I Never Promised You A Rose Garden

by Joanne Greenberg

  By the time Doris herself appeared, very pale and haggard, a few days later, she had a whole hall of secret enemies. Deborah appraised her in the light of the myth which she and Carla had made. Doris was very thin and she had graying hair, but even exhausted and dizzy with sedatives, there was an abundant sense of life thrumming through her. In whatever manner she had taken the world for this long, it had not been on her knees.

  She saw Deborah looking at her with the merciless eye of the whole ward.

  “What are you gawking at?” she said in a hard, honest voice. “You don’t look like a fashion model either.”

  “You were here before,” Deborah said, blurting out unexpected words to answer the unexpected remark.

  “So what?”

  “How come you are back?”

  “It’s none of your goddam business!”

  “But it is!” Deborah shouted. Before she could explain, the anxious cordon of attendants flanked Doris and led her away. Deborah was left with the anger strong in her ears and the question still held unasked.

  Yr began to rumble and the Collect prepared its brittle laughter. “I will, too!” she said to the phalanx of her other dimension. She went to the closed door of Doris’s seclusion and pounded on it.

  “Hey! Was it too tough—is that why?”

  “No! I was too tough, and a lot happened,” the door shouted back.

  “Like what?”

  “Like none of your goddam business!”

  “But they talk about getting well—and going out. Everybody does, and—”

  She had been heard. The attendants moved to nip trouble in the bud. “Get away from that door, Deborah. You have no business there,” the white blurs said.

  “I was talking to Doris,” Deborah insisted, not knowing if any of her questions would be answered, but feeling that she had to ask that door—even if it gave no answer—if she would be forced to take the Censor back, and the semblance of sanity, and all the other lies and horrors, in order to live in the depthless, colorless world outside.

  “Okay, Blau … come along.” Their voices were warning her: pack or seclusion or both if she didn’t come along.

  “Hey you!” the door said. “Listen—leave her there. Maybe I can answer the crazy bitch’s questions. I won’t know until she asks them.”

  “Rivera, this isn’t your affair,” the attendant on one side said righteously. “Blau….”

  “All right—” Deborah said. “All right.”

  That afternoon, Dowben’s Mary tripped and fell and her shoe flew off and Deborah caught it. She threw it back to Mary and for a while four or five of the patients began to play catch with it, sending it around corners and into the dormitory. On a high catch, Deborah came down hard on her ankle. The next morning the ward doctor examined it and said that he thought it was broken.

  “Our X-ray machine is out of whack,” he said. “She’ll have to be taken to St. Agnes’s.”

  And so, two uniformed students, terrified that she might escape, took Deborah in a taxi to the hospital. At St. Agnes’s, set apart in a private room and guarded inside and out by two sets of nurses, Deborah alternately laughed and swore. Other nurses and aides kept creeping by the door to her room. “Is that the mental patient in there?” (Whispered outside, as though she were a movie star or a carrier of the plague.) Heads turned, eyes turned as she made her way down the hall to X ray. (Elaborate disinterest—“If I look, will she look?”)

  The students who accompanied Deborah felt very important and did not fail to tell the others in the X-ray room that their duty was the “disturbed ward.”

  “Are they violent?”

  Perhaps the reply was a wink; Deborah did not hear any answer. Suddenly she saw herself as they must be seeing her: lank hair, dirty, flabby from inactivity, wearing an old ward bathrobe over her miserable pajamas (they had thought that she might stay at St. Agnes’s, and dressing was a nuisance), the Crazy Look maybe. She could never tell what the mask might look like. And then it struck her: here it was—what Doris Rivera had faced and what Carla might soon face—the World. She fainted.

  Looking up at the avid faces outside the X-ray room only a few moments later, Deborah realized how much she would hate to have a broken ankle and have to stay where she was so much more insane than she was on the “violent” ward of the nuthouse. She sat up.

