I Never Promised You A Rose Garden

by Joanne Greenberg

  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.

  “They sent searchers out!” Carla said breathlessly, and they dived together into a side ditch until the car passed. After the light had disappeared in the rain, the fugitives came out of the ditch and walked on, laughing because they were quick and able. After a while they saw another car.

  “More searchers?”

  “Don’t flatter yourself, nut. It’s still a public road.”

  “Might as well play it safe, though …” and they dived again for the ditch.

  Huddled cold and alert in their hiding, Deborah wondered for the first time what they intended to do. They had no dry clothes and no money. They had no plan and no desire to do any more than they were doing. She tried to remember what Furii had taught her about doing what she really wanted, and sat back against the embankment wondering what it was. Beside her, Carla was shaking a stone from her shoe. When the car passed they clambered up, looking like twins for the mud, and went on walking.

  “We have to turn back sometime,” Deborah said aloud.

  “Sure,” Carla answered. “I see my doctor tomorrow. I just had to be alone, that’s all, not led or taken.”

  Deborah smiled in the darkness. “Of course. That’s what I wanted.”

  It was a long walk back. They sang through some of it and laughed at the way they slid in their sopping shoes. They were not “caught” until they were through the front gate and inside the front door of the B-C-D ward building. In retaliation, it seemed, for having gone and come with such sweet ease, they were phalanxed and separated. Two attendants guarded Deborah while she took a bath. They were Second Night Staff, which meant that it must be after midnight.

  “You’ll be in for it now,” one of them said self-righteously.

  “Do I have to go … up?”

  “You behave here and take your sedative and go to bed and you’ll be here tonight,” the attendant said. “You girls will have to be in seclusion.”

  After the bath Deborah and her guard passed Carla and her guard on the way to the end of the hall, where a small group of rooms were kept for seclusion. Their glances, still free, caught over the heads of the nurses and they winked at each other. Later, when Deborah began drifting toward sleep, she thought: It may be a hell of a price. But she remembered the smell of the rain.

  A new doctor, a Dr. Ogden, was administrator for B ward. Deborah did not know him yet and couldn’t tell what he was like. She hadn’t seen Carla since they had exchanged the wink of complicity. All she could do was to try to remember all the grapevine talk about escapes in the past, and think of something that would make their reasons sound good enough. At 11:00 that morning, she was sent down to the administration offices under guard. The attendant knocked at Dr. Ogden’s door.


  “Come in.” Deborah went in and there, sitting at the desk, was Dr. Halle. The surprise and delight she felt must have been spread all over her face, since he smiled slightly and said, “Dr. Ogden is down with the flu, so I am taking over the B-ward work for a while. Being here for B-ward duties keeps things straight.” Then he leaned back, rubbing his thumbs together. “What’s it all about?”

  She told him where they had been. He stopped her twice for details and when she was finished asked, “Whose idea was this in the first place?”

  She groped for an explanation. There was an Yri word that described how they had felt and its presence in her mind made it difficult to concentrate on speaking English. She decided at least to translate the single word and hope that he could understand. After her false start he looked at her and said, “Just tell me.”

  “Okay …” She hesitated because of the awful need to sound sane. “Well … if you’re clumsy and bungling the way I am, you venerate people who aren’t. Where … I … Where I came from we called such people atumai. For such people that extra step is not there to trip them, and the string that they tie packages with is never two inches too short. The traffic lights are always with them. Pain comes when they are lying down and ready for it and the joke when it is fitting to them to laugh. Yesterday, I got to have that atumai, just for a while. Carla had it, too. We both had it together. You don’t decide to sneeze, you just do it. No one had the idea or was the leader; we just did it and were.” She thought of the way they had swung back together through that second door and the smile came back and broke away from her.

  “Was it fun?” he asked.

  “It sure was!”

  “All right,” he said. “I’m going to talk to Carla for a while and I want you to wait outside.”

  She left the office and saw Carla, right outside, waiting her turn likewise guarded and looking very frightened. Her eyes questioned. Deborah shrugged the imperceptible shrug of the experienced patient, prisoner, spy, or nun. Carla’s eyes took the gesture like a blow. She went in. After what seemed a long while, she stuck her head out and motioned to Deborah. “Come in—he wants to see us together.”

  This time it was the guards who exchanged glances.

  Deborah went in, scenting the air. Dr. Halle looked very grim, but Deborah breathed out with relief when she saw that he was fighting a smile.

  “You broke hospital rules—eight of them, I believe,” he said. “Very reprehensible. Your descriptions of your actions tally with each other’s. It was fun, wasn’t it? It was shared fun. That’s rare here. I’m kind of proud of you….” He rearranged his look toward discipline. “I see no reason to change the status of your privileges. That’s all.”

  They left, closing the door behind them. Dr. Halle swiveled around in his chair to look out the window. Outside, the trees were in small leaf, the springtime filling out along the branches. The hedge was raining green. He thought of the two girls in the stormy night, walking and singing and of a trip he had once taken, running away. “Kids!” he exclaimed. In his voice there was impatience, admiration, and a little kernel of envy.

  “Where’s Carmen?” Carla asked Deborah. “I want to tell her that it’s all okay. She saw us go in the afternoon and she must have heard what happened.”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t seen her.”

  They asked the nurse.

  “Carmen’s gone home. She left last night.”

  “But didn’t her father come just to visit?”

  “Yes,” the nurse said, “but I guess he changed his plans. All I know is that she left with him about seven last night.” The nurse’s tone told them to ask no more, so they questioned each other. “What could it have been?”

