I Never Promised You A Rose Garden

by Joanne Greenberg

  “What did you say?” the doctor was asking, but Deborah had fled, terrified, into Yr, so that it closed over her head like water and left no mark of where she had entered. The surface was smooth and she was gone.

  Looking at her, drawn away from words or reasons or comforts, Dr. Fried thought: The sick are all so afraid of their own uncontrollable power! Somehow they cannot believe that they are only people, holding only a humansized anger!

  A few days later, Deborah returned to the Midworld looking out on Earth. She was sitting with Carla and some others on the corridor of the ward.

  “Do you have town privileges?” Carla asked her.

  “No, but they let me go out when my mother was here.”

  “Was it a good visit?”

  “I guess so. She couldn’t help trying to get me to figure out what made me sick. We were no sooner sitting down when it came out in a big rush. I knew she had to ask it, but I couldn’t tell her—even if I knew.”

  “Sometimes I hate the people who made me sick,” Carla said. “They say that you stop hating them after you’ve had enough therapy, but I wouldn’t know about that. Besides, my enemy is beyond hating or forgiving.”

  “Who is it?” Deborah asked, wondering if it could only have been one.

  “My mother,” Carla answered matter-of-factly. “She shot me and my brother and herself. They died; I lived. My father married again, and I went crazy.”

  They were hard words, and stark, with no euphemisms such as one always heard outside. Starkness and crudity were two important privileges of the hospital, and everyone used them to the fullest. To those who had never dared to think of themselves, except in secret, as eccentric and strange, freedom was freedom to be crazy, bats, nuts, loony, and, more seriously, mad, insane, demented, out of one’s mind. And there was a hierarchy of privilege to enjoy these freedoms. The screaming, staring ones on Ward D were called “sick” by others and “crazy” by themselves. Only they were allowed to refer to themselves by the ultimate words, like “insane” and “mad,” without contradiction. The quieter wards, A and B, were lower on the upside-down scale of things and were permitted only lighter forms: nuts, cuckoo, and cracked. It was the patients’ own unspoken rule, and one learned without benefit of being told. B-ward patients who called themselves crazy were putting on airs. Knowing this, Deborah now understood the scorn of the rigid, dull-eyed Kathryn when a nurse had said, “Come on now, you are getting upset,” and the woman had laughed. “I’m not upset; I’m cuckoo!”

  Deborah had been two months in the hospital. Other patients had come and some had gone up to “D” among the “insane,” and some to other hospitals.

  “We’re getting to be veterans,” Carla said, “old hands at the funny farm.” And perhaps it was true. Except for “D,” Deborah was no longer frightened of the place. She did what she was told and apart from that wielder of horrors, Dr. Fried, in her innocent-looking white house, there was no mark of excessive caution put on anything by the Censor.

  “How long is the time until we know if we’re going to make it or not?” Deborah asked.

  “You kids are just in the honeymoon phase,” said a girl sitting near them. “That takes about three months. I know, too. I’ve been in six hospitals. I’ve been analyzed, paralyzed, shocked, jolted, revolted, given metrazol, amatyl, and whatever else they make. All I need now is a brain operation and I’ll have had the whole works. Nothing does any good, not this crap or anything else.” She got up in the very doomed, dramatic way she had and left them, and Lactamaeon, second in command of Yr, whispered, If one is to be doomed, one must be beautiful, or the drama is only a comedy. And therefore, Unbeautiful….

  Kill me, my lord, in the form of an eagle, Deborah said to him in the language of Yr. “How long has she been here?” she asked Carla in the language of Earth.

  “More than a year, I think,” Carla said.

  “Is this … forever?”

  “I don’t know,” Carla answered.