  “How do you feel?” her own nurses asked (as if they were the only ones with sufficient knowledge to approach her psychologically). It occurred to Deborah that if she frightened them all enough, they would let her go back, ankle or no.

  “It’s one of my attacks”—she tried to look ominous—“coming on.”

  “Well!” the doctor said very heartily. “That’s a nasty sprain she has there—but nothing’s broken!”

  A long sigh of release from everyone; out the door she limped with a bound-up ankle and two nurses to lean on and into the waiting cab and fast-fast to highway to road to smaller road to gate and into the back door of South Building (Wards B and D) and up in “the meatwagon” to “D” and home and thank God! Thank God!

  In the evening, at night wash-up, she limped into the big bathroom and looked at herself in the steel plate that served as a mirror. The self-hate of hundreds upon hundreds of patients had been vented on it and tempered steel cannot endure such an onslaught. Even the weaponless had found weapons to scratch it and dent it and no inch of its surface was clear. “E nagua,” Deborah said to it; the formal Yri for: “I love you.”

  “Off to the physical hospital …” she told Furii, “… I never wished you used straitjackets until yesterday. I would have loved to make the picture complete. I’m a fool, though; I didn’t even think about frothing at the mouth until I was well away!”

  “You are trying to hurt yourself now,” Furii said. “What happened?”

  When Deborah told her, she sighed.

  “It goes very slowly, this prejudice,” she said, “but it is getting better. I remember how much worse it was before the Second War and really how much worse before the First. Be patient about this. Because you know so much more about mental illness than they do—you are freer to be understanding and forgiving.”

  Deborah shifted her gaze. Again, there was Furii’s subtle, all-pervading message to cast with the world, to help it, even while sick and estranged.

  “I can’t help anyone, don’t you see! Don’t you understand anything I’ve been telling you? The nganon cries from itself!”

  “What? Try to tell me what this is … perhaps I do not understand.”

  “I’m separated from the good. There’s a saying in Yr, and the Censor used to torture me with it; I will translate it for you. …In silence, in sleep, before action or breath, utterly and immutably, nganon cries from itself.’ It means that the poisoned substance, the enemy-self can cry out and draw to itself all the other few poisoned ones that there are in the world. It draws them without my knowing, magically, no matter how or what I do.”

  “I think you mean it has drawn one or two or three,” Furii said. “I want you to tell of them.”

  Beyond all of the forces of Yri magic, gods, and worlds, Deborah was sure that there was another proof of her intrinsic unworthiness. This proof lay in the world, in the simple, daily matters of an earthly youth. It was the seemingly magic force which attracted her to others. One had to choose or be chosen as a partner at camp, a seatmate at school, the member (in a certain order of importance) in all kinds of cliques and groups and classes. A semblance of membership in the Earth-world had to be served. Deborah had found that she could meet the demands of this membership only with the tainted, the very poor, the crippled, the disfigured, the strange, the going-insane. These pairings-off were not planned or thought out even secretly; they came about as naturally as the attraction of magnet and metal, yet many of the fragments which had been drawn together thus knew why in their hearts and hated themselves and their companions.

  One summer at camp there had been a brilliant girl named Eugenia.
The time before the last great change was running out, and Yr was demanding more and more of Deborah’s days in service to it, and giving less and less of its comfort in return. Eugenia and Deborah found each other and they knew why and sometimes they tormented each other for it. Yet there was a sympathy, too, a knowing without needing to be told what suffering there could be behind the simplest act, an understanding of how hard the Semblance was to hold up before the world. Above all there was need for surface companion-ship—to walk to the dining room together, to the ball field together, to the lake together, to comfort each other without the words being utterly lies or only lip service to the Semblance. Although they needed walls between themselves and the others, they most needed—just sometimes, with just someone, to break through that soundproof plate-glass partition that was the Semblance, and for a little time, to say things as if the whole world were not the Collect.

