Джоанн Гринберг - I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

“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.