  The winter hung around them. It was December, and outside the windows the tree limbs were black and stark. A group in the dayroom was decorating a tree for Christmas. Five staff and two patients—God, they tried so hard to make the madhouse look like home. It was all lies; their laughter hung very false among the ornaments (no sharp edges and no glass), and Deborah thought that at least they had the decency to be embarrassed. At the doctor’s house the dragging forth of her history, and the retreats, camouflaging, and hiding, went on. Except for her contact with Carla and Marion on the ward, she was drawing away from the world even the undervoice that answered questions and stood in place of herself when she wished to be in Yr. “I can’t describe the feeling,” she said, thinking of the Yri metaphors which she had used to tell herself and the Yri ones what she wished. In recent years thoughts often came, and happenings also, for which there seemed no sharer on the hard earth, and so the plains, pits, and peaks of Yr began to echo a growing vocabulary to frame its strange agonies and grandeurs.

  “There must be some words,” the doctor said. “Try to find them, and let us share them together.”

  “It’s a metaphor—you wouldn’t understand it.”

  “Perhaps you could explain it then.”

  “There is a word—it means Locked Eyes, but it implies more.”

  “What more?”

  “It’s the word for sarcophagus.” It meant that at certain times her vision reached only as far as the cover of her sarcophagus, that to herself, as to the dead, the world was the size of her own coffin.

  “With the Locked Eyes—can you see me?”

  “Like a picture only, a picture of something that is real.”

  The exchange was making her terribly frightened. Because of it the walls began to thrum a little, vibrating like a great, blood-pumping heart. Anterrabae was reciting an incantation in Yri, but she couldn’t understand his words.

  “I hope you are happy with your prying,” she said to the fading doctor in her chair.

  “I am not trying to frighten you,” the doctor said, not seeing the walls writhe, “but there is still much to do. I wanted to ask you, since we had spoken about the tumor operations, how the world went gray suddenly after that, what the rest was like, the rest of those early years.”

  It was difficult speaking to a half-present shape in the grayness outside of Yr, but there was an aching sense of loss and misery about the past and if this doctor could give a form to it, the memory might be easier to endure. Deborah began to pick through the happenings, and wherever she looked there was failure and confusion. Even at the hospital where the tumor had been so successfully removed those years ago, she had somehow not been equal to the game they were playing. Its rules had been lies and tricks and she had seen through them but had not known how to respond to the play—to fall in with it and believe. The convalescence had also been hypocritical, since the illness itself had not passed.

  When her sister, Suzy, had been born, Deborah’s senses had told her that the intruder was a red-faced puckered bundle of squall and stink, but the relatives had all come crowding into the nursery, crowding her out in their wonderment at the beauty and delicacy of the newborn child. They had been shocked and angered at the truth she felt so naturally: that she thought the thing ugly, did not love it, and could not conceive of it as ever being beautiful or a companion.

  “But she is your sister,” they had said.

  “That was not my doing. I wasn’t even in on the consultation.”

  With that remark the family’s discomfort about her had begun. A clever and precocious comment for a five-year-old, they had said, but cold, almost cruel. An honesty, they had said, but one which rose from anger and selfishness and not from love. As the years went by the aunts and uncles had stood off from Deborah, proud but not loving; and Suzy had come behind with a careless, bright sweetness, all woman-child, and had been loved without reservation.

  Like a dybbuk or the voice of a possession, the curse proclaimed itself from Deborah’s body
and her mouth. It never left her. Because of the operation she was late starting school and stood apart from the first friendships and groups that the little schoolmates had formed in her absence. A kind and sorrowing mother, recognizing the fatal taint, took hold and played hostess to the girls of the most popular group. Deborah had been too heartsick to dissuade her. Perhaps through a lovely mother, taint or no, Deborah would be tolerated. And it was somewhat so. But in the neighborhood the codes of long-established wealth still prevailed and the little-girl “dirty Jew,” who already accepted that she was dirty, made a good target for the bullies of the block. One of them lived next door. When he met her, he would curse her with the deep-rooted, hierarchical curse he loved: “Jew, Jew, dirty Jew; my grandmother hated your grandmother, my mother hates your mother and I hate you!” Three generations. It had a ring to it; even she could feel that. And in the summer there was camp.

