Джоанн Гринберг - I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

“Well, then, good-by, Deborah.”

“Good-by.” She moved past. The hardness came back into Miss Coral’s eyes; the muscles tensed. The writhing began again; the machine hum started. The truce was ended.

When Deborah sat in the bus, she thought of Miss Coral and trembled a little. How many of the dead could be raised? Of all the D-ward women, how many would be free someday? In her three years there many faces had come and gone, and many had stayed. Of those who had gone, maybe three-quarters had left for other hospitals. Some had improved enough to live a kind of half-life as outpatients. How many were really out, alive, and free? You could count them on your fingers! She shivered. She would have to force herself to her books tonight.

The months went on and the high-school subjects began to fill in the notebooks. If sanity was measured in feet and hours, learning was weighed in pounds of books carried to school and back again. The heavy textbooks gave her a kind of pride, as if she might someday weigh in the world what her schoolbooks weighed in her arms. The city remedial school was mainly for young children with reading problems or speech impediments, but apart from sitting at tiny deal tables, Deborah liked it. She liked not having to be uncomfortable with her teachers, working alone and hard and with no precocity, and not unbelonging in the middle of the Varsity Drag. After a while her teachers began to praise her for her tenacity. Steady and steadfast, they said, and she was greatly pleased. It was only when she was returning to her room in the afternoon that the world hurt. Young and rustling, loud with charm-bracelets and giggling, the high-school and young college girls would overwhelm the buses, and she would once again find herself peering into the world of the elaborately vain, mirror-mad, fearing and predatory young girls—a world where she had failed, a world that she knew looked much better than it really was, but to the eyes of its outcasts, a world that glowed with mysterious brilliance. She looked down at her own school skirt and sweater. She looked the way they did, but she was still a stranger, the imitation of a young schoolgirl.

And am I not as that world is? Idat asked from Yr. I am veiled and mysterious; I am rewarding and full of splendor. If you leave me and Lactamaeon, who loves you, and Anterrabae, who is your friend, with whom you laugh and are easy, will you ever have such light?

Then, strangely, the images of her tutors at the remedial school appeared in Yr to speak to Idat.

Are you joining the Collect? You too? Deborah called to them.

Certainly not! the English tutor said. We are against those creatures of yours!

Listen, you, the math tutor said to Idat, that girl works hard. She is here every day with sharp pencils and conventional dress. She is prompt and obedient and never insane in the classroom. She’s not overbright in math, but she works hard for what she gets and that’s the good, solid truth!

Hardly a shower of stars, Idat said dryly. Hardly a silver raven. (It was an Yri metaphor for flattery—because of the high polish.)

Suddenly, one by one, members of the Collect began to appear in the Midworld. One carried a trumpet, one a fiddle, one a drum, and one a tambourine. We are going to the Dance, they said to Deborah.

What dance?

The Grand Dance.

Who will be there?

You also.

Where will it be?

The Five Continents.

Sick or well, the English tutor said, sick or well you are one of the dancers—don’t you see that? Teachers and Collect began to trace the Yri words of separation on a piece of paper. In Yri and English they copied the old, old words, “You Are Not Of Them.” There it stands, the math teacher said. All your old reality.

Then they tore the paper into shreds and gave it away to the wind.

That evening at the church, Deborah invited her hymnbook mate out for a soda. The girl blanched and stammered so badly that Deborah became frightened that those who had seen might think she had said something indecent. She saw a momentary picture of the ancient fear, as Onward Christian Soldiers marched onward against the little girl of the past. Slipping back to invisibility she sang on through choir practice about Compassion.

“Adolescence again?” Furii said. “ That at least you can grow out of, but do you really think you are poisoned still?”

“No, it’s just hard to get rid of the old things all at once. I was always so careful of my nganon, and so jealous of the clean things that other people had. It’s hard to think differently about everything all at once.”

“But you have friends—” Furii said, more as a question.

“In this town, though I sing beside them and take classes at night—they don’t see me. They will never see me.”

“Are you sure it isn’t your attitude?”

“Trust me,” Deborah said quietly. “It’s true. There are brightnesses, but they are small except for one or two friends from the hospital.”

“And the small brightness?”

“Well, my landlady was babysitting for her daughter. The little granddaughter is just two months old and the landlady had to go out. She came to my room and just said, …Deborah, will you mind the baby ’til I get back?’ Then she went out and that was all. I sat with that little baby for an hour and a half, hoping against hope that it would keep imitating itself—breathe in, breathe out, and not die while I was there.”

“Why should the baby die?”

“If I really was just a Semblance after all—only alive one-eighth-inch inward; alive to fire perhaps, but no deeper—”

“Tell me, do you love your parents?”

“Of course I love them.”

“And your sister, whom you never murdered?”

“I love her—I always did.”

“And your friend Carla?”

“I love her, too.” She started to cry. “I love you, too, but I haven’t forgotten your power, you old mental garbage-collector!”

“How does it feel to go about without all that old, stinking garbage?”

Deborah felt Anterrabae begin to rumble. Were he, Lactamaeon, Idat, and all the beauties of her many places in Yr to be lumped together with the Pit, the Punishment, the Collect, the Censor, and all the plagues of past reality?

“Does it all have to go? Do we pile it up and throw it all out?”

“It cannot be a decent bargain now—don’t you see?” Furii said. “You have to take the world first, to take it on faith as a complete commitment … on my word, if no one else’s. Then, on what you yourself build of this commitment you can decide whether it’s a decent bargain or not.”

“How about the shining things? Must I never think about Lactamaeon, so black on his black horse, or Anterrabae, or Idat, now that she keeps her form and is so beautiful? Am I never to think of them again or of the words in Yr that are better than English for certain things?”

“The world is big and has much room for wisdom. Why have you never drawn pictures of Anterrabae or the other ones?”

“Well, they were secret—you know the laws against mingling the worlds.”

“Perhaps the time has come to share the good parts, the lovely and wise parts of Yr, with the world. Contributing is building the commitment.”

Deborah saw Anterrabae falling faster in his own spark-lightened darkness, and while Idat’s tears had been diamonds, his were flame-bits; Lactamaeon was weeping blood like Oedipus. The blood made her remember something and she spoke absently.

“I once went to a lady’s house and saw blood coming out of her kitchen faucets. There used to be blood clotted in the streets and people were bug-swarms. At least I don’t have that anymore.”