  After a while the camp accepted them as friends of each other and wrote them out of its anger and hard judgments. Deborah had known, of course, that Eugenia was different, alone, bitter, and unquiet, but she had tried to shield herself from the thought that Eugenia was a carrier of the poisoned nganon. One day Deborah had managed to slip away in order to be quietly in Yr on the Plains of Tai’a where she could fly if Yr allowed it. She had many hiding places at the camp where she could find an hour or so of peace before the world started to call and look for her. One of the best of these was the deserted shower-house, but when she went there on this day, she sensed that someone else was there. She began to sing to warn the one who could not see her. Too many times she herself had been intruded upon while laughing or speaking Yri aloud, and had had to bear the torments of the Censor for it. Now, there was a frantic scrambling in one of the stalls and the sound of Eugenia’s voice.

  “Who is it?”

  “Deborah.”

  “Come here.”

  Deborah went to the shower. Eugenia was standing naked in the stall of the dry shower. She was sweating heavily. As Deborah came toward her she held out a heavy leather belt. “Here,” she said. “Beat me.”

  “What?”

  “You know what I am. I don’t have to lie to you. Take it. Use it.”

  “What for?” Something awful was coming.

  “You’re running away, and pretending you don’t understand. You know what it’s for—it’s for me, and you have to—”

  “No—” Deborah began to back away. “I can’t. I won’t.

  ” Eugenia’s need filled up the space between them. Sweat was running from her face and beading on her shoulders and arms. “Don’t forget what I know about you! I’m going to make you beat me with this belt, and you will … because … you … understand.”

  “No—” Deborah moved farther away. It flashed through her mind that perhaps her nganon had reached Eugenia and combined with Eugenia’s own waiting virulence to bring this about. Deborah might be Ruin—Pernai shackled and shod in destruction—but it was for herself alone; she had never asked anyone else to partake of it. Then it suddenly came to her that Eugenia’s nganon might be more virulent than hers. Even so, to witness was to share; to share was to be responsible. Her nganon had called to Eugenia’s, thus opening, thus causing … Deborah went to Eugenia, took the belt, threw it down, and ran from the showers. She never looked at or spoke to Eugenia again.

  “Then the one who is a friend—anyone who likes you or is attracted to you—is ruined, if not by you, then by closeness to you….”

  “Yr puts it as a joke, but you say it more to the point. Yes, that is true.”

  “Is it true of your mother and father and sister?”

  “Men are not poisoned by female poison. I think that they are broken in some other way. I never thought of it before, but I see men here. They have whole wards of them, just like us.”

  “Indeed so,” Furii said. “It is true for women though? You still have this fear of contaminating?”

  “I have been slowly contaminating them for many years.”

  “And the results of this?”

  “I think that my sister will be insane.”

  “You still think so?”

  “Yes.”

  The phone rang and the doctor rose and went to the desk to answer it. There were few hours when the phone didn’t ring at least once, and during one amazing session there had been five calls. Furii shrugged in a little helpless sign of apology and spoke for a few minutes. “Now …” she said, sitting down, “where were we?”

  “In the bell-clanging world,” Deborah said acidly.

  “Some of the calls I cannot stop—they are long distance or made specially from doctors who have no other time. I free us from as many of them as I can.” She looked at Deborah with a little grin. “I know how hard it is to succeed with a …great, famous doctor.’ There is always such a desire to even up the score a little even if it is with your own life, to keep her from an imaginary …perfect record.’ I tell you I have many failures, too—in spite of my being in such great demand. Will we work together?”

  “We were talking about contaminating.”

  “Ah, yes. I’m curious,” Furii said. “If this incident in the showers had happened to you now, would you be as frightened?”

  “No,” and Deborah laughed because it seemed ridiculous.

  “Well, why not?” “Well …” Deborah came into a sort of sunshine. “I’m crazy now. As soon as you admitted that I was sick—as soon as you admitted that I was so sick that I had to be in a hospital, you proved to me that I was saner than I had thought. You know, saner is stronger.”

