I Never Promised You A Rose Garden

by Joanne Greenberg

  Even as she had compromised her captors, she had lost the wish for Semblance—to be a picture of belonging at all costs. She knew the costs now; in a tightened, frightened small town where her classmates would be three years younger and light-years distant, she knew that at best such a world would be a no-man’s-land. Even if she no longer belonged to Yr, there would still be the awful alienation from Earth that had, once made her run to otherness in pain day after day. Yr or no, it was too late to join students such as these again, too late for the proms, the cliques, the curlers, and the class pins. She had had quite enough of a “special vocabulary of belonging.”

  “I’m nineteen …” she said to the heap of buildings. “It’s too late.” She turned shivering in the Yri wind that blew over all the miles of a real and unreal separation.

  “I can’t go back to my merry high-school days again,” she said to the outpatient administrator, “volleyball in the gym and teeth-teeth at the school dances.”

  “But unless you have that diploma to show …”

  “Non omnia possumus omnes …” she said, and reminded him that it was Virgil, but she knew that what he said was true.

  “Why don’t you make a list of all the things you can do?” he said. She knew that it was make-work, “doing something useful,” something Deborah felt was nothing more than juggling dead-end signs. The administrator wanted to get off the hook, he wanted not to be bothered with the world of commerce and livelihood, and Deborah, seeing this, was moved out of sympathy to be dutiful and do what he said. Perhaps she would find hiding in a word some preference, or talent, or something that could really be used. There it was again, the little Maybe, building its compelling heat from a small and vulnerable spark.

  She went back to her little table at the rooming house, sat down, and ruled a piece of paper down the middle. On one side she wrote KNOWLEDGE and on the other, POSSIBLE JOB.

  KNOWLEDGE

  POSSIBLE JOB

  1.Ride a bicycle

  Rural delivery girl

  2.Know all of Hamlet by heart from beginning to end

  Tutor of Hamlet to kids who are taking it in school

  3.Can wake up from dead sleep in full possession of faculties

  Night watchman

  4.Have a tremendous vocabulary of obscene words

  Language consultant

  5.Some Greek

  (Not enough)

  6.Some Latin

  Tutor of Latin for kids who are taking it in school

  7.Have potential for callousness

  Professional assassin

  8.Artist for 10 years

  Not genius—not commercially practical

  9.Know the components of most forms of mental illness and could act them realistically from seeing the original

  Actress (too dangerous)

  10.Don’t smoke

  Wine taster

  She rewrote the list leaving out numbers 4, 5, 7 and 9. She felt a special poignancy at having to leave out “Professional assassin.” She realized that she was too poorly coordinated and clumsy, and professional assassins should be very wiry and graceful. She was so lacking in atumai that she knew her victims would always fall the wrong way, and picturing herself trying to crawl out from beneath the body of a three-hundred-pound former wrestler, she knew that 7 was a lost cause.

  The next day she took the list to the administrator, but did not stay to see him read it. Even Anterrabae was embarrassed by the poor showing of his queen and victim, and the Collect was jubilantly self-righteous. She was frightened by the choices that the world offered her. The possible futures stretched before her like the hall down which she was now walking from the administrative offices: a long road with carefully labeled doors every ten feet of the way—all closed.

  “Oh, Miss Blau—” a voice called behind her. It was one of the social workers. (What now? she wondered. I have a room, so I don’t need a room-tracker, unless there’s one to rescind the other’s trackings.) “Dr. Oster was talking to me about you going to the high school.” (There it was again, the lock-step-lock of the world; they had reassigned her to her place under the juggernaut.) Redness seethed upward from the tumor until she was hot to the eyes with its pain.

  “I should have thought of it right away,” the social worker was saying. “There’s a place in the city that might be able to prepare you for them.”

  “For what?” Deborah said.

  “For the examinations.”

  “What examinations?”

  “Why, the high-school equivalency. As I was saying, it seems the practical way …” The social worker was looking at her quizzically. Deborah wanted to tell her that it is not possible to hear through a red wash, and that the relief of her news, which had turned her face a chalk white, was also giving her “the bends” from the change in pressure.

  “I wouldn’t have to go to the town high school?”

  “No, as I was just saying, there is a tutorial school in the city—”

  “I could choose, then?”

