Empathy

A work of creative nonfiction
by Patricia Parkinson

“Can anyone tell me what empathy is?” asks Mr. Wiebe, the school principal, standing at the podium looking very Mennonite-ish in his suit and badly knotted paisley.

Brunette heads turn—there are no blondes, not the blonde I seek, I miss, who’d be sitting next to me saying, “Why the fuck do we come to these things?” There’s only brown, which is the new black, she told my yesterday when I stopped by to check for a pulse, and pink. “Do you like this haircut?” she asked, and scratched her bald head.

My six-year-old son, Dylan, looks at me. His fingers are held tightly together. He bends them halfway in a wave and then into a fist, and we punch the air and mouth the words, one, two, three: paper. He smiles and turns into his dad, who turns into my husband, who turns into a baby boy with blue eyes and a vagina.

The other mothers look sideways at me, especially the woman with big bleached teeth who wears lots of pink and brown, who wanted Emily to get a manicure at her daughter’s eighth birthday party and was aghast when I said, “She doesn’t like that sort of thing.” She walks past me at church and past me in the parking lot and past me at the art table where my lighter falls from my purse exposing my bad habit, and she walks past until my sleeve catches on fire from trying to win her approval that I don’t want, I yell, and I’m consumed.

“Being nice to people?” a little girl in the front row guesses.

“Yes, that’s part of it,” Mr. Wiebe says, his eyes searching the crowd.

“I can take you to your appointment on Monday,” I told the blonde.

“Great,” she said. “Maybe you’ll quit smoking when you see what chemotherapy is really like.”

It’s a black room with a black light and neon tubes that glow with toxic waste, and everyone laughs and stares with no eyes and the children skip and cry and bow to kiss polished walnut—bagpipes.

“Empathy is being a good friend.”

I turn to see the face of the voice. It came from behind me. I look and look. I stand up. I turn around and around and I’m skating on a rink to Melissa Manchester.

There’s no one there.

“It is being a good friend,” says Mr. Wiebe.

“Do you want to hang out with me?” I asked the blonde when we went skating at the Newton Arena in grade seven.

She skated beside me, faster, faster—she’s the jock, I’m the cheerleader. “Let’s go!” she said, and laughed the way she does without making a sound. She tugged at my sleeve and pulled me along the ice and we went to the beach and nursed our daughters.

Dylan looks at me again. His lips, closed tight, are ready to burst. His eyes giggle. He knows the answer. I smile and wink, and we’re alone.