Adam and Evil - Gillian Roberts Page 0,3

those who need to be brought into line: preschoolers and me.

I wasn’t eager to join forces with another of Beth’s displaced friends. Not with anyone, in fact. I was already drowning in too-muchness, and my current fantasies were of silence and solitude. I wanted a Georgia O’Keeffe life, as long as it didn’t require artistic talent. Few possessions and fewer visitors to my plain white space. No teenagers. No sisters with dull, sad, and needy friends.

“I’ll try,” I said. “I’ll ask the group next time we meet.” They’d be annoyed with me—they’d settled the issue at the last meeting. I could only hope Beth would quickly forget about her relocated friend. Out of sight and all that.

“What do you think of our expanded view?” Mackenzie asked. The wall now appeared to have a barn window, through which we saw a vista of fields and grazing cows, the latter suspended a few feet above the painted pasture. We city dwellers living several stories above street level had found the floating bovines funny. I, for one, was in great need of funny.

Also, the painting filled a whole lot of wall. Judged by price per square inch, it had been a bargain, as my mother would say were she not safely several states due south, in Florida.

“I think it’s straight,” Sam said. I wasn’t as sure.

Beth fussed with her children. “You realize you’re going to upset that boy’s parents,” she said to me.

“Adam’s? About the conference?”

“I’d be. And if it’s true, wouldn’t they be the first to notice?”

At which point silent Sam surprised me by voicing an unsolicited opinion. “Be careful about your actions,” he said. “It’s hardly what a parent wants to hear, and given the fact that you have no background in psychology, no credentials in that area…”

“I’d like them to have him evaluated. To get him help if he needs it. It isn’t as if I’m accusing them of something or libeling them.”

“His parents might not see it the same way, is all I’m saying. Think twice.”

We were all expected to listen to Sam’s advice, which was always wise and always conservative, and for which he charged others big bucks, but he was annoying me. What had happened to the concept of being a decent human being? Love thy neighbor. Good Samaritanism.

“When should people intervene?” I asked. “At what point should somebody stick her neck out and try to help? Shouldn’t we try to prevent things? Or should we wait for a TV crew to arrive so we can say, ‘I noticed he was behaving oddly, but…’ I’m mostly afraid for Adam. Do you know the statistics on teenage suicide?”

“Mandy!” Beth said, with a fearful glance at her children. “Sam, I think we should all go to Emily’s.”

I got the sense that Sam most definitely did not agree, but after hosing down the kids, many farewells, and a further warning from Sam about intervening in a child’s personal life, they went off to their party.

Even with the ladder put away, Mackenzie fretted about his handiwork. “Not sure it’s straight,” he said. I pointed out that we lived in the oldest part of the city. In a former factory. The floors weren’t straight and neither were the walls, and there probably wasn’t a ninety-degree angle to be had, so how could one tell about a painting in the middle of a long, un-straight wall?

“The appearance of straightness, then,” he said.

Kin to the appearance of mental illness. “I don’t care what Sam said,” I told Mackenzie. “If I don’t put out an alert about the boy, who will?” I was convincing myself because if my sister and brother-in-law were correct, I was about to kick up a lot of hard feelings, and in truth, I still couldn’t decide if Adam’s essay contained brilliant imagery beyond my puny comprehension, or lunacy. Or whether I’d become such a grumpy, burned-out case that I was looking for trouble, scapegoating Adam Evans.

“Tell me about the kid.” Mackenzie stared at the wall, tilting his head to the left, obviously still deliberating the painting’s straightness or lack thereof.

And there you had the problem. I shouldn’t have needed to tell him about Adam. I already had. Lots. He didn’t listen. He divvied up his attention and deeded me almost as little conscious brain space as my students did. Was he listening now as he squinted and realigned himself and paced in front of the wall? Maybe my tales were too thin a gruel for Mackenzie’s daily diet. Compared to