Джоанн Гринберг: I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

“Does anyone ever leave?” Deborah asked. “I mean be well and leave?”

“I don’t know,” said Carla.

They asked a nurse.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I haven’t been here that long.”

There was a groan from Lactamaeon, the black god, and a derisive laugh from the Collect, which were the massed images of all of the teachers and relatives and schoolmates standing eternally in secret judgment and giving their endless curses.

Forever, crazy girl! Forever, lazy girl!

Later one of the little student nurses came to where Deborah was lying, looking at the ceiling.

“It’s time to get up now,” she said in the wavering and frightened voice of her inexperience. There was a new group of these students working out their psychiatric training in this place. Deborah sighed and got up dutifully, thinking: She is astounded at the haze of craziness with which I fill a room.

“Come on now,” the student said. “The doctor is going to see you. She’s one of the heads here and a very famous doctor, too, so we must hurry, Miss Blau.”

“If she’s that good, I’ll wear my shoes,” Deborah replied, watching the young woman’s expression widen with surprise and her face fight with its look of disapproval. She must have been told not to show anything so strong as anger or fear or amusement.

“You really should be grateful,” the student said. “You’re very lucky to get to see her at all.”

“Known and loved by madmen the world over,” Deborah said. “Let’s go.”

The nurse unlocked the ward door and then the stairway door, and they went down to the lower floor, which was open, and out of the back of the building. The nurse pointed to a green-shuttered white house—a small-town, oak-lined-streets type of white house—standing incongruously just inside the hospital grounds. They went to the front door and rang. After a while a tiny, gray-haired, plump little woman answered the door. “We’re from Admissions. Here she is,” the nurse said.

“Can you come back for her in an hour?” the little woman said to the student.

“I’m supposed to wait.”

“Very well.”

As Deborah stepped through the door, the Censor began to thrum his warnings: Where is the doctor? Is she watching from behind a door somewhere? The little housekeeper motioned toward a room.

“Where is the doctor?” Deborah said, trying to stop the rapid juxtaposition of walls and doors.

“I am the doctor,” the woman said. “I thought you knew. I am Dr. Fried.”

Anterrabae laughed, falling and falling in his darkness. What a disguise! And the Censor growled, Take care … take care.

They went into a sunny room and the Housekeeper-Famous-Doctor turned, saying, “Sit down. Make yourself comfortable.” There came a great exhaustion and when the doctor said, “Is there anything you want to tell me?” a great gust of anger, so that Deborah stood up quickly and said to her and to Yr and to the Collect and to the Censor, “All right—you’ll ask me questions and I’ll answer them—you’ll clear up my …symptoms’ and send me home … and what will I have then?”

The doctor said quietly, “If you did not really want to give them up, you wouldn’t tell me.” A rope of fear pulled its noose about Deborah. “Come, sit down. You will not have to give up anything until you are ready, and then there will be something to take its place.”

Deborah sat down, while the Censor said in Yri: Listen, Bird-one; there are too many little tables in here. The tables have no defense against your clumsiness.

“Do you know why you are here?” the doctor said.

“Clumsiness. Clumsiness is first and then we have a list: lazy, wayward, headstrong, self-centered, fat, ugly, mean, tactless, and cruel. Also a liar. That category includes subheads: (a) False blindness, imaginary pains causing real doubling-up, untrue lapses of hearing, lying leg injuries, fake dizziness, and unproved and malicious malingerings; (b) Being a bad sport. Did I leave out unfriendliness? … Also unfriendliness.”

In the silence where the dust motes fell through the sun shaft, Deborah thought that she had perhaps spoken her true feelings for the first time. If these things were so, so be it, and she would leave this office at least having stated her tiredness and disgust at the whole dark and anguish-running world.

The doctor said simply, “Well, that seems to be quite a list. Some of these, I think, are not so, but we have a job cut out for us.”

“To make me friendly and sweet and agreeable and happy in the lies I tell.”

“To help you to get well.”

“To shut up the complaints.”

“To end them, where they are the products of an upheaval in your feelings.”

The rope tightened. Fear was flowing wildly in Deborah’s head, turning her vision gray. “You’re saying what they all say—phony complaints about nonexistent sicknesses.”

“It seems to me that I said that you are very sick, indeed.”

“Like the rest of them here?” It was as near as she dared go, already much too near the black places of terror.

“Do you mean to ask me if I think you belong here, if yours is what is called a mental illness? Then the answer is yes. I think you are sick in this way, but with your very hard work here and with a doctor’s working hard with you, I think you can get better.”

As bald as that. Yet with the terror connected with the hedged-about, circled-around word “crazy,” the unspoken word that Deborah was thinking about now, there was a light coming from the doctor’s spoken words, a kind of light that shone back on many rooms of the past. The home and the school and all of the doctors’ offices ringing with the joyful accusation: There Is Nothing The Matter With You. Deborah had known for years and years that there was more than a little the matter—something deeply and gravely the matter, more even than the times of blindness, intense pain, lameness, terror, and the inability to remember anything at all might indicate. They had always said, “There is nothing the matter with you, if you would only …” Here at last was a vindication of all the angers in those offices.

The doctor said, “What are you thinking about? I see your face relax a little.”

“I am thinking about the difference between a misdemeanor and a felony.”

“How so?”

“The prisoner pleads guilty to the charge of not having acute something-itis and accepts the verdict of guilty of being nuts in the first degree.”

“Perhaps in the second degree,” the doctor said, smiling a little. “Not entirely voluntary nor entirely with forethought.”

Deborah suddenly recalled the picture of her parents standing very single and yet together on the other side of the shatter-proof locked door. Not aforethought, this thing, but more than a little with malice.

Deborah became aware of the nurse moving about in the other room as if to let them know that the time was up.

The doctor said, “If it’s all right with you, we will make another appointment and begin our talks, because I believe that you and I, if we work like the devil together, can beat this thing. First, I want to tell you again that I will not pull away symptoms or sickness from you against your will.”

Deborah shied away from the commitment, but she allowed her face a very guarded “yes,” and the doctor saw it. They walked from the office with Deborah striving assiduously to act as if she were somewhere else, elaborately unconcerned with this present place and person.

“Tomorrow at the same time,” the doctor told the nurse and the patient.

“She can’t understand you,” Deborah said. “Charon spoke in Greek.”

Dr. Fried laughed a little and then her face turned grave. “Someday I hope to help you see this world as other than a Stygian Hell.”