I Never Promised You A Rose Garden

by Joanne Greenberg

  “This word here—the biggest one—I think I heard you say it. Has it a meaning?”

  Deborah groped wildly for gestures, words, or sounds to convey the impact of the volcano’s eruption; the word she had written in the blood from a cut finger was the third form of anger, which she had never spoken or written before and which was more extreme than black anger or red-white anger. After moving about restlessly for a while, she threw back her head in a soundless scream, wide-mouthed. The nurse looked at her.

  “Is the word fear?” she asked. “No—not fear—anger.” And then looking at Deborah again: “An anger you cannot control.” After a pause she said, “Come on, we’ll try seclusion until you can take care of yourself.”

  The seclusion room was small, but the force of the volcano would not let her rest. It kept hurling her from one side of the room to the other; walls and floors pounded her head and hands and body. Now her lack of inner control matched the anarchic world with an Yr gone newly mad itself.

  After a while they caught her up and put her in a pack. She fought with them, terrified of what she might do to them now that she had no law. English, Yri, and gibberish all flowed together. Gradually, the anger was overtaken by the fear, but the words to warn them that she was wild could not be framed, and she fought them with her head and her teeth while the restraints were being tied, trying, doglike, to bite herself, her wrappings, the bed, the beings. She fought until she was exhausted and then she lay still.

  After a while Deborah could feel the constriction of blood in her legs and feet that usually brought a familiar pain, but there was no pain. The burns, she knew, had had their raw surfaces ripped open under the bandages, but there was no pain from them either. How cold the wind was blowing above the law! … She lay shivering, although the sheets had been close for many hours and she should have been warm. Beyond even the laws and logic of Yr she breathed out in wonder: My enemy, my virulent, plague-pouring self—and now not even control of it….

  “There was a gear …” she cried aloud, and it came in Yri loud and mingled with strange words which were not hers. “There was a gear all teeth, two at least world-caught. And now nothing, nothing engages with the world!”

  You are not of them, the Censor said. It was an old phrase, perhaps the oldest one in Yr, but its context changed from comfort and pity, to anger and terror, and now to the last deceit, the final move of the game which was part of the world’s secret purposes and her damnation. She now knew that the death she feared might not be a physical one, that it could be a death of the will, the soul, the mind, the laws, and thus not death, but a perpetual dying. The tumor began to ache.

  Furii looked at her and said, “Are you ill?” and Deborah laughed with the same ugliness that her cry had been. “I mean, is something physically the matter?”

  “No.” She tried to tell Furii, but the walls began bleeding and sweating, and the ceiling developed a large tumor which began to separate itself from its surface.

  “Can you hear me?” Furii asked.

  Deborah tried to say what she felt, but she could only gesture the Yri gesture for insanity: flattened hands thrust toward one another but unable to meet.

  “Listen to me. Try to hear me,” Furii said seriously. “You are afraid of your power and that you cannot control it.”

  When Deborah could speak at last, she could only say, “Yri … in the world … collision …”

  “Try again. Just let it come.”

  “Gears uncaught … n’ai naruai … uncaught!”

  “It is why you need a hospital. You are in a hospital and you do not need to fear the terrible forces that seem to have been opened in you. Listen hard now, and try to stay in contact with me. You must try to talk to me and tell me what is happening in your collided worlds. We will work with all our strength to keep you from the excesses of your sickness.”

  Some of the fear eased so that Deborah could say, “It came Yri, English, nonsense. Wild … hitting. Anger.”

  “Were you angry for all the years, in the way that anger gets when it grows old and is rotted with guilt and fear—like bad-smelling pebbles inside?”

  “Much …”

  “The suffering was not because of your anger then, was it?”

  “No … Yri … on Earth … collision. Censor … death penalty … the last …” She began to tremble in a cutting cold.

  “Use the blanket,” Furii said.

