears and saving my dignity.
Since that summer, I have not cried in front of a group of near-strangers, and I would like to keep it that way. Only a few close friends have seen my tears, and not that often. Tears do have some positive associations. “Teardrop shape” is a delicate shape—the shape of gems or cut glass. Tears taste salty, like the sea, like the beginning of life. But crying is an awkward and unromantic experience and there is no getting around that. In novels or movies, beautiful heroines may shed beautiful tears, but our real-life experience is nothing like that: choked up, we breathe noisily and eventually have to blow our noses. Nobody looks good while crying. Most of us look almost comical with our red eyes and flattened hair, a crumpled handkerchief or tissue clutched in our hands.
Sometimes, when I feel like crying, I remember what my mother used to say to make me laugh—a Japanese saying she repeated because it sounded funny: sakki naita karasu ga mo warau. It meant, “The crow that was crying a few minutes ago is already laughing now.” My mother didn’t have to scold my brother and me for crying or encourage us to be stoic, because she could usually make us laugh. When she repeated this saying, I imagined the three of us—my mother, brother, and me—turning into big black birds flapping our wings and screaming. I laughed, picturing us perched on trees and cawing. If we were crows, I thought, no one would know if we were laughing or crying.
This was my mother’s gift. Crows are smart and stubborn. They are tough birds that survive and wheel around in the sky on their big wings. My mother wanted us to imagine ourselves flying around, making a racket, and laughing-crying-singing. In Japanese, the word for crying, naku, also means “birds making noise,” although the two verbs are written with different pictorial characters. In conversation, the two words sound exactly the same: a flock of blackbirds rise up to the sky, leaving us with the clamor of their singing and crying.
CHAPTER TEN
LIES
The hardest part of my job as a teacher is getting people to tell the truth.
“I liked your story a lot,” my students say to one another during the peer critique sessions of our creative writing classes. “I thought it was very good.”
Later, in my office, they often confide, “I didn’t like that story at all. The plot was trite and predictable. The dialogue was bad. People talked like they were characters from a soap opera.”
I don’t know how to bridge the gap between the polite lies people tell one another and the harsh criticisms they make in private. What I want is something between these two extremes: courteous and constructive criticism. That’s the hardest thing for my students to give—or for me to encourage—because all of us have been trained since childhood to tell polite lies to save other people’s feelings.
“Don’t be personal and negative,” we’ve been taught. “If you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything.”
The format I use for our writing workshops reinforces our polite habits. I ask the students to start the peer critique sessions with what they liked about the story, what they considered to be its strengths. After a few minutes, I reiterate the “strengths” people have pointed out, and only then do I feel ready to ask, “Is there anything in the story that you were confused by? Any parts you felt should have been developed more or cut out? Anything you might do differently if it were your story?” My questions are answered at first with a few tentative comments; but after the ice is broken, almost everyone pitches in, offering opinions in animated (though polite) conversations. Our discussion follows the same polite pattern we use to criticize others—starting with, “I like So-and-so and we get along, but …”
This is the standard format that many writing teachers use, and it isn’t necessarily bad. It sets a friendly tone. Having agreed that the story has merits, the class feels less inhibited about pointing out the few things that need improvement, and the writer can hear the criticism without feeling personally attacked. But the scenario does not work well when we discuss stories that need more than a little improvement. After spending the first few minutes on the story’s supposed strengths, nobody feels ready to admit, “I’m afraid that the whole concept is wrong. Maybe you should put this story aside and do something different.” Unfortunately, that is sometimes the only honest thing we can say.
Every semester, a few students write stories that won’t improve through revision because the whole premise is wrong: a story about “justice” that takes place in a courtroom even though the writer has never witnessed a trial; a story at the end of which we realize that the narrator is a dog; a story that is a “dialogue” between Satan and God; that sort of thing. I try to prevent these stories from getting workshopped in class. In my private conference with the student, I tell the truth: “You would be better off writing something else, because this story doesn’t quite work out. Why don’t you put your energies into a different story? Don’t revise this one. Just start over and do something else.” Most people are willing to take my advice, but for the few who won’t, I don’t have a policy that would allow me, the instructor, to bar anyone’s work from classroom discussion. So the stubborn few students end up workshopping their stories and feeling encouraged by everyone’s polite remarks. Theirs are the stories that occasion some of the other students to come to me with the truth: “Actually, I didn’t like that story.”
“Why didn’t you say that in class?” I ask.
; The answer is usually the same: “I didn’t want to be too negative.”
I sympathize with my students when they can’t bring themselves to be honest. I have the same problem. I tell the truth to my students because that is my job, but in every other situation, I am as politely dishonest as anyone.
“I liked your poems,” I often say to people who send me the poems they wrote to overcome some tragedy in their lives. “I could see that writing helped you a lot.” In private, I might value the poems as a form of therapy but not as works of art. But except to people who are officially my students (or former students or writer friends with whom I have a mutually honest relationship), I won’t have the courage to say, “I’m glad you found writing to be a helpful activity, but as poems, these don’t work.” I know that every time I don’t tell the truth, I am compromising the truths I do tell. If I don’t tell people when I think something is bad, how can they take me seriously when I say and mean that their work is good?
I would like to believe that my failure to be honest is a sign of consideration or kindness: I care about others and don’t want to hurt their feelings. But that is simply not the case. I don’t find it any easier to tell unpleasant truths to people I don’t know or don’t like. I tell lies because I want to spare myself the embarrassment of appearing negative and unpleasant: I want to protect myself as well as—or more than—the other person.
Not a week goes by without my telling a lie, but I suppose that is the same for most people. The polite but untrue compliments we offer can be dismissed as “white lies”—small lies we tell to protect ourselves and/or others from trouble or embarrassment. I am not sure how small or harmless any lie is, but if there is any justification for white lies, it is that they are usually expressions of what we wish were the truth. When I lie to people about liking their poems, their new haircuts, or the gifts they gave me, I wish that what I am saying were the truth. If I tell a friend that I missed the party at her house because I was tired and didn’t feel well—rather than because I didn’t feel enthusiastic about going in the first place—I am half convinced, myself, that I really was feeling a little under the weather that night. What I say is an extension, rather than a contradiction, of the truth—something that could easily have been so. Perhaps in resorting to these lies, we are only telling our friends what they, too, wish were the truth.