I Never Promised You A Rose Garden (34 page)

* * *

STATE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION

High-School Equivalency Examination

The high-school equivalency examinations will be given on May 10th at the County Courthouse.

As a registrant for these examinations you will
be required to fill out and send in the appended forms and be present at the County Courthouse on Tuesday, May 10th at 9:00
A
.
M
. Failure to comply with both of these requirements will disqualify you for certification.

Deborah put the notice on one side of the table and on the other, the sketches for a picture of Anterrabae. She had taken the notice from its envelope quickly, surprised that the time for it had come so soon. She had filled out the enclosure immediately, had looked twice to see that the address was right, and had gone out to mail it right away, lest it be forgotten or misplaced. When the letter was in the gullet of the mailbox, she had felt the first fear.

Now she sat before the table and tried to laugh it back, knowing with what eagerness and excitement part of her mind was functioning. The real feeling was hope, not fear. It was too late to pretend that she might not cast with the world this time.

Expectation bore her along for the two weeks until the test, and then she went forth in the clothes of reason on the specified day, to the musty, wainscoted room in the old courthouse building. There she found others taking their high-school educations at one gulp—a group of hard-handed day laborers who sweated and grunted over their papers as if they were blocks of granite. She was surprised and then humbled that they, too, though not prisoners or insane, had somehow missed beats in the rhythm of the world, and now were sharers with her in this necessary thing. McPherson’s wisdom was at her elbow: you have no corner on suffering. When the time was up and the papers had to be given in, Deborah put hers with the others and left, unable to measure what she had done.

An arrangement had been made at the school for her to go on with the tutoring until the results came in, as much to keep her from worry and idleness as out of fear that she might fail and have to apply again. It was a time of innocence before decision. She pursued her studies, but not
breathlessly; followed the season of budding fruit trees in front of the Methodist Church; looked at the changes of the sky; fell in love with poplar trees; went to the movies every time the picture changed, which meant that she knew
Tarzan
at least as well as
Hamlet;
and had a month of singular, idle happiness. She called it “childhood.”

At the end of the month the Regents of the State called her out of the springtime to open their letter. She had passed well—well enough to be certified by the state as having an education equivalent to that of students who had attended high school—and there were enough points over to make her an acceptable applicant to any college. She phoned home especially proud to give her parents that second bit of news, and glad that their time of pride, while hedged-about and deferred, was still possible.

“Wonderful! It’s wonderful! Oh, wait until I call all the family! They are all going to be so proud!” Esther said.

Jacob, by comparison, was almost still. “… Very proud,” he said. “It’s fine, just fine.” His voice seemed on the verge of breaking.

The high-school graduate hung up the phone, ashamed of her father’s pitiful pride. The sunlight still pulsed through the room, the air still bore the odors of spring—sap and greenness, flowering bushes, and moist, warmed earth. She walked slowly outside and down the road and around the old Catholic graveyard and past the auto wreckers’, intending to go to the high school and stare its windows down. It was a ritual she has promised herself if she passed the exam. There was no joy in going now; she was going simply to keep an old promise. She walked onto the school grounds and skirted the huge ball field, on which four boys were still practicing. Suddenly she felt very tired, and sat down against the fence that bounded the back of the field.

Why had he been so pitifully proud? She had given all her strength, all her struggle, all her will to succeed at her study. Now it was over and what had it been, after all, but what everyone else did without half trying, and it was two
years late. She was nineteen and a high-school graduate, with parents who were calling the good news all over Chicago by now.
But I wanted it!
she whispered to herself in Yri, turning toward the fence in sudden helplessness.

On the field the boys were running with the late-afternoon magic of their ten-foot shadows. They seemed so young and strong and golden in the late sun. It had taken all of her capacities, every drop of her will, to come as far as they had come laughing and easy. The wall between them was still there and it would always be there. She could see through it now, to where the world offered its immense beauty, but she would burn away all her strength, just staying alive.

Across the field, gleaming in the sun, two other figures walked. A slender young girl, all grace and innocence, held the hand of the boy who walked with her. His jacket hung loosely on her slim shoulders. Slowly they walked around the field past her. A few times they stopped, playing or saying something that ended in laughter; he would lean over nuzzling her gathered-up hair or her cheek.

Deborah talked to herself out loud, the way crazy people do. “I will never have that,” she said. “Not by fighting or study or work or withstanding will I be able to walk with one of them or be warmed by their hands.”

Carla told you that long ago,
Lactamaeon said from the fence.
Your studies, your job
—
it’s all the same: “good morning” and “good night.”

Quentin will give you water,
Anterrabae said,
from the feeding tube. He will never move over your face with his hand. No one … no one …
”

It was almost dark. She got up slowly and walked back toward town. The faces of the church choir seemed to challenge her from the yard of the auto wreckers.
Good evening. Good night.
They never spoke her name.

