I Never Promised You A Rose Garden

by Joanne Greenberg

  “But I remember …”

  “You may remember hating, but the facts are against you! What did your mother say when she came in? Was it: …Put that baby down!’ or …Don’t hurt the baby!’?”

  “No, I remember clearly. She said, …What are you doing here?’ and I remember that the baby was crying then.”

  “What astonishes me about this whole business is that I was so busy listening to the emotional content—the hatred and the pain—that I lost the facts and they had to shout at me again and again before I could hear them. The hatred was real, Deborah, and the pain also, but you were just not big enough to do any of the things you remember doing, and the shame you say your parents felt all these years was only your guilt at wishing your sister dead. With the false idea of your own power (an idea, by the way, that your sickness has kept you from ever growing out of), you translated those thoughts into a memory.”

  “It might as well have been real; I lived with it for all those years as if it were real.”

  “Yes, that’s true,” Furii said smiling, “but no longer will you be able to flagellate yourself with that particular stick. Our would-be murderess is no more than a jealous five-year-old looking into the cradle of the interloper.”

  “Bassinet,” Deborah said.

  “Those ones on legs? My God, you couldn’t even reach into it then. I turn in my detective badge tomorrow!”

  Deborah was back in the room being five again and standing with her father for a view of the new baby. Her eyes were on the level of the knuckles of his hand, and because of the ruffles on the bassinet she had to stand on her toes to peep over the edge. “I didn’t even touch her …” she said absently. “I didn’t even touch her… .”

  “As long as you are back in those days, we might as well see them together,” Furii said.

  Deborah began to talk about the year of brightness before gloom had settled in for good. She explored the brief and magical time when looking forward had been with expectation. Now it came to her that for that one year, even with the false weight of the murder and her dethronement as princess, she had not yet been under the sentence of destruction. There had been that season—it came again now with a powerful surge of meaning—when she had still been committed to life and had lived a joyful hunger because of a present and a future.

  She came from the sunshine of that fifth year with tears running down her face. Furii saw the tears and nodded. “I approve.”

  Deborah understood now that the very early happiness was proof that she was not damned genetically—damned bone and fiber. There had been a time when she suffered, yet shone with life. She began to cry in full earnest. It was still a novice’s cry, harsh, random, and bitter, and when it subsided, Furii had to ask if it had been a “good one,” with healing in it.

  “What’s the date?” Deborah asked.

  “December fifteenth. Why do you ask?”

  “I was just thinking out loud. Yri time is internal. You know about the two calendars and how days are measured between meetings for trial by the Collect.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I just remembered that today is Fourth Englift toward Annot. It means that we are on a rising-calendar.” She was still too frightened to say that, by some miracle, it seemed to have raised her from Hell to Purgatory.

  When she left the doctor’s office to return to the ward, an icy rain was falling. Cold of the causal world made her shiver, and she was grateful because it was a cold responsible to the laws and seasons of the earth. In the Preserve the tree limbs were wet and black. She saw Idat high above her, walking on a great branch. Her veils were all shimmering like the air above a fire.

  Suffer, victim, Idat greeted her.

  Oh, Idat! Deborah answered in Yri. The earth is so good now—why is it walking in ruin to have both Yr and Elsewhere?

  Am I not beautiful in this tree? the goddess asked. Questions had a particularly poignant quality in Yri because they used a familiar form and because they gave hint of the quick and ephemeral quality of asking anything. Idat was the Dissembler and her answers were always difficult. I think I shall be a woman always, she said now. You can have something on which to model yourself.

  Deborah knew that she could never use Idat for a model. They were different in every way, mainly in that Idat was a goddess and impossibly beautiful, not bound to the world at all. When Idat cried, her tears crystallized into diamonds splashed on her face. Her laws were not those of Earth.

  Stay with me, Deborah begged to Yr, using the word which meant forever. There was no answer.

  At dinner Carla seemed particularly nervous. Her hands were shaking and she had a pale, sick look. Deborah tried to warm her by looking at her with “pure” Earth eyes, but it was no use. When coffee came, Carla tried to pick up her cup, but it leaped from her shock-wired hands and fell, breaking like the brittle crust of reality on which they all walked. While the sound of the breaking crockery still echoed, the others at the table made quick reference to their own places on that crust, while the fright ran all along the familiar pathway traces inside of them.

  Then Deborah took Carla’s hands and held them. The hands rested. Carla rested. The act was a sudden thing, more sudden than the recollection that Yri time and season were measured by the internal climate and that Fourth Englift toward Annot was a strong position to venture from—more sudden than the recollection that a debt to Sylvia still had to be paid and that she still wanted to give a kiss to McPherson, long away. She looked at Carla. The face was still pale and slapped-looking, but it was better than it had been. The hands relaxed. No one said anything and soon the nurse whose particular job it was to signal the end of the meal raised her discreet white arm, just enough to be seen, and everyone, more or less, got up and went. It was then, at the signal, that Deb realized that she had unhidden herself for Carla. On the way up the stairs it came to her that perhaps—no, perhaps was too strong—that three short of maybe, she might be more than only an ex-almost-murderess. She might be something more nearly—the word hit like a fist, but it was there and she could not cancel it or keep it out of her mind—more nearly good.

  chapter twenty-four

  Her dream began with winter darkness. Out of this darkness came a great hand, fisted. It was a man’s hand, powerful and hollowed by shadows in the wells between bones and tendons. The fist opened and in the long plain of the palm lay three small pieces of coal. Slowly the hand closed, causing within the fist a tremendous pressure. The pressure began to generate a white heat and still it increased. There was a sense of weighing, crushing time. She seemed to feel the suffering of the coal with her own body, almost beyond the point of being borne. At last she cried out to the hand, “Stop it! Will you never end it! Even a stone cannot bear to this limit … even a stone …!”

  After what seemed like too long a time for anything molecular to endure, the torments in the fist relaxed. The fist turned slowly and very slowly opened.

  Diamonds, three of them.

  Three clear and brilliant diamonds, shot with light, lay in the good palm. A deep voice called to her, “Deborah!” and then, gently, “Deborah, this will be you.”

  chapter twenty-five

  On the first of January, with eagerness outrunning terror, Deborah went home for a five-day visit. Although she knew that she wore a strange look, that besides the scars of scrapings and burnings, a subtler mark was on her—an aura of withdrawal and loneliness—hunger for the new world propelled her into it.

  She was received at home as if she had won the world. Suzy had been warned, Jacob had been warned. Grandmother and Grandfather had been warned, and all the old aunts and uncles, warned, so that they held their love up, quivering with pity and fear, to show her that it was still whole. All her favorite foods were served and all her favorite people came to bear witness to the fact that “nevertheless” and “no matter what …”

  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.”)

  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 S
uzy’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.

  chapter twenty-six

  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.”