Джоанн Гринберг - I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

Deborah tried to eat the holiday food and speak to the people who came to see her, but exhaustion would claim her as she sat. The hospital relationships had been brief and fleeting and never complicated by more than two or three people at a time and conversation ended abruptly when darkness fell on any of the speakers. Now there was chatter and threads of talk that wove in and out like a complicated cat’s cradle. It was not possible to tell them how immense she found the distance between herself and the rest of the human race, even if she were of human substance.

Jacob’s warmth and pride, pathetic and vulnerable, flowed toward her as he saw her sitting again at his table. “I’ll bet they don’t serve a piece of meat like this at That Place.”

Deborah was about to answer that the cutlery alone was sufficient challenge, but she caught herself in time.

“Soon you’ll be home for good,” he said.

Deborah paled so markedly that Esther threw herself into the talk like a suicide from a skyscraper. “Well, we’ll see, we’ll see—I think the mushrooms are delicious—you see, Debby, all your favorite foods!”

Suzy sat across the table looking at Jacob and Esther and the homely, tired, older sister who was really younger than she, and who was being feasted and catered to as if her homecoming were some kind of miracle. She knew that she had to protect this latest Debby. It was not the sister she had wanted—the prom-going sister, all boyfriends, college football games, and glamour—but in her somewhere, and by some mistaken magic, the family happiness and peace rested.

“Look, Debby,” she said, “Mother and Daddy told me already about that place not being a school, so if everybody would stop dying over the big secret, it’ll be a lot easier.”

It would be easier, she thought, to go into the bedroom and make a telephone call, and tell her friend that she would not go on the outing they had planned for so long. Mother and Daddy needed her now, and Debby needed her, too, in a frightening sort of way. It was really too bad…. She felt the tears coming because she had wanted to go on this trip so much. She dared not wipe her eyes where they could see her.

She got up, knowing that they wanted to talk without her. “Excuse me, I have to call Annette.”

“You’re going with them, aren’t you?” Esther asked, remembering how long Suzy had been talking about their “weekend.”

“No … I’ll go next time.”

“Is it because I’m here?” Deborah said.

“No—no, I just don’t want to, this time.”

A bad lie. Deborah’s mind, already exhausted and dulled by another day in the world, grappled for Suzy’s feeling. “Were they supposed to come up here first or something?” she asked.

Suzy turned, and almost answered, but the open mouth bit it back, and she said, “You’re not here that much. I want to see you this week.”

“Don’t mother me, tell me!” Deborah said, sinking under the world.

“No!” Suzy shouted, and she turned and went in to make her call.

“She really loves you very much,” Esther said. “The whole family is doing everything it can—all the roads have been smoothed over.” All Deborah heard were the sounds of her own gasps of exhaustion as she climbed an Everest that was to everyone else an easy and level plain. As she reeled and pulled on the endless, vertical cliff, she felt that every favor, every easing, was an unpaid debt heaped upon her by loving tormenters and weighing like lumps of lead. Among equals gratitude is reciprocal; her gratitude to these Titans, who called themselves average and were unaware of their own tremendous strength in being able to live, only made her feel more lost, inept, and lonely than ever.

When Deborah had gone to bed, Esther and Jacob came embarrassedly to her bedside with the ration of sedatives prescribed by the hospital. As Deborah took them, Jacob looked away, but when he kissed her good night he said winningly, “It’s nice here, isn’t it? It’s where you belong.” The tumor heaved inside her. He continued, “Debby, you don’t need to stay with all those … those screaming women.”

“What screaming women?” Deborah asked, wondering if he had ever heard her louder than a whisper, and hoping with all her soul that he had not.

“Well, when we visited … we heard it—”

The pain of looking at him escaped in a laugh. “Oh, I know—that must have been big, dumb old Lucy Marten-son. She gets even with everybody by playing Tarzan out the front windows of the D ward and scaring the visitors to death.”

It had never occurred to Jacob that the screamer who still haunted his dreams might just be a person, someone named Lucy, and the realization eased him a little, but he hugged Deborah hard when he said good night.

In the dark her room was luminous with Yri personages. We never hated you, Lactamaeon said, shining on his hard-ridden horse. The cruelty was for protection! Anterrabae said in antiphon, waving a sheaf of sparks in his hand.

We came in the era of dryness and the death of hope, called Lactamaeon.

We came with gifts, said Anterrabae. When you were laughing nowhere else, you were laughing with us.

She knew that it was the truth. Even now, delighting in a world of rich color and odors that actually referred to what one was smelling; even profoundly in love with cause and effect, optics, sonics, motion, and time all obedient to their laws; she wondered if Yr would be a fair trade for all of it. Of course, the Yr she meant was the once-upon-a-time Yr, not the anarchic Yr of world’s end, the latter-day Yr that sent its queen hurtling endless distances into pits of mindlessness, but the ancient kingdom of the early years: with a crag for an eagle, an illimitable sky, a green landfall where wild horses grazed, and falls with Anterrabae that showered light behind them.

The change had begun with the coming of the Censor after a long time of horror that she now knew had been the collision of the two worlds. He had promised protection and had told her that he would keep the worlds separate so that she might go safely between them, paying lip service to the gray and lonely Earth while being free in Yr. In the times of greatest joy, the happiness was so great that her feet could not bear the ground and she went to flight. The time of the pure flight, the joyful and perfect flight, had been pitifully short, and the Censor had begun to rule like a tyrant in both worlds. Yr still gave beauty and great joy, but the beauty and joy were at the tyrant’s erratic whim.

Now the choice was to be made again, but this time the scale that weighed the Earth’s virtues had a new quantity to add to the rest—hope, the little, little Maybe. Still the earth was a place full of peril and treachery, especially for an alien. The sedative began to dull her senses, but at the last moment of vision the brightness of Yr prevailed.

Suzy stayed home the next day and the next. Members of the family were still coming for visits, carefully grouped according to the state of their ignorance about Deborah’s “condition.” She had brought a package of her drawings home to show Esther, who had always been her first judge, and Esther displayed them proudly to group after group of aunts and great-aunts, who looked with the bemused and tolerant pride of relatives. There were no hospital scenes at all, but there was Helene, a string-haired vacant-eyed madwoman looking into a mirror at the lovely college friend of the photograph, and there was Constantia and the two nurses it took to give her a walk seen as tiny figures in a Preserve that went off into infinite distance. These and others she had Deborah explain for the technical aspects. Most of the visitors contented themselves with extravagant praise such as they always gave, leaving with a kiss and a joke for Suzy about her latest conquest. (“No, Aunt Selma, he was weeks ago—I just went to the party with him.”)