Джоанн Гринберг - I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

At dinner, Esther praised Deborah’s poise and charm, while it seemed to Deborah that Suzy had somehow darkened over these two days. She had been free to go out and leave the prodigal elder sister to all the praises, but she had stayed. Was it perhaps the virulence after all—the slow poison of Deborahness which conscious will told her did not exist, but which still whispered, “They lie! They lie!” deep in the places beneath logic and will.

She took her sedative early that night and went to sleep. As she drifted away, she heard Suzy’s and Esther’s voices from the living room. They were voices of argument, and full of anguish. “God help us!” Deborah said, and slept.

“You don’t hear them,” Suzy groaned, “because when it isn’t about Debby, you just don’t hear anything, but I’m more than just a careless and brainless dope!”

“You’re not being fair,” Esther said. “It’s that she’s only home for a few days, so we seem to be making a bigger fuss.”

“Every letter,” Suzy cried, “every visit that you make to her! I draw, too; I dance, and I wrote two of the songs for the camp follies last year. They may not be as …profound’ as Debby’s pictures, but you never stop Grandma or invite Aunt Natalie and Uncle Matt to hear the new song that I wrote or the smart thing that I said.”

“Don’t you see, you stupid girl,” Esther said almost savagely, “I don’t have to! Praising you is bragging. Praising Deborah is—excusing—”

Their voices were so loud that Jacob came in from the bedroom angrily and growled, “Enough! You’ll wake the dead!”

They all caught the slip, the unconscious but accurate allusion to the drugged and sleeping cause of all these years of heartache and argument. They went to bed guiltily and angrily, loving and despairing.

When the visit was over, Deborah went back to the hospital with a suitcase full of new clothes.

Spring moved in again and winter drew off the Preserve and off the streets that led to the town. Deborah, still in the first urgency of hunger and love for the world’s forms and colors, had radiated her artistic gift into a dozen mediums and styles. The materials in the craft shop were scanty, but she worked with whatever there was: silk-screen and block-printing, watercolor and gouache. She yearned to play with all the toys of the earth, while Yr and the world’s darker parts fought it out inside her. To Earth’s usages and people she felt she could never come, but to the material things there was new access and freedom and great reward. A new patient asked her what she was, meaning her religion, and she found herself answering, “A Newtonian.”

The new patient was very like Helene. Deborah felt that, underneath her vagueness and sudden crying out as if she had been shot, there was a trueness and a strength. Her name was Carmen, her father was a multimillionaire, and Deborah knew that she was destined for a long stay on D ward. The three-month “honeymoon” that most people spent clutching the last rags of sanity to cover an awful nakedness was almost over for her. Sometimes, when Carmen passed, Carla and Deborah looked at each other and said with a look: When she blows, she’s going to cover the ceiling.

“Hey, Carmen—let’s go over to A ward and play Ping-Pong.”

“I can’t. My father’s coming to visit this afternoon.”

“Do you want us around or not?” Carla said, and Deborah knew that she was volunteering their aid. Though they were no beauties, she and Carla would wash up, get combed and rigged, to help their ward-mate by running interference between Carmen’s father and the more bizarre-looking of ward B’s cuckoos.

“No,” Carmen said in her listless way, “he wouldn’t understand. I just hope I can do it … just right.”

“Which is how?” Deborah asked.

“Agreement … always. Just absolute … agreement.”

It was Sunday and the craft shop was closed. There was a weekend desertedness about everything. Even in the safety of the hospital, Sundays were hard to take. Carla described how agonizing they had been when she was “outside” working, and Deborah herself remembered how treacherous the world made its Sundays. On regular days the Semblance could be pulled up like a screen over body and mind, but Sunday called itself Rest and Freedom, and threw one off guard. Sunday promised leisure, peace, holiness, and love. It was a restatement of the wish for human perfection. But it was on Sunday that the Semblance never fully covered, and Sunday afternoon was a frantic struggle to hide the other worlds before Monday arrived with its demand that the lies be repeated and the surface be perfect.

Deborah and Carla ambled idly in the half-warm mists of the early spring, looking at the cracks that winter had left in the walkway and playing their dreamers’ game, which they had made up to pass the time. In it they would shatter the world a dozen times and rebuild it, half as a punishment, half in a secret, fragile hope.

“In my university, we won’t allow any special groups or cliques.”

“In my factory, the bosses will work on the most routine jobs just so they can see how murderous they are.”

But it was hospitals that they knew best and they built and staffed hospitals endlessly, equipping and administering them as the main part of the game. As they talked, they found themselves walking far beyond the doctors’ buildings and student nurses’ residence.

“I could do away with all the bars on the windows,” Carla said.

Deborah wasn’t sure. “The patients would have to be strong enough to stand it, first,” she said. “Sometimes you have to fight what won’t yield and put yourself where it’s safe to be crazy.”

“Let’s make our doctors-on-call really on call.”

“All my attendants will spend a week as patients.”

They found themselves in the meadow far beyond the last hospital building.

“Look where we are.”

“I’m not allowed out here,” Deborah said.

“Neither am I.”

They felt good. The afternoon was settling into evening and a light rain was beginning to fall, but neither of them could bear to part with this small and special mutiny against Sunday, supervision, and the world. They sat in the field, stupid with pleasure and let the Sunday God’s rain fall on them. The day went to twilight. The rain got cold. They stood up in their sopping clothes and began wistfully to walk back toward the hospital.

As they neared the last building, they were seen by Henson and little Cleary, who had come out of Annex 3 and were going toward the main building.

“Hey, you girls—do you have night privileges?”

“No,” Carla said. “We were just going in now.”

“All right then.” The two attendants waited for them, flanking them when they came. It was not the way to go back; they could not go back that way, not after the freedom, the laughing, and the good rain. They looked at each other. Their eyes said, “No.” When they came close to the door, the attendants closed in automatically; and so, defeated, they went in. On the other side of the door the moment came. Carla and Deborah saw it together, and, as if they had been trained for it all their lives, they took it together. Henson and Cleary had relaxed unconsciously. Beyond the door was a set of swinging doors, and when they had all passed through them, Carla and Deborah simply turned on the same footfall, back through the doors, which swung back on the surprised attendants, and out the front door without a break in stride. As they ran, they heard the buzzer that signaled to the hospital a patient’s escape.

They ran, laughing until they were breathless, for a long, long time, down the dark back roads. The rain beat hard on them and there was a fast rack riding the sky. Anterrabae was singing gloriously out of Yr, songs of the beauties of the world which he had not given for many, many years. Deborah and Carla ran on until the breath sobbed out of them and their sides ached, and then slowed down, shivering with cold and freedom. From a distance a light came on. It was a car.