I Never Promised You A Rose Garden

by Joanne Greenberg

  “Deborah. Can you hear me?” It was McPherson’s voice. Someone in the background was saying, “What’s the matter with all of them tonight?” McPherson was still trying to talk to her. “Deb—don’t be afraid. Can you walk?”

  There was not much direction to the walk. She shambled and had to be taken, leaning on someone, to the end of the hall where the open pack was waiting. She collapsed on it almost gratefully, not feeling the first cold shock of the wet sheet….

  A long time later she came up clear again, and after a period of breathing and listening to herself breathe, she gave a long sigh. A voice beside her said, “Deb? Is that you?”

  “Carla?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t know,” Carla said. “I’m a stranger here myself, but the ward is sure going nuts tonight.”

  “Going!” They laughed a little.

  “How long has it been?” Deborah said.

  “You hit just a little after I did. Helene’s in the next room and so is Lena, and Lee Miller is having hysterics.”

  “Who’s on the night shift?”

  “Hobbs.” The tone of dislike was plain. “I wish it was McPherson.”

  They talked for a while, letting the real world in slowly, being pleased to talk to each other but not daring to admit that they were, in a small sense, friends. Carla told how she had listened to one of Helene’s hours with her doctor. The sessions were held on the ward because of Helene’s violence. “Silence is murder,” Carla said. “Old Craig just couldn’t stand all that silence. He began to talk himself and soon he was getting louder and louder and more and more upset. Any minute I expected Helene to say, …Calm down, Doctor; I’m just here to help you.’ When he came out of there, he looked … like one of us!”

  Deborah, fully conscious, began to stretch, feeling the now-familiar bone-ache of restricted circulation in her feet and ankles. She could see the motionless mummy-hump of Carla in the bed near her.

  “Deborah … Deb … I know what it was—what happened to us.”

  “What?” Deborah said, wondering if she really wanted to know.

  “Doris Rivera.”

  Somewhere inside Deborah an awful ache rose, a recent but now familiar ache which she had begun to identify with Yri words—an ache hiding the ancient and fearsome English word: Truth.

  “No, it wasn’t.”

  “Yes, it was,” Carla said, gaining conviction. “She got well and went out and she’s working, and we got frightened because we might someday … have to be …well’ and be in the world; because there’s a chance that they might open those doors for us, on … the world.” Carla’s voice was cut with the knife of her panic.

  Inside the motionless white casing Deborah’s heart had begun to pound and her stomach to heave. She began to tremble hard and the tremor took her whole body. My God, she thought, I am now what I was in the world—a motionless mountain whose inner part is a volcano.

  “Go to Hell!” she cried at Carla. “Just because your mother was insane and killed herself, you think you have more reasons to be crazy than I do!” She heard the sharp intake of breath from the other bed. The spear had gone home, but her cruelty had given her no protection. She pushed her head hard against the ice pack pressing like reality at the back of her neck.

  At that moment the light went on over them and they blinked, trying to shield themselves from the glare.

  “Just checking,” Hobbs said. He came and felt Deborah’s pulse at the temple. “She’s still pretty high,” he said to the attendant who had come in behind him. “This one, too,” he said as he straightened up over Carla. They left and the light went out.

  In shame, Deborah turned her head away from Carla’s bed.

  “Is the meat done?” Carla said bitterly. “No, give it another twenty minutes.”

  “We are not of them,” Deborah murmured, and the comfort of Yr in this new context seemed almost shocking. “Carla …” The words were coming hard. “I’m sorry for what I said. I did it for me and not against you. I didn’t want to hurt you—to make you sicker.”

  There was quiet for a while; the only sound was their breathing. Then Carla’s voice came, not rancorous or arch, although Deborah was listening for rancor. “My sickness … is a glass that’s full and running over, and your little drop is lost by now in all the overflow.”

  “What you said about Doris Rivera maybe … is true.”

  The bone-truth hurt, but a little less this time.

  “I know.”

  Deborah began to fight the reality, the pack, the questions. She struggled against her restraints, half-crying.

