Джоанн Гринберг: I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

“You want a drink?”

“No, thank you.”

Suffering, shy with each other, waiting for his disappointment and her fear to make their weights known between them, they looked at each other, and Deborah was suddenly struck that Quentin Dobshansky, her friend, was a man—a sexual man—a passionate man who seemed to be sounding a cry of passion into the echo-places of her emptiness. Only at that moment did she become aware of them as empty. And at the instant she discovered emptiness, she discovered hunger. It was a long, hard hunger, years late and never plumbed before. But the measure of hunger was the measure of capacity. Furii had been right; nuts or not, Deborah could feel.

She looked up at Quentin. He was pausing at the door, waiting to give hope, of which he had less than he wanted to show. “You have another hour,” he said.

“It’s okay.” She knew that she was ugly and she didn’t want to hurt his eyes or his mind’s eyes, so she turned her head and let him close the door.

Now it was not Anterrabae who mocked, but Lactamaeon, the black god with the icy blue eyes. The fisherman has won, and the fish is in the net, but it does not die and be dead. It keeps flapping and slapping against the sides of the boat, turning and seeking for its element and suffering the deprivation of the essence by which it lives. This distresses the fisherman. He does not want to think about the death-throes of the fish, which is his prize and his victory. Thus are you to the world and to us also. Re-die, and let things stand as they were.

Don’t you see! she cried out at him. I don’t know how any more!

Back on the ward that afternoon, an attendant left a smoldering cigarette on an ashtray near the nursing station. Deborah picked it up, hid it, and took it to the dormitory where she was staying, now between an Ann and Dowben’s Mary. She sat on the floor, hidden by the other beds, and looked at her scarred arm. The tissue would have no feeling, the burn do no good. She began to start a new place, moving the burning cigarette to put it out against undeadened flesh. As it came closer she felt the warmth of it, the heat, the burn. The first singe of hair brought a red-hot stab with it so that she jerked her arm away, astonished.

“It was a reflex!” she said incredulously to the bedrail. She tried again and again, but at every place, a burning hot pain prevailed upon instinct and she had to pull away from the burn before it had even closed upon the flesh. She put out the cigarette against the bed-leg and said aloud in Yri:

“ To all gods and Collects of all the worlds: No more burnings and no more fires, for I seem to begin to be bound —” She had begun to cry because of the terror and joy of it. “ I seem to begin to be bound to this world…. ”

When it was time to see Furii, she ran to her office, terrifying her tracker, and burst in to the beginning of the session. “Hey! You know what happens when you burn yourself? You get burned, that’s what! And it has a hurt called a burn, that’s what!”

“You burned yourself again?” Furii asked, drawing away the smile with which she had answered Deborah’s.

“I tried to, but I couldn’t.”

“Oh?”

“Because it hurt !”

“Oh, I’m glad!” They smiled at each other. Then Furii saw the tracker behind Deborah and asked her why she was with her and was told. When the nurse left to wait outside, Furii gave the quizzical look that Deborah knew and had winced at long in advance of its coming.

“I always had warnings before—an explanation of why it was going to happen—”

“Maybe …it’ knew that you needed help. You were in calling distance of that help, but you didn’t dare ask for it outright, lest it be refused.”

“But the oncoming was so sudden and severe. How can I be getting any better at all when it’s so sudden and complete?”

“These defenses against getting well and casting with the world are at their last barricades. Of course, there is a desperation to save everything that can be saved of your sickness.”

Deborah told her about the school, how frightened she had been and how despairing at the thought of three years inside the town’s vast silence, and how she had thought that it was predecided, the lock-step-lock of being a victim. She came to the part about meeting the social worker and hearing her suggestion, the sudden release of forgiveness and hope, and how she had sat down with “the bends” and been overwhelmed without warning. As she described the oncoming of the Pit, it struck her that there had been a change in it. “Something … funny.”

“What, funny?”

“Well, Yr used to be the logical and understandable place, and the world, the anarchic thing. There were sets of formulas to help in the escape. They got more and more elaborate, but always … they were predictable….”

“Well?”

“Well, when I began to have the world, it was as if Yr said, …We’ll take the other way of it, whatever it is.’ When the world was without logic or law, Yr was the place with form and caused effects. When the world began to be the rational one, Yr stopped giving reasons at all.”

“Yes,” said Furii gently, as she did when she wanted to remonstrate without an overtone of anger. “When will you stop straddling these two worlds?”

“I’m not ready yet!” Deborah shouted.

“All right,” Furii said mildly, “but you will never be able to grasp the world really, with all of its advantages, until you relinquish your double allegiance.”

The wind of panic beat over Deborah and her heart began to rattle with it. She called silently to Anterrabae and he came, fleet and reassuring to her. Suffer, Victim. (The familiar Yri greeting.)

Is it true that you bring me beauty lately only when you are threatened? she asked him, waiting for his sardonic half-smile. He did not give it, but winced instead.

Pity me.

She was thrown by the surprise of this action. Of what do you suffer?

Of burning.

But you are not consumed.

When you were exalted and beyond the range of human fire, I was also. Since the flames burn you, they burn me also. He breathed in again, sharply, and she saw the upward planes of his face as they were lit by his fire, shining with sweat and tears. Oh! she cried out for him, so that he turned his eyes toward her again.

You see — you endure and share with me. We are of a voice, of a look. Could you ever hope or imagine to be so sharing with anyone of Earth? And he made the gesture of turmoil and renunciation that was Yri hand-language for the world.

“Where have you gone?” Furii was asking. “Take me with you.”

“I was with Anterrabae. He’s right. The world may have law and logic, even if it is dangerous and twisted sometimes. It has challenge, too, and things I don’t know to learn, like mathematics, which the gods can’t teach me, but where else”—and here her eyes suddenly filled with tears—“where else is there the sharing that I have with them?”

“What are those tears?” Furii asked, still very softly. Deborah looked at her and recognized the opening words of their formula, hers and Furii’s. She had to smile.

“Of ten units, four self-pity, three what Yr calls …the Hard Rind,’ and one desperation.”

“That is only eight.” (Still the formula.)

“And two miscellaneous.”

They smiled again. “You see,” Furii said, “it can be as clear between the two of us as with your gods. I never hid my nature, but sometimes you forget that I am and have always been a representative of and a fighter with you for this present world.” And she blew her nose as if to show how typical a member of the world she was. “What is that which you call …the Hard Rind’?”