  They said it was nonsectarian, and it might have been so for the niceties which differentiated various sorts of middle-class Protestants, but she was the only Jew. They scrawled the hate-words on walls and in the privy (that place where the evil girl with the tumor had screamed once at the release of burning urine).

  The instincts of these hating children were shared, for Deborah heard sometimes that a man named Hitler was in Germany and was killing Jews with the same kind of evil joy. One spring day before she left for camp she had seen her father put his head on the kitchen table and cry terrible, wrenching men’s tears about the “checks-andthe-poles.” In the camp a riding instructor mentioned acidly that Hitler was doing one good thing at least, and that was getting rid of the “garbage people.” She wondered idly if they all had tumors.

  Deborah’s world revolved around an inborn curse and a special, bittersweet belief in God and the Czechs and the Poles; it was full of mysteries and lies and changes. The understanding of the mysteries was tears; the reality behind the lies was death; and the changes were a secret combat in which the Jews, or Deborah, always lost.

  It was at the camp that Yr had first come to her, but she did not tell the doctor of it, or of the gods or the Collect with their great realms. From her absorption in the telling of events she looked out again and saw the doctor’s expressive face indignant for her. She wanted to thank this Earth person who was capable of being moved to anger. “I did not know that they endowed Earth-ones with insides,” she said musingly, and then she was very tired.

  Yr was massed against her when she got back to the ward. Sitting on a hard chair, she listened to the cries and screams of the Collect and the roaring of the lower levels of Yr’s realms. Listen, Bird-one; listen Wild-horse-one; you are not of them! The Yri words sounded an eternity of withdrawal. Behold me! Anterrabae fell and said, You are playing with the Pit forever. You are walking around your destruction and poking a little finger at it here and there. You will break the seal. You will end. And in the background: You are not of us, from the cruel-jawed Collect.

  Anterrabae said, You were never one of them, not ever. You are wholly different.

  There was a long, profound comfort in what he said. Quietly and happily, Deborah set out to prove the distance across the yawning gap of difference. She had the top of a tin can, which she had found on one of her walks and picked up, both knowing and not knowing what she expected of it. The edges were rippled and sharp. She dragged the metal down the inside of her upper arm, watching the blood start slowly from the six or seven tracks that followed the metal down below the elbow. There was no pain, only the unpleasant sensation of the resistance of her flesh. The tin top was drawn down again, carefully and fastidiously following the original tracks. She worked hard, scraping deeper, ten times or so up and back until the inside of the arm was a gory swath. Then she fell asleep.

  “Where’s Blau? I don’t see her name here.”

  “Oh, they moved her up to Disturbed. Gates went in the room this morning to wake her up and saw a real mess—blood on the sheets and on her face and an arm all cut up with a tin can. Ugh! A tetanus shot and right up in the elevator.”

  “It’s funny … I never figured that kid was really sick. Every time I saw her I thought: There goes the rich girl. She walked as if we were too low to look at. It was all beneath her; and the sarcastic way she said things—not what she said, really, but the coldness. A spoiled little rich kid, that’s all.”

  “Who knows what’s inside them? The doctors say that all of them are sick enough to be in here and that the therapy is damn hard in those sessions.”

  “That snooty little bitch never did anything hard in all her life.”

  chapter seven

  She was terrified of the Disturbed Ward, from which all pretensions to comfort and normalcy had been removed. Women were sitting bolt upright in bare chairs, and sitting and lying on the floor—moaning and mute and raging—and the ward’s nurses and attendants had big, hard, muscular bodies. It was somehow terrifying and somehow comforting in a way that was more than the comfort of the finality of being there. Looking out of a window barred and screened like a fencer’s mask, she waited to find out why there seemed to be some subtle good about this frightening place.

  A woman had come up behind her. “You’re scared, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m Lee.”

  “An attendant or something?”

  “Hell no, I’m a psychotic like you…. Yes, you are; we all are.”