  “What’s the matter?” Carla said in the darkness.

  “You could have hurt me—and you didn’t!” And because Deborah could not understand why Carla had spared her, she lay shaking and gritting her teeth in cold, bare terror.

  chapter ten

  The Blaus sat at dinner. Esther was tired, Jacob angry. There had been another report, and Jacob had read it. It was general and noncommittal as usual, but it seemed to him to say that certain hates, violences, and terrors that had been deep inside his well-beloved daughter had erupted. She had been transferred “to greater protection.” What it meant to Debby he did not know. His inner eye saw only that high, barred, and screened place; his inner ear heard only the madhouse scream which had come from high up, where “the violent ward” was, to torment night after night of his sleep. To that porch, to that screaming they had taken his Debby. Esther had known that she couldn’t keep the truth from him forever. She had equivocated and hidden the reports and misread them as long as she could. Now Jacob knew also and all she could do was to try to calm him, using over and over the carefully neutral words of the new ward administrator.

  “They say that she’s better in some ways,” Esther explained, but Jacob didn’t believe her and she wondered if she believed herself after all.

  At the table, they tried to forget the report for Suzy’s sake, but they both returned to it to worry it again and again this way and that, speaking in a kind of code over and around the head of the happy daughter, who sat chattering at her meal, knowing and not knowing why the heaviness was all around them like a fog, seeming to hide them from one another. It was Debby. It was always Debby. For a moment she wondered if, were she far away and sick, she could ever make them suffer so palpably. She realized suddenly that she would be afraid to try; she would lose—almost certainly. Fear of wanting to prove that failure once and for all, guilt at foreseeing such a failure, and anger at Debby, who had all the love, made Suzy turn from one parent to the other and say, “All right! She’s not lying in a ditch somewhere. She has doctors and stuff! Why is everybody always crying over poor, poor Debby!” She left the table angrily, but not before she had seen the pain in her parents’ faces.

  Carla sat next to Deborah in the dayroom, elaborately smoking her cigarette. In conformity with the revised regulations of a hard-starch new head nurse, patients wishing to smoke were required to do so in the hall or dayroom, individually “specialed” by a nurse or attendant. For two weeks, cries of “Cigarette! Cigarette!” had echoed and reechoed from the hall and rooms, and the staff was beginning to look haggard.

  Carla had come from the end dormitory, saying, “Cigarette, please,” up to the barred ward door, and then turning to Deborah with a wink, “If you can’t join ’em, fight ’em.” They had sat down, waiting for time to pass.

  In the first days on D ward, Deborah had been able to dramatize herself in her own mind simply by thinking: the insane asylum—the violent ward. It conjured huge and flaming pictures in her mind. The reality had offered a promise of more physical safety, but to experience the reality was to suffer a boredom as endless as the illness itself. The number of cracks on the cold corridor floor was nineteen, the wide way, and twenty-three the long way (counting the seam). When Deborah was in the world of the ward, she walked with the moving frieze up and down the corridor, around where i
t widened and was called “the hall,” into and around the dayroom, out to the nursing station, past the front bathroom, past the banks of seclusion rooms, past the dormitories (where wandering was not allowed), past the back bathroom, and around the other side of the corridor to start again. When she was not real enough to walk, she lay on her bed. The ceiling was nineteen holes by nineteen holes in its soundproofing squares. Sometimes she stood with the stone women near the nursing station, waiting for something to happen, or not to happen. The boredom of insanity was a great desert, so great that anyone’s violence or agony seemed an oasis, and the brief simple moments of companionship seemed like a rain in the desert that was numbered and counted and remembered long after it was gone. Deborah and Carla were enjoying such a rain as Carla nursed her cigarette.

  “When I get around to it, I’m going to do your portrait,” Deborah said, watching the smoke of Carla’s cigarette. From Deborah’s statement Carla understood that she had managed to steal both pencil and paper and hide them. They were behind the cold-water pipe in the front bathroom. The back section, where the tubs were, was always kept locked unless it was being used and it could be used only in the presence of the attendant. Deborah began to explain this and Carla caught the suggestion in it.

