Джоанн Гринберг - I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

After her visit, she rode home to lie to Jacob and the family. She would tell them that she had seen Deborah and the ward and the doctors and that it was all, all fine. They would want to hear this and they would want desperately to believe it, and so they would let her lie to them, at least for a while. She had carried an armful of magazines with her for Deborah. They had not even let her give them, and she noticed absentmindedly as she sat looking out of the train window that she still had them. She began to thumb through them idly; the lie she had to tell to Jacob and the pain she had to keep to herself seemed to be reflected in everything she saw. She tried to escape to the pictures in the magazine, but there was no refuge there either. As she looked, tears closed over her eyes and blurred the grimly gay models in the advertisements:

COLLEGE IN THE FALL

CLASSIC STYLE FOR THE CAMPUS

And on the next page:

OUR NEW YOUNG DEBUTANTES

WHITE, WHITE, WHITE FOR HER FIRST

PROM

There were forget-me-nots scattered all over that page, and Esther set her jaw hard against those flowers, waiting for the tears to stop filling in her eyes. Deborah’s classmates would be looking at these pages, substituting their own faces in place of the models, as they looked forward to graduation and college. Friends of Esther’s with daughters were already giving and taking the names of colleges like calling cards. They were getting the lovely outfits ready to be worn, and the diaries to be filled. She still met these mothers, her friends, and spoke to them, and their children’s problems seemed only a little smaller in scope than Deborah’s. “Marjorie is so shy; she just doesn’t seem comfortable with her friends!” “Helen takes everything as if it were life and death—she’s so intense.” Esther listened to these descriptions with her cold lie in front of her, and recognizing a little breath of Deborah in this sigh or that. Her little idiosyncrasies were like theirs. She, too, was shy; she, too, covered her fear with precocity and cynical wit; she, too, was intense, but would she ever come back to a world like theirs? That hospital—could it—could it have been a mistake all along?

When she got home, she saw Jacob and then the family, smiling and poised, and she parried and equivocated with fluency and conviction. She thought herself greatly successful, until Jacob said, “Wonderful—I’m glad they think she’s made so much progress, because next time you go, I’m going with you.”

“How did you destroy your sister?” Dr. Fried asked Deborah, who was huddled on the couch, shivering in Yr’s cold through the heat of Earth’s August.

“I didn’t meant to—she was exposed to my essence. It’s called by an Yri name—it is my selfness and it is poisonous. It is mind-poisonous.”

“Something you say that destroys? Something you do, or wish?”

“No, it’s a quality of myself, a secretion, like sweat. It is the emanation of my Deborah-ness and it is poisonous.”

Suddenly Deborah felt an explosion of self-pity for the miasma-creature she was, and she began to elucidate, drawing larger and larger the shape of herself and the virulence of her substance.

“Wait a moment—” The doctor put up a hand, but the joy of self-loathing had taken Deborah as fully as if it had been love, and she went on and on, decorating and embellishing the foulness, throwing the words higher and higher. When she was finished, her shadow was immense. The doctor waited until Deborah could hear her and then said flatly, “So, you are still trying to throw dust in my eyes?”

Deborah parried, defending and nursing the unrecognizable image she had made, but the doctor said, “No, my dear—it just doesn’t work. It’s an old invention, this camouflage, and it was not invented by your Eeries, either.”

“Yeeries.”

“I wonder. No. To hide one can forget, or pretend to another happening, or distort. They are all just good methods of getting away from the truth that might be bitter.”

“Why not hide then, and be safe?”

“And be crazy.”

“Okay, and be crazy. Why not, after what they did to me!”

“Oh, yes. You remind me cleverly of what I had left out. Another camouflage is to blame it all on someone else. It keeps you from having to face what they really did to you, and what you did to yourself and are still doing.”

Part of what Deborah had said about the evil emanation was actual and true to her, but the glorifying of it had put its reality far away for a while, and the monster-girl she now saw was a stranger to her. The doctor pressed her to continue about the destruction of Suzy, and she did, telling of the early jealousy and the later love that had been so racked and guilty. Deborah’s illness had been oncoming for a long time. She described how she felt about it: that everyone she knew was tainted by it through her—Suzy more than anyone because Suzy was loving and impressionable.

“Do you make her have hallucinations or smell things that are not there? Do you make her doubt her own sanity or reality?”

“No,” Deborah said. “The illness is not seeing or hearing things—the illness is underneath those. I never gave her symptoms. The illness is the volcano; she will have to decorate the slopes herself.”

“Are you still cold?” the doctor asked.

“Yes, ever since these rains began to fall and the icy fogs settled. On the ward they never turn the heat on.”

“Well, in the outside—the world—it is August. The sky is clear and the sun is very hot. I am afraid that the cold and the fog are inside you.”

The tumor woke, angered that there were other powers contending for her allegiance, and it sent a sharp bolt through its kingdoms to remind them that it was still supreme. Deborah doubled up, gasped with pain, and began to tremble. I warned you, the Censor said. The heavy smell of ether and chloroform came to her and she heard her heart pounding. “I tried to kill my sister when she was born,” she said. She was surprised that the information did not come out any louder than her own voice. No cannon boomed.

“How did you do this?”

“I tried to throw her out the window. I was almost ready to throw her when mother came in and stopped me.”

“Did your parents punish you?”

“No. No one ever mentioned it again.”

She felt a slow, fearful gratitude to her family, who had lived with a monster and treated it like a person.

“After the operation …” the doctor mused.

“We were in the sunny house where we had moved for that one year. No matter what they gave me, you see, no matter what they did for me—” She was near tears for a moment, until the sickness remembered that tears were human. You are not of them, Yr said, and the tears drew away as suddenly as if they had never approached.

“Did you just think about killing her?”

“No! I had her in front of the window all ready to go.”

“And your parents never spoke of it or asked you about it?”

“No.” Deborah knew that they must have taken the naked fact and buried it hurriedly somewhere, like carrion. But she knew well how the stench of a buried lie pursues the guilty, hanging in the air they breathe until everything smells of it, rancid and corrupting. Yr had a region called the Fear-bog. Lactamaeon had taken her there once to see the monsters and corpses of her nightmares accumulating there from year after year of terrifying dreams. They had swum through the almost solid ground.

She had said, What is that awful stench?

Shame and secrecy, Bird-one, shame and secrecy, he had answered.

Deborah began to laugh, so that the doctor leaned toward her. “What is it? Take me along with you.”