  “Yri cold … nacoi … Earth blankets …”

  “We will see if Earth warmth helps,” Furii said. She picked up the blanket and covered Deborah with it. Deborah remembered that there was no Yri word for “thank you.” She had no word to give Furii her gratitude. It remained a mute weight inside her. Even the trembling did not lessen, so that Furii could see it and be glad.

  “Tell me this,” Furii was saying, “of the emotion you felt as you heard yourself cry out in these languages, how much was anger and how much was fear?”

  “Ten,” Deborah said, thinking of the emotion by letting a stroke of it come up and engulf her once again, “three anger, five fear.”

  “That is only eight.”

  “I suffer,” Deborah said, helping herself with Yri hand-motions. “After you I suffer smarter. Now I never fill them. Two is for miscellaneous.”

  Furii laughed. “Anger some, fear quite a bit, and what are those little two miscellaneous? Relief, maybe, not to have to give everything to that wall between Yr and the world? Also, was there not something overt to remind me that I went away and left you with it all?”

  Deborah felt that the last idea was only half true, but she let it sound in the judgment with the others, and she said, “Fear … Censor—doing the forbidden … destroy me … and …”

  “And what is it?”

  “Then … no. No-ness; not Yr even. Loud gibberish and just No. No!”

  “Not even the gods for friends,” the doctor mused. She drew her chair up closer to where Deborah was huddled shivering under the blanket whose warmth stopped short of her interior climate. “You know, Deborah, you have a gift for health and strength. Before you let go for this breaking of walls, you trusted our work together and you trusted me. Before you let the anger come, you got yourself on D ward and in the sort of seclusion that was at hand, and when a nurse was on duty, mind you, whom you liked and trusted. Not so dumb for someone who is supposed to have lost her marbles. Not so bad at all, that talent for life.”

  Deborah’s eyes began to get heavy. She was very tired.

  “You are worn out,” Furii said, “but no longer so very frightened, are you?”

  “No.”

  “The anger may come again. The sickness you have built may also come and fight you perhaps, but I have faith that you will conquer it enough to get the help and control that you need. Half of your fear is that you will not be able to be stopped, and it is this fear which makes it impossible to speak so that others can understand.”

  When Deborah got back to the ward after her session with Dr. Fried, she found that another holocaust had visited it.

  “Your good friend …” Lee Miller said under her breath, “… sweet, genteel Miss Coral.”

  “What?”

  “She took that bed there, and threw it! She picked it up and threw it at Mrs. Forbes!”

  “And it hit?”

  “Sure it hit. Mrs. Forbes is now in a physical hospital as a patient—with a broken arm, cuts and bruises, and who the hell knows what else.”

  Lee Miller was angry because Mrs. Forbes was one of those rare elect whom the patients themselves, consciously or not, tried to save from harm. She took time, she was intelligent and unselfish, and—most rare—she was happy in her work and the patients knew it.

  “Mistake,” Deborah said, like talking wood. “By mistake.” She remembered others: a patient who had aimed at one person and hit another, the student nurse who always seemed to be walking where fists and chairs were landing. If this one could somehow be made to fit in with the others …


  “Maybe the dear patient was temporarily insane!” Fiorentini’s Mary chimed in gaily. “Temporary Insanity—that’s a legal term. It means before and during and a while after, but they never say how long which way. Very exact, the law … a science, you know.” And she skipped down the hall like a seven-year-old, erupting in a new giggle and leaving the old one to grate against their senses.

  “Is Mrs. Forbes coming back?” Deborah asked, feeling sick to her stomach. She understood that Lee was taking out her anger at her because Miss Coral was in seclusion and not to be approached, while Deborah was standing before her, available. Deborah had not thought of herself as being anyone’s friend, but it occurred to her that Lee thought otherwise.

  She turned very slowly to Lee, and with overdrawn dignity, because dignity was new to her and strange and worn uncomfortably, she said, “Okay, Lee, Carla, too.” (She was still afraid to say the word “friend,” because of its transcendent danger.)