  “It takes paper to do portraits,” Carla said.

  “True.”

  “What kind of picture would it be?”

  “Watercolor. I would use lots and lots of water.”

  Carla understood and smiled. “If you get to do it, you’ll need something to lean on.” By this Carla meant that she had a book and that it was hidden in an accessible place.

  At the times when they were capable of it, the patients took great pleasure in the codes and secrecies of prisoners or nuns or mental patients or members of remote and tiny clans who knew every moment of each other’s day. Speaking past the alien faces of the attendants, they were beginning, now and then, fragments of an allegiance. Helene would move with Deborah or Carla sometimes, and then, frightened, withdraw into violence. Lee, the veteran of the ward, spoke the most. Although there was no cohesiveness or loyalty or generosity, at least they had secrets.

  “I wish I could do that portrait now,” Deborah said, wishing aloud that she had the forbidden things. Paper was allowed, but pencils and pens were considered weapons and were not allowed on the ward unless used in the presence of a watching attendant.

  “Do I need a hairwash?” Carla asked vaguely. In the code, she was suggesting that they both ask to be allowed to wash their hair. Carla would ask first and get the back bathroom with the nice big sink. Since policy was that unless there were three on duty in the bathroom, no more than one patient could use the sinks at one time, Deborah would have to go to the front bathroom, where she might be able to get the attendant to unlock the tub-room door and be distracted long enough for Deborah to get to her treasure.

  “My hair feels dirty,” Deborah said. “If you don’t like it, you can lump it.” She was saying “thank you.”

  The plan went well and by lunchtime the forbidden pencil was resting in a sling made of discarded rubber bands hooked to the underside of the fourth bedspring of Deborah’s bed. Then there was to wait for the lunch trays. Then there was to wait for the end of lunch. Then there was to wait for change of shift. Then there was to wait for supper. Then there was to wait for the sedative line. Then there was to wait for bed.

  Dr. Fried was off at a convention of some kind, so there were not even the therapeutic hours to break the days. Deborah could have put in for the craft shop and gone there when the people from “D” went in the morning, but she didn’t. She had given up “doing things.” Sometimes she sketched a little, sitting on the floor and shielded by the bed of the Wife of the Abdicated. She attended the denunciations of the Collect, the tyranny of the Censor, and the witty calumny of the gods and the blandishments of Yr, but after the hours of punishment or propitiation there was time to wait through, endless time, marked off by meals and sleep, a word or two brushing by, an anger, a story, or the raging delusion of another patient—all experienced disinterestedly and remembered only as part of the frieze of the sick around the walls of the ward. Sometimes there were frightening dreams; or great volcanos of waking terror; or fears congealed with hallucinations of sound, odor, and touch; but mostly there was only looking at the clock that was masked like the face of a fencer standing forever en garde over the door of the nursing station.

  Esther had written another letter to the hospital, asking if she might visit Deborah on her new ward, and if she might see the ward doctors and Deborah’s doctor also. The reply she got was the usual mystifying, placating one about the patient doing as well as could be expected. If she wished, she might have some time with Deborah’s doctor. The ward administrator did not deal directly with patients’ families, and visits to Ward D were not permitted. If there were any matters to be discussed, there would be time made available with the social worker, Mrs. Rollinder….

  Esther took the long train ride for the single appointment with Dr. Fried. She was glad that Jacob’s work kept him from insisting that he drive her. At the hospital she found that her presence gave her no easier way around the doctors, whose written rules she had hoped somehow to circumvent. Dr. Fried was gentle but noncommittal. She tried to ease Esther’s fear about the D ward; she seemed hopeful still that this was a “phase of the sickness.” Esther talked to the social worker and got the same answers, but more impersonally and coldly. The no-visiting rule stood.