  “You could talk to them about the possibilities—”

  “Does one call for an appointment?”

  “Well, you are still a ward of …”

  “Could you call them for an appointment?”

  “Yes, I could do that.”

  “And will you tell me what they say?”

  The social worker said that she would, and Deborah sat down and watched her walk away. The pain in the red wash was fading, but the panic was not withdrawing from her. Listen to your heart, Anterrabae said, falling beside her. She heard it slamming like a latchless door in the wind.

  What is it? What is it? she called to Yr. I was real, just here, just before! Her vision was ragged and distorted and the words came in an odd Yri form, as if even Yri had been coded for secrecy. Why? Why is this happening?

  Her question broke the Earth’s silence, and she sensed people near, perhaps Dr. Oster coming out of his office. But her hearing was distorted like her vision, and when she stumbled into someone, she cried, “The senses are not discrete!”

  “Is she going to be violent?” (or something like that, came in bored annoyance from the blur). Deborah began to answer that violence to a volcano is natural law, but she could no longer communicate at all. Flanked and followed by the handed blurs, she entered the steel patient-elevator and was carried up to D ward—the beginning all over again.

  When she cleared—again, all over again, wrapped and restrained yet again—she laughed down at herself looking the length of the case.

  “Now I know, you sudden, falling calendars. Now I know, Lactamaeon, you sad god. Now I know why Carla and Doris Rivera were so damned exhausted!” Her throat seemed to be breaking with the hard, hurting laugh.

  After a while Quentin Dobshansky came in to take her pulse.

  “Hi …” he said, trying to figure out if he should be cheerful or grave, “… is the pack helping?”

  “Well, I can see again,” she said, “and hear, and talk.” She looked at him. “Are you still a friend of mine?”

  “Well, sure!” he said uncomfortably.

  “Then don’t do anything to your face, Quentin. Just leave it hanging there.”

  He let his face go, and it fell back into disappointment. “Just … well, I liked to think of you being outside and starting along, that’s all.”

  He was beginning to feel an ache of anxiety because this person toward whom he felt kindly was a crazy person (even though the doctors had told him to call them mentally ill) and he could make her crazier if he said the wrong things. The doctors and all the books he had been reading told him not to be too definite, not to argue or show strong feelings, but to be cheerful and helpful. In spite of these instructions, he knew that he could move her, and this made him try, and the trying made him feel something for her, and his success at this feeling made her a human being to him. She was homely and straggle-haired, but he had been laughed at for his looks, too; and he had been defeated once as she seemed to be now. He ha
d been in an accident which had left him lying on a road all broken, his father beside him. The rescuers had taken him to the hospital tied up in a blanket, as she was tied up now, and he remembered that trip. Before the pain there had been something worse: the awful feeling of being crushed to a pulp—body and soul. It had whispered to him over and over with the turning of the wheel rims: stove-in and broke, stove-in and broke. Of the later pain he was curiously proud. His father’s death left a raw, clean sorrow; the broken ribs made each breath-in-breath-out a kick in the face of death, a hurt of being alive. Now he looked at Deborah and heard his mind go again around the rims of the wheels, stove-in and broke, stove-in and broke. It must be what she was feeling now.

  “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 c
lear 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’?”

  “Well, when I first came to the hospital I was not unhappy. I didn’t care about anything and that had a kind of peace about it. Then you made me care and as soon as I did, Yr punished me and I got desperate with it. When I begged for mercy from Yr, Anterrabae said, …You have eaten down hope from the red to the rind.’ I thought that I would have to live and watch that old rind shrivel up and get hard and be thrown away at last. He used that allusion now and then, and when I realized that I was alive, really alive and of the same substance as the world’s inhabitants, I told him that I would chew that dry rind and keep chewing until it gave me nourishment. This time, when I was back and everybody was so disappointed in me, Anterrabae said, …That hard rind is cracking your teeth—why not spit it out at last?’ ”

  “And what do you feel about doing that?”

  “I can’t stop chewing now, even if I don’t seem to be getting anything much,” Deborah said. “Since I have the reflexes and instincts of a world one, I guess I’m stuck with it …” and she smiled sheepishly because it was an admission; it counted and someday she might have to hang from it.