  “I don’t quite understand.”

  “I had known all those years and years how sick I was, and nobody else would admit it.”

  “You were asked to mistrust even the reality to which you were closest and which you could discern as clearly as daylight. Small wonder that mental patients have so low a tolerance for lies….”

  “You look as though you are seeing this for the first time,” Deborah said, still in the light. “Is it true? Did I bring you something?”

  Furii paused. “Yes, in a way you have, because though I knew other reasons why lying is bad for the mentally disturbed, I never saw it in this particular way.”

  Deborah began to clap her hands, smiling.

  “What is it?” Furii said, seeing that the smile was not bitter.

  “Oh, well …”

  “You are happy to give then, as well as to be given?”

  “If I can teach you something, it may mean that I can count at least somewhere.”

  “I weep,” Furii said. “I weep big crocodile tears for your Yri gods.” And she imitated the hypocritical down-pulled mouth of form-sorrow. “They are wasting the time of a real human being who will someday recognize it and break their houses down and send them away.”

  “You make me see a pinnacled white cloud …” Deborah said, “but behind it is still the same Furii of the fire-touch and the lightning bolt,” and she trembled to think of having to endure without Yr.

  Later, they began to explore the secret idea that Deborah shared with all the ill—that she had infinitely more power than the ordinary person and was at the same time also his inferior. The poisoning nganon had been such an idea for Deborah, but she saw into the intricacies of it coldly, with her reason and not as a truth of the spirit. One evening, as she sat in the hall waiting for the sedative call, she looked at Miss Coral, sitting like an ancient owl on one of the heavy chairs, and at Lee and at Helene, who had just come walking toward them.

  “Can you read my thoughts?” she asked them.

  “Are you talking to me?” Lee said.

  “To all of you. Can you read my thoughts?”

  “What are you trying to do—get me sent to seclusion?”

  “Go to hell,” Helene said pleasantly.

  “Don’t look at me,” Miss Coral said, with the genteel horror of a countess visiting an abattoir. “I can’t even read my own.”

  Deborah looked around at the figures
decorating the walls of the hall. They were always waiting, always seeming never to have moved or changed.

  “If you’re seeking objective reality,” she muttered to herself, “this is one hell of a place to start.”

  chapter eighteen

  It was spring, the season of passion and impatience. The terrible vacuum caused by the rushing by of time made Jacob feel empty inside. He sat at the grammar-school graduation exercises of his younger daughter, heard the singing and the speeches, the prayers and the promises, and felt the emptiness deepen as if it would never end. He had told himself that this was Suzy’s day and that Deborah was to be no part of it. But against his conscience, his wishes, his promises to Esther and himself, he could not get the thought of Deborah out of his mind. Why wasn’t she here with them?

  It was the second spring that she was gone, and how much closer was she to the modest, obedient, womanly being that his heart cried out to have as a daughter? No closer. There had been no improvement at all. The young girls began to file out of the auditorium, all innocence and white dresses. Jacob turned to Esther, who, for Suzy’s sake, was dressed stunningly in what the family called her “coronation clothes.”

  “Why can’t she come home for a while? We’d go to the lakes,” he whispered.

  “Not now!” Esther hissed.

  “She’s not committed there by law!” he whispered back.

  “It may not be good for her.”

  “It may be good for me—me, once in a while!”

  In the evening they took Suzy out to a fancy restaurant. She had wanted to go to the class party, but Jacob, feeling that time and beauty and all his days of them were slipping away, had wanted this one evening at least. Because he wanted it so badly, it was a failure from the start. Suzy was subdued, Esther, saddened because the present daughter was being stinted again for the absent one. Jacob knew that the symbol breaks when it is too heavily weighted, but he could not help himself. The whole evening had a forlorn quality to it.

  Esther, trying to sound natural by naming the name, said, “Debby wanted to come to your graduation—and if she could, she would have sent something.”