  The woman was small, dark-haired, and troubled, but she had looked out of herself far enough to see another’s fear, and, being a patient, had all the direct and immediate access that no staff member could attain. She has courage, Deborah thought. I might have belted her one, for all she knew. And Deborah suddenly knew what was good about D ward: no more lying gentility or need to live according to the incomprehensible rules of Earth. When the blindness came, or the hard knots of pain from the nonexistent tumor, or the Pit, no one would say, “What will people think!” “Be ladylike,” or “Don’t make a fuss!”

  In the bed next to hers was the secret first wife of Edward VIII, abdicated King of England, who had been spirited to this place (it was a House of Prostitution) by the Ex-King VIII’s enemies. When the nurse locked Deborah’s possessions in the small built-in cupboard, the woman—who was sitting on her bed discussing her strategy with the invisible form of the Prime Minister—rose and came to Deborah, her face full of pity. “You’re so young to be in this evil house, my dear. Why, you must still be a virgin. I’ve been raped every night since I came.” She went back to her discussion.

  “Where will I meet you alone here?” Deborah cried to Lactamaeon and his others.

  There are always ways, Yr echoed. We will not crowd or overcrowd the guests of this unsecret unwife of the abdicated King of England! Yr rang with laughter, but the Pit was very close.

  “Escorted?” the doctor asked Deborah, looking quizzically at the attendant standing beside her.

  “She’s upstairs now, on D ward,” the attendant answered evenly, and then posted herself outside the normal-looking, booby-trapped, civilized office.

  “Well, what happened?” The doctor saw the lostness and the fear and its mask of truculence on Deborah’s face. Deborah sat down, hunching over the vulnerable abdomen and the lower area, where waited the easily awakened tumor.

  “It was something I had to do, that’s all. I scratched my arm a little—that’s all.”

  The doctor looked at her intently, waiting for a sign of how honestly she might be ready to search. “Show me,” she said. “Show me the arm.”

  Deborah undid the sleeve, burning with shame.

  “Wow!” the doctor said in her funny, accented colloquial English. “That’s going to make a hell of a scar!”

  “All my dancing partners will wince when they see it.”

  “It is not impossible that you will dance someday, and that you will live in the world again. You know, don’t you, that you are in big trouble? It’s time to tell me fully what brought you to doing that business th
ere.”

  She was not frightened, Deborah saw, or horrified, or ridiculing, or making any of the hundred wrong expressions that people had always shown in the face of her trouble. She was only completely serious. Deborah began to tell her about Yr.

  At one time—strange to think of it now—the gods of Yr had been companions—secret, princely sharers of her loneliness. In camp, where she had been hated; in school, where strangeness set her apart more and more as the years went on, Yr had grown wider and wider for her as the solitude deepened. Its gods were laughing, golden personages whom she would wander away to meet, like guardian spirits. But something changed, and Yr was transformed from a source of beauty and guardianship to one of fear and pain. Slowly Deborah was forced to assuage and placate, to spin from the queen-ship of a bright and comforting Yr to prison in its darker places. She was royalty among gods on the days of the high calendar, debased and wretched on the low. Now she was also forced to endure the dizzying changes between worlds, to bear the world’s hatred voiced in the chanting curses of the Collect, to be subject and slave to the Censor, who had been given the task of keeping the world of Yr from blowing its secret seeds to ground on Earth, where they would spring up wide open to flowering lunacy for all the world to see and recoil from in horror. The Censor had assumed the role of tyrant over both worlds. Once her guardian, the Censor had turned against her. In her mind, the proof of Yr’s reality had become its very cruelty, for it was like the world, whose promises were all lies and whose advantages and privileges were, in the end, evil and agony. A sweetness turned into a need, the need into a force, the force into total tyranny.

  “And it has a language of its own?” the doctor asked, remembering the alluring words and the withdrawal that came after them.

  “Yes,” Deborah said. “It is a secret language, and there is a Latinated cover-language that I use sometimes—but that’s only a screen really, a fake.”