Джоанн Гринберг - I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

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.”

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.