Responsible Adults by Patricia Ann McNair

Abstract

Reviewed by: Responsible Adults by Patricia Ann McNair Jane Rosenberg LaForge (bio) responsible adults Patricia Ann McNair Cornerstone Press https://www3.uwsp.edu/english/cornerstone/Pages/BOOKS.aspx 202 pages; Print, $18.85 In any other world, freelance editor and substitute teacher Sandy Olsen would seem a paragon of responsibility. She worries over the home lives of her students and takes her cat to the veterinarian for what might as well be a mental health visit; there's nothing physically wrong with her pet. But Sandy also might be a little too candid, telling one fragile student, "Lonely isn't always bad." Her impulse to do good may lead to more harm than she can imagine. Even if you don't blame her after reading "Regarding Alix," one of eighteen short stories in Patricia Ann McNair's Responsible Adults, you might still wonder over the unsettling strangeness of her guilt, its understated quality and dissociation from reality. Or perhaps Sandy, like her creator, is living under unusual circumstances, where the consequences of thoughtless or feckless actions are not necessarily immediate. But they are always damning. There are some frighteningly irresponsible adults in McNair's second collection of short stories: drunken and divorced parents, junkie brothers and oblivious pet owners, most who live in the fictional midwestern town of New [End Page 88] Hope, Illinois. New Hope is two hundred miles outside Chicago, Sandy tells us; it is alternately rustic and working class; a former site of industrial might, and once agriculturally prosperous. Now weighed down by the ennui, it also hosts hoarding, random acts of carelessness, and other bad decisions that will reverberate long after they are made manifest. One story, "Things You Know but Would Rather Not," is built on a premise similar to Kathryn Harrison's 1993 novel Exposure, in which a child is made to pose for a parent's artfully staged, distasteful photographs. In the novel, the child grows to become a deeply troubled woman. For McNair, the damage is still percolating within Mary Alice, an independent and intellectually curious thirteen-year-old. At a gallery showing her mother's photographs, Mary Alice reports on her image: "You could see the bruises on her shins, the ones from everyday use of her legs, her big feet. There was a shadow at the tops of her legs, just under the sheet, something black and mysterious. She looked closer. It was true what they said; her eyes were foggy, not right. … All she knew for certain was that she was hideous." When the photos make her beautiful, Mary Alice's mother rips them apart, stashing the scraps in the cat litter. Her most immediate wish is to die: "It gave her something to focus on. Something all her own to look forward to." "Things You Know but Would Rather Not" is one of the rare McNair stories told in third person, rather than as a first-person confession. Perhaps because of this, we do not get as complete an understanding why Mary Alice's mother insists on publicly humiliating her. We only learn the scale of that humiliation, how it seeps into their interactions. Where McNair's other culpable but unaccountable grown-ups fall on a scale of maliciousness or liability is not necessarily the point. McNair is seeking neither justice for characters who have been wronged nor redemption for the perpetrators. She is more interested in characters such as Sandy, who in hewing to what they believe is the path of the best intentions, nevertheless haunt in this compilation of neglect and absentmindedness. Responsible Adults is an investigation into what constitutes responsibility when so much of life is out of our control. The 2001 destruction of the Twin Towers, otherwise known as 9/11, is one event none of McNair's narrators could have stopped, and it hovers in the background. Two months after 9/11, Sandy is happy to flee Chicago and a "high-rise apartment in the city where planes came in over the lake and circled [End Page 89] overhead" for the woodsy setting of a boarding school. Once the semester ends, she thinks back to the pre-9/11 era as "before any...