  Lee walked to the door of the nursing station and beat on it. When it opened, she asked for a cigarette, and when it was lit for her, she growled, “What am I doing here with all these crazy people!” Deborah walked into the dorm, lay down on her bed.

  The more she thought about it, the more she wanted to know why Miss Coral had hit Mrs. Forbes; why one of the Good Ones? After the lineup for sedation that evening, she moved unobtrusively to the corner beyond the nursing-station door, and stood completely still with her head against the water pipes that were placed there. The hot pipe was jacketed with insulation, but the cold, though uncomfortable, was sometimes used by the patients as a listening device. If a person put the whole side of her head against this pipe and held her breath, she could hear the conversations going on inside the nursing station, even with the door closed. Deborah had assumed that the sounds were transmitted by the faucets, because the reception was better when the speakers were near the steel sink. She was not noticed where she stood; the whole ward had been darkened for the evening, and the attendants who were out on the halls were busy getting the reluctant patients to bed. Inside the nursing station the reports were being written.

  “Over there,” a voice was saying. It sounded like Miss Cleary.

  “No, there—by the coffeepot.”

  The idea of having coffee anytime, now or whenever, set off a water of desire in Deborah’s mouth, and she pushed her head harder against the pipe to get her mind off it. They began to talk about allotment of days off. The hall was clearing fast. If they didn’t get down to it soon, she would have to move.

  “Jesus, I’m tired.” (That would be Hanson.)

  “You ain’t the only one.” (Bernardi.) “I don’t know, but seems to me they’re all getting sicker.”

  “You mean crazier.”

  “Tch, tch, tch. Watch your language!” They laughed.

  “No, honest—the damn ward is never a day without fights, a couple more in seclusion, half of ’em in packs. Now that old Coral Allan everyone calls Miss Coral, as if she was some Southern belle—I’ve heard people talk about her, but I never seen it myself ’til this afternoon.”

  “God! You ever think an old lady like that could lift a bed, no less chuck it?”

  Deborah wanted them to talk about Mrs. Forbes, and when they started to, she smiled against the cold pipe.

  “You seen Lou Ann?” (Mrs. Forbes’s first name was Lou Ann.)

  “Hudson and Carelle went down with her. Sophie’s going down to see her tomorrow, and I will too, if I get off.”

  Deborah ground her teeth with impatience. They were beginning to get ready to close the night on their charges. If the evidence was not given now …

  “Hey, you seen Blau last night?”

  “No—I missed that one; I was back with Whitman.”

  “Oh”—laugh—“brother.”

  Deborah didn’t want to hear about Blau. She had come to find out what circumstances there might be to mitigate the pain she was feeling about Coral vs. Forbes; some reason to hold against all of her knowledge that always deceived her and ended blind and mad.

  “Lord! In the bathroom and yelling all kinds of nonsense. Filled the wall with some kind of crazy writing and come out fighting like a tiger. All the time we was packing her she was swearing in that kind of babble-talk—not anything you could understand, but you looked at her face and there was that hate. Brrrr.”

  “She didn’t talk at all today.”

  “Well, put it in the records.”

  Deborah sank down along the cold track of the pipe to the floor. She covered her face with her hands. It was hot with shame. She crawled a little away from the pipe so that she would be on neutral ground, and disassociated from the source of her knowledge. She began to cry with the incredible sounds she had made before, murmuring to all the worlds and to the collision, the one unchanging thing, “You are not of them.” She was still heaving and holding her face when Martenson, the student nurse, came and stood over her.

  “Come on now, Miss Blau,” she said, “let’s get to bed.”

  “Okay,” and she stood up, still hiding in the dark behind her hands, and stumbled into the dorm and to bed. She continued to sob.

  “What are those obscene noises?” Fiorentini’s Mary chirped. “Some new sort of homosexual perversion, I am sure. … Oh, you insane are all so inventive—it’s because you have time to think things through.” She began to murmur and laugh.

