I Never Promised You A Rose Garden by Joanne Greenberg Page A

edge of the tray. She turned toward the ward doctor and saw him cowering against the wall, saying in a voice very different from his professional drawl: “Don’t hit me, Helene—don’t hit me! I know how hard you can hit!” Right behind his cry the attendants came rushing in to overwhelm the ballet with their heavy arms and hard, frightened faces. There seemed to Deborah to be quite a few of them for one small woman, even though she was like a thresher and they, wheat. She murmured beneath the mess dripping from her face and hair, “Good-by, Helene, go in sixes.”
    “What did you say?” the doctor asked, straightening his clothes and struggling to do the same with his expression.
    “I said,
…Relevez, soufflé, dragged away.
’”
    She heard the bed being moved for the cold pack. The doctor left hurriedly to cope with some screaming that had started in one of the back rooms. Deborah stood alone in the mess wondering if she were bleeding.
    Because of the excitement, it was half an hour before she could get an attendant to unlock the bathroom so that she could clean up a little. Here as elsewhere, the attackers were favored above the attacked. They were not so far from the world after all. Deborah thought a curse against the whole business. They might have quelled Helene roughly, but they were caring about her; they wereconcerned. When she had freed herself of Helene’s lunch, she went to her bed, where her own cold food was waiting, having been half eaten by a patient who slept near the window.
    “Eat, dear,” said the Wife of the Abdicated, sitting on her bed, “they’ll get it out of you later.”
    “No …” said Deborah, looking at the stew. “I’ve done this already.”
    The Wife of the Assassinated looked at her sharply. “My dear, you’ll never get a man, looking like that!”
    She turned from Deborah to attend her conference, and, suddenly, Deborah knew why Helene had come in and tried to hurt her. About an hour earlier, before the doctor had called her, Helene had come to Deborah and, speaking quite clearly, had shown her some pictures which had come in a letter. Helene was kept in a seclusion room, for she was universally feared for her angers and violence, which could break bones when she wished. The door had been open today, though, and no one had noticed her going to see Deborah or had heard them sharing the small confidences of the pictures. She had gone on for a while telling Deborah who this one was and that, and had come to a picture and said, “She was with me in college.” A nice girl, standing in the real world, that nightmare no man’s land. Helene had taken the picture back from her and lain down on Deborah’s bed, saying, “Go away—I’m tired.” Because she was Helene, Deborah had left the room and gone into the hall and soon the attendant had found Helene and told her to go back to her room. Deborah understood now that Helene had attacked her because she had to discredit her as a witness to the shame and misery that the picture evoked. The mirror had to be dirtied so that it would no longer reflect the sudden secret vulnerability beneath the surface of hard fists and eyes and obscenity.
    “Philosopher!” Deborah muttered to herself and picked a piece of food from behind her ear.

chapter nine
    “We have the changes and we have the secret world,” Dr. Fried said, “but what was going on in your life in the meantime?”
    “It’s hard to get close to; it all looks like hate—the world and camp and school….”
    “Was the school also anti-Semitic?”
    “Oh, no, it was truer there. The hate was all for myself, the good, hard in-spite-of-lessons-on-manners dislike. But every time mere dislike turned to active anger or hate, I never knew why. People would come to me and say, … … after what you did, …’ or … … after what you said, … even I won’t defend you anymore…
.’ I never knew what it was that I had done or said. The maids in our house left one