  “Terry, did you see Carmen yesterday?”

  “Yeah—I saw her.”

  “What happened?”

  “She disagreed.”

  Deborah and Carla looked at each other, shivering, with the world’s perversity and Dr. Halle’s praise circling each other in their ears.

  “My parents—” Deborah said. She knew that they had seen more of her hatred than her love, but they had let her stay. They had let her stay without a sign of improvement for a long, long time. They had never demanded of her a recovery to heal their prestige. She looked down and found her hands working in Yri again, passionately, framing words to speak to her own mind. Carla, sealed in her own cell and shut off at the eyes from all else, filled in her special words.

  “It was freedom they gave me after all. Carmen’s didn’t give her a chance, but mine …”

  It came to Deborah that it was her parents who had bought this fight for her. They could have cut her off from it the minute that she failed to make their progress. They had kept faith with a future which might never sing their praises.

  “Carla … if I weren’t scared to death of it, I would be so grateful!”

  chapter twenty-seven

  Dead pale, cold-handed, in a lilac-flowered dress that ill suited the lithe tiger wearing it, Helene came to B ward. Her “normal” smile seemed wired, like a booby trap. When Deborah and Carla told her they were glad to see her, she told them they were hypocrites and liars, and her true smile crept behind the display one, so that they saw she was inhabiting her body and they were happy for her.

  They took her over to the craft shop when she was given her privileges. Deborah went, too, because she remembered that it was a wheatfield and that the hunter there had a very sudden gun. With Helene’s violent past, legends of which were still current, the gun would be a cannon.

  Carla left early for her doctor’s hour and they didn’t see her again until just before supper. She came quietly out on the hall where Deborah and Helene were sitting with sketch pad and curlers, and walked over to them.

  “Deb—it’s about Carmen.” She handed her the newspaper clipping. Newspapers were not allowed on B ward, but there was a brisk bootleg trade going on. Deborah looked at it quickly and slipped it in her sketch pad. The headline said, MAGNATE’S DAUGHTER SUICIDE. She held the pad so no one could see the clipping and read it through. Under the headline there was an article with details about the mess that can be made when a human being fires a gun into her ear.

  “Do you know her? I mean did you know her?” Helene asked. “How long was she here?”

  “Just long enough to learn to disagree,” Carla said.

  “She could have made it,” Deborah said flatly, as she stood up.

  “Oh, Deb, how can you be sure?”

  “You’re not just rubbing it in good to get a little free suffering out of it?” Helene asked in her bitter voice.

  “I didn’t say that she would have made it, but that she could have.”

  Their voices brought others out of their rooms. Everyone knew what the talk was about and there was a rippling tension on the ward. The nurses stood by, not knowing whether to speak or be silent, and Deborah began to feel the mood was less about Carmen’s suicide than an argument between the cynicism that was in each of them and the blind, small longing to fight.

  To her surprise, Deborah found herself on the side of the little Maybe. She knew what she was thinking, but wondered if she could speak to these women who were both so much saner and so much more terrified than the D-ward patients were.

  “Oh, Deb, you said yourself that Carmen was going to blow sky-high any minute,” Carla said.

  Deborah looked at Carla, wondering if Carla were trying to keep her from saying something that would make trouble and need recanting, or spoil something between them that had weathered all the suffering.

  “Carmen could have made it, that’s all. She had a good, healthy sickness.”

  “That’s a contradiction in terms!”

  “That’s impossible!”

  “No, it isn’t—think about it for a minute—a sickness with a good, hard hurt that’s direct and doesn’t cover with an appealing surface or exercises in normal-faking the doctors.”

  There was an embarrassed silence and without m
eaning to, Deborah found herself looking at Linda, the “psychological authority,” who had read everything and gave jargon like currency, recklessly improvident because she hoped never to be touched by the pain that was wrapped in the words. Linda, frightened of the look and the definition, came back angrily. “Ridiculous—you’re just rationalizing your own defensive system!”

  Deborah tried to say it better, and make it more real. “Look at the bunch from the Men’s Admitting—they’re all very rational and …sane’ and witty. The staff likes them, even as people, but they’re here and they’ve been here for years and they aren’t helped by anything or anybody. They don’t seem to suffer much because they don’t feel anything much. That’s sick-sickness. Miss Coral up on D may be sick but she’s feeling and fighting and alive …” Her voice petered out in the face of their anger and disbelief, but suddenly she felt again the quiet power of the opening of the world which she had felt that evening on the D ward. Only now it came more urgently and passionately. “Alive is fighting,” Deborah said. “It’s the same thing. I still think that Carmen could have made it.”

  The nurse stopped them then, and Deborah looked around at the faces suffused with anger against her. She had hit a particularly sensitive nerve. It was B ward’s nerve, a desperate hope that the false “fine-fine” might see them through if only they acted long enough and tried to make it be the truth. Was it as frightened a clutching at convention on the outside?

  “You sure like to rattle the cages around here,” Carla said later as they got ready for bed.

  “You’re wondering how I ever made it to this old age, as thorny as I am?”

  “I’m going to miss you, Deb.”

  In Yr’s distances a cannon went off. “Why should you?”

  “Because I’m going out to try again.”

  The fear, like a backhand slap, caught her unprepared, but her lessons with Furii had been well learned, and while she shook, she questioned: Fear for me or for Carla? If for me, why? Lose a friend? Lose a friend to the world? Fear because soon I will have to go?