  The Wife of the Abdicated became disturbed by Mary’s laughter and the choked-out noises of Deborah’s crying and began to protest. “Have you no respect, you filthy whores! I am the secret first Wife of Edward, the Abdicated King of England!”

  “Well, Hail Columbia!” said Jenny, rarely heard, but one who liked her sleep.

  “Hail Mary, Full of Grace …” called Dowben’s Mary, who always brought out the atheist in everyone with her endless prayers.

  “Oh, Christ! Now you’ve started that bitch up again!”

  The tumult mounted and Deborah heard it as a counterpoint to the ugly sounds that were still working inside her. The attendant came and shut them all up, and there was silence, with each soul sealed away in a seclusion to the limits of which no eye could seem to reach.

  Deborah lay in bed, and her thoughts returned to the puzzle. Dust motes blown and floating all the patients were, but even so there were some things that were not done. Deborah knew very well that she could never ask Miss Coral why she had thrown the bed or how it was that Mrs. Forbes’s arm had been intruded upon by that bed. Beating, stealing, swearing, blaspheming, and sexual eccentricity were not sins on D ward. Spitting on the floor, urinating, defecating, or masturbating incontinently in public aroused only passing annoyance rather than horror, but to ask how or why was not forgivable and to oppose another patient’s act was a sign of crudity at best and at worst a kind of assault—an attempted mayhem at the barriers which were the all-costly protectors of life. Lee Miller had cursed Deborah for the burnings which had resulted in the whole ward’s restriction, but she had never asked why they had been done or expressed a wish that they be stopped. There was ridicule and anger, but never intrusion. Miss Coral could never be confronted with throwing the bed, and her friends, such as they could be, would henceforth delicately expunge the name of Mrs. Forbes from their conversation in the presence of the one who had caused her to be hurt. Where then could Deborah get the answer to her question?

  Through the days of wondering, Deborah’s surface registered nothing, and when she spoke her words were the mangled Anglo-Yri-gibberish and there were only enough to try to answer a question or to hint at a need. The ambiguity of what she said surprised her as much as anyone. When an attendant asked her if it was her day for a bath, she tried for a purely English answer, but it emerged as, “It never goes deep enough.”

  In the bathroom: “Blau—are you in there?”

  “Here is cutucu.” (The second degree of being hidden.) As she struggled to translate, finding it almost impossible to span the light-years of distance between herself and
them, the confusion of tongues only alienated her further. She would become frightened, whatever she said next could not be translated at all, and the formless sounds would make her even more frightened. Only with Furii was there any clarity.

  “They said we were getting sicker, all of us. They said I was getting sicker.”

  “Well, do you think you are?” Furii said, lighting another cigarette.

  “No games.”

  “I do not play games. I want you to think deeply and answer honestly.”

  “I don’t want to think anymore!” Deborah said, with her voice rising in the wind of her sudden anger. “I’m tired and scared and I just don’t care anymore what happens. Work in the dark and work in the cold and what for!”

  “To get you out of this damn place, that’s what for.” Furii’s voice was as loud as Deborah’s.

  “I won’t tell you anything more. The more garbage I give away the more I have left. You can turn me off and go with your friends or write another paper and get another honor for it. I can’t turn me off, so I’m turning the fight off, and don’t you worry—I will be nice and docile and nothing more will go on the walls.”

  The cigarette gave a long puff before the doctor’s face. “Okay,” she said, almost amiably. “You quit, poor little girl, and you stay in a crazy house the rest of your life. You stay on a crowded disturbed ward all your days…. …Poor darling,’ the world will say, …she could have been such a nice person … so talented … what a loss.’” The mobile features made a “tch-tch” purse of the mouth.

  “And more talented than I really am because I’m here and will never test it!” Deborah shouted because the bone-truth gave such a fine sound, even from Hell.

  “Yes, damn it, yes!” Furii said.

  “Well, what!” Deborah said, good and loud.

  “Well, did I ever say it would be easy? I cannot make you well and I do not want to make you well against your own wishes. If you fight with all the strength and patience you have, we will make it together.”