  After her visit, she rode home to lie to Jacob and the family. She would tell them that she had seen Deborah and the ward and the doctors and that it was all, all fine. They would want to hear this and they would want desperately to believe it, and so they would let her lie to them, at least for a while. She had carried an armful of magazines with her for Deborah. They had not even let her give them, and she noticed absentmindedly as she sat looking out of the train window that she still had them. She began to thumb through them idly; the lie she had to tell to Jacob and the pain she had to keep to herself seemed to be reflected in everything she saw. She tried to escape to the pictures in the magazine, but there was no refuge there either. As she looked, tears closed over her eyes and blurred the grimly gay models in the advertisements:

  COLLEGE IN THE FALL

  CLASSIC STYLE FOR THE CAMPUS

  And on the next page:

  OUR NEW YOUNG DEBUTANTES

  WHITE, WHITE, WHITE FOR HER FIRST

  PROM

  There were forget-me-nots scattered all over that page, and Esther set her jaw hard against those flowers, waiting for the tears to stop filling in her eyes. Deborah’s classmates would be looking at these pages, substituting their own faces in place of the models, as they looked forward to graduation and college. Friends of Esther’s with daughters were already giving and taking the names of colleges like calling cards. They were getting the lovely outfits ready to be worn, and the diaries to be filled. She still met these mothers, her friends, and spoke to them, and their children’s problems seemed only a little smaller in scope than Deborah’s. “Marjorie is so shy; she just doesn’t seem comfortable with her friends!” “Helen takes everything as if it were life and death—she’s so intense.” Esther listened to these descriptions with her cold lie in front of her, and recognizing a little breath of Deborah in this sigh or that. Her little idiosyncrasies were like theirs. She, too, was shy; she, too, covered her fear with precocity and cynical wit; she, too, was intense, but would she ever come back to a world like theirs? That hospital—could it—could it have been a mistake all along?

  When she got home, she saw Jacob and then the family, smiling and poised, and she parried and equivocated with fluency and conviction. She thought herself greatly successful, until Jacob said, “Wonderful—I’m glad they think she’s made so much progress, because next time you go, I’m going with you.”

  “How did you destroy your sister?” Dr. Fried asked Deborah, who was huddled on the couch, shiverin
g in Yr’s cold through the heat of Earth’s August.

  “I didn’t meant to—she was exposed to my essence. It’s called by an Yri name—it is my selfness and it is poisonous. It is mind-poisonous.”

  “Something you say that destroys? Something you do, or wish?”

  “No, it’s a quality of myself, a secretion, like sweat. It is the emanation of my Deborah-ness and it is poisonous.”

  Suddenly Deborah felt an explosion of self-pity for the miasma-creature she was, and she began to elucidate, drawing larger and larger the shape of herself and the virulence of her substance.

  “Wait a moment—” The doctor put up a hand, but the joy of self-loathing had taken Deborah as fully as if it had been love, and she went on and on, decorating and embellishing the foulness, throwing the words higher and higher. When she was finished, her shadow was immense. The doctor waited until Deborah could hear her and then said flatly, “So, you are still trying to throw dust in my eyes?”

  Deborah parried, defending and nursing the unrecognizable image she had made, but the doctor said, “No, my dear—it just doesn’t work. It’s an old invention, this camouflage, and it was not invented by your Eeries, either.”

  “Yeeries.”

  “I wonder. No. To hide one can forget, or pretend to another happening, or distort. They are all just good methods of getting away from the truth that might be bitter.”

  “Why not hide then, and be safe?”

  “And be crazy.”

  “Okay, and be crazy. Why not, after what they did to me!”

  “Oh, yes. You remind me cleverly of what I had left out. Another camouflage is to blame it all on someone else. It keeps you from having to face what they really did to you, and what you did to yourself and are still doing.”

  Part of what Deborah had said about the evil emanation was actual and true to her, but the glorifying of it had put its reality far away for a while, and the monster-girl she now saw was a stranger to her. The doctor pressed her to continue about the destruction of Suzy, and she did, telling of the early jealousy and the later love that had been so racked and guilty. Deborah’s illness had been oncoming for a long time. She described how she felt about it: that everyone she knew was tainted by it through her—Suzy more than anyone because Suzy was loving and impressionable.