Джоанн Гринберг - I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

He looked at her arms. The bandages were rank and the flesh around the burns was beginning to take on the mushiness of the burned area.

“Well, we’ll give it a try.” She saw in his face that the burns were worse than he had remembered. When he was through, he said, “I tried to go easy. I hope it didn’t hurt too much.”

“Don’t worry,” Deborah said, and rose the tremendous distance from the falling Anterrabae to be capable of a smile. “Someday, maybe it will.”

When the nurses cut the bandages two days later, the putrefaction was gone.

“What was that stuff he used!” The head nurse shook her head in wonder.

“He left it for her in number six cabinet,” said little Cleary.

Deborah turned to the nurse. “I’ll have my contribution ready.”

“And what is that?” she said with the impatience of the expert.

“Why, the smile.”

Because she was going to live, because she had begun to live already, the new colors, dimensions, and knowledges became suffused with a kind of passionate urgency. As form and light and law became more constant, Deborah began to look into the faces of people, to talk with them and hear them. Although she was shy and stunted in the subjects on which people spoke to one another, she began to find the D ward with its lost patients and harried staff too thin a reality. Impatient and eager on the hospital’s ponderous wheel, she began her slow ascent; she could almost hear a creak as the wheel groaned under her weight. Bit by bit she regained the distance by which the doctors measured responsibility: Alone to Her Doctor’s Office (100 ft. [.dotmath] 1 hr. sane); Alone on Front Grounds (200 ft. [.dotmath] 3 hrs. sane); Alone on Front and Back Grounds (1 mi. [.dotmath] 5 hrs. sane); and at last she applied to go to B ward, where the foot-hour rule would be given the whole inward sweep of books and pencils and sketch pads. Now that she held this tremulous but growing conviction that she was alive, she began to be in love with the new world.

“If I’m alive, then I must be of their substance—the samesubstance, don’t you see!” she told Furii in her excitement, gesturing outward to the world. The last time she had been on B ward there had been only darkness and silence except for the roaring of the Collect and the building up of the volcano. She had seen no one and nothing, but the way to the bathroom and the way to the food and sedative line. This time she took her bedding eagerly, looking into the faces of the nurses, and asked their names and hoped for a room up front where it was noisy and alive.

The head nurse cocked her head. “You know Carla Stoneham, don’t you?”

“Is she back? I … I thought she was gone.”

“Well, she was an outpatient for a while,” the nurse said, trying to keep anything but the dead level from her voice. “She’s back now.”

Carla was sitting on her bed. Looking at her, Deborah felt a special warmth in the eye.

“Well, you girls know each other.” The nurse put the extra blanket on the other bed and left.

“Hi, Deb….” Carla seemed glad to see her, but Deborah could see that she was subdued because of shame, and Deborah’s mind, warm as her eyes toward Carla, began to plead: I am your friend—don’t be ashamed because of this. She closed her eyes and pushed the English words of commitment across her Yri tongue.

“I don’t care if it is selfish. I’m glad you’re here because it’s where I am.” Then she began to make her bed and put her clothes away while they gossiped about this and that: Miss Coral, Helene, Mary’s latest crack, and the nurses on “B” (which one would come if there was trouble and which would not).

Then Deborah said, “Grapevine never told me you were back.” She looked straight at Carla while she said it, and with that look she meant everything that would have been an intrusion had it come in words.

“It gets awfully lonely out there, that’s all,” Carla answered. She had given Deborah the privilege of a question; Deborah tried to make it a simple one.

“Was it hard to come back?”

“Well … it’s being defeated,” Carla said, and she nodded the question away with her head and went off, gently, on a tangent. “I was all alone in my job … the long ride in the morning to work gets you kind of hypnotized and there was no one except the technicians and …good morning’ and …good night.’ In the evenings I went to the movie show or stayed in my room and read technical books to catch up. Soon the streets began to remind me of the other streets back in St. Louis and the way the days were back there—the feeling of it all seemed the same—”

The look of the familiar pain was stamped on Carla’s face as she talked, but suddenly she pulled herself away from her thought. “I’m not saying that no one succeeds,” she said hurriedly, “or even that I won’t make it again—it’s just that I go out sometimes in defiance, when I’m not ready—” The ringing of a bell interrupted her. “The O.T. shop is open,” she said. “Come on—I’ll show you around.”

Outside, the winter air was sharp with cold. Deborah found the world incomparably beautiful. Somewhere beyond the hedge of the Preserve there was smoke rising and she caught the smell of it occasionally. Next to her was a friend and in the craft shop a drawing pad waiting to be filled. She tried to stop the gratitude and hunger that were overflowing inside her, but her eyes filled with the colors and dimensions of the world and the laws of the consubstantial human race—motion and gravity, cause and effect, friendship and a sense of a human self. She heard a sound high up and behind her, and turning, saw Miss Coral waving from a window on D ward.

“She must be in seclusion again,” Carla said, counting the windows. They waved back and for a few moments drew signals in the air to talk to one another.

(I was in a fight) Miss Coral said, spreading her gestures in the space of the fenced window.

(I am free!) Deborah answered, breaking chains and doing a caper.

(How far?) Miss Coral asked, making the sign of looking out to sea.

Deborah made a wall with her arm and stopped before it, with her hand.

(Nurse is coming!) Miss Coral shouted, hands to head for the two wings of the white cap and then the flip of a key.

(Good-by!) A quick wave and gone.

An attendant had come out the back door and seen gesticulating in the walkway.

“What are you girls doing?” she asked.

“Just practicing,” Carla said, “just practicing.” They walked on to the craft shop that was in one of the out-buildings.

The shop had a warm, normal look of work being done until one looked close and saw that it was only imitation. Patients were sewing or modeling in clay, reading or making collages with paste and bits of fabric. Most of their activity was make-work of the most obvious kind, and Deborah felt quietly embarrassed. Outcasts from the laws of the world seemed to be warming their hands before the illusion of satisfying labor. They were vainly seeking its textures, papers, and materials, and raveling out old woolen scarves to extract reality from them. In a land where usefulness was extolled above all, the “therapeutic” make-work seemed to Deborah an unconscious slap at the pride which the patients were supposed to be developing. An occupational therapy worker in her blue-and-white-striped uniform came toward them.

“Well, hello, Carla,” she said, a little too cheerily; then, looking at Deborah, “Have you brought us a visitor?”

“Yes,” Carla said. “We just wanted to look in. This is Deborah.”

“Why, of course!” the worker said enthusiastically. “I’ve seen you before—it was up on D ward!”