I spent my hope singing and sewing with you, and when I stand next to you, you don’t remember who I am.
They were at the graveyard, Anterrabae scattering his flames in the darkness. Lactamaeon moaning in a dog-howl, the Collect
building again—
Work hard, lazy girl; fight hard, clumsy girl … never … never … never …
”

I won it hard!
she cried to them.
I showed up even when I was sick. I showed up neat and on time and sane every day. I have some certain pride
—But they had drowned her out in a great wave of laughter. She called Anterrabae, watching into Yr for his fiery passing, but there was only his laughter, a savage hollow laughter of terrible scorn. He flashed by, shrieking with laughter, joined suddenly by another figure, a figure which she recognized from a distant book, one of the forgotten books in Grandfather’s study, a book with engravings, a book out of fashion now, but which had once been de rigeur in cultured homes. It was Milton’s
Paradise Lost;
her original brilliant vision of a god falling perpetually in fire was none other than Milton’s Satan. She had gone over the pictures a thousand times in visits to Grandfather’s house. The nine-year-old had caught some of the ponderous thunder of the lines she did not know she had read, and while the artist in her had studied the etched angels and fine engraved lines that had blessed them with dimension, the secret-kingdom-seeker had subtly stolen the proud archangel for the first inhabitant of her world. Even Anterrabae was not hers!

In back of the vision the tumult mounted.
You will create
… the Collect roared.
Nothing! You will lie down in the fields … nothing! Study and work … nothing!

They screamed her down the road into town and through the streets; she went vacant-eyed, listening into Yr. Past the church, where she sang on Wednesdays and Sundays, the gods mocked her father’s breaking voice. Past all the familiar streets the Collect hooted over Quentin’s smile and the golden people on the ball field. Male and female created He them. She was nearly at the hospital now—she could make out the two lights where the cars turned in. She went as if by habit, blindly. The Pit was waiting. Soon. She was terrified. Sight go soon. Voice … nothing. Up the steps to the door. Now, open it. Someone there, please! Inside: “Hello, Miss Blau.”
And then, “Are you all right, Miss Blau?” One thing left: make a sign. Though a god screamed she could still hear the other sound—three buzzes: emergency. The Pit.

She emerged again back at the eternal beginning, with her heart just slowing from the terror. Because she was still alive, still bearing the insolent pumping muscle in her chest, she began to fight and struggle in her bonds, hoping to become exhausted and die. Exhaustion came, but death was adamant against her. After a while Dobshansky came again. This time his face had been carefully strained to remove all but the bland hospital expression. The books had won.

“You feel okay now?”

She was very tired. “I guess so.”

“We had to call your landlady and tell her you weren’t coming back there tonight and that you were here. She got worried about your school and came over with your books and some clothes. She was concerned about you.”

“She’s a good person,” Deborah said, meaning it, yet wishing that she did not have to wear everyone’s virtues as a weight that somehow counted against her own. She congratulated Quentin on his “secret” marriage and watched his face struggle with astonishment.

When he and little Cleary had gotten her free, she put on the ratty hospital robe and went slowly out on the ward. The faces there were empty or hostile, the same as ever; the first shock of a return was always brutal. It was early evening; she had lost all of the previous afternoon and most of the morning. The trays were just being given out. In the corner, Dowben’s Mary was muttering rites over her dinner. Miss Coral was in seclusion again, probably; Helene was hiding from her in bitterness and envy … and friendship. Deborah sat down, heartsick, and looked at the meal.

She heaved a sigh over the lukewarm substance on the plate, and suddenly Dowben’s Mary stood up and flung her coffee cup and saucer, and it hit Deborah a sharp, glancing blow on the head. She turned to face Mary and
saw her unchanged, as if she were unaware of what she had done. The attendant came, slightly menacing them both because he didn’t know what had happened even though he had been sitting there and he felt guilty at having missed it all. Deborah felt in her hair for the wetness and remembered, as if it were medieval history, another gesture like that—her gesture years ago after Helene’s attack with the tray.

She looked again at the faces on the ward. Her presence was making them struggle with Maybes. Suddenly she realized that she was a Doris Rivera, a living symbol of hope and failure and the terror they all felt of their own resiliency and hers, reeling punch-drunk from beating after beating, yet, at the secret bell, up again for more. She saw why she could never explain the nature of her failures to these people who so needed to understand it, and why she could never justify scraping together her face and strength to go out again … and again. In some ways reality was as private a kingdom as Yr. The dimension of meaning could never be made plain to people whose survival depended on its abridgment or eradication. Mary’s cup and saucer glancing hard off Deborah’s head, and the unshielded fear and anger that Mary turned at her, made Deborah understand why the anguish had begun to come as her hand had hung up the telephone after delivering a triumphant piece of news. Yr was forcing her to choose at last. With her acceptance as a member in the world, a person with a present and a possible future, a Newtonian, a believer in cause and effect, the final lines of choice were drawn. It had come in agony and violence, in the familiar terror of the Pit, only because she was still very inexperienced in her knowledge of the difference between problems and symptoms, and so the sickness, which was also a source of her only defense and strength, had placed her where it was safe to make a choice. It was time for true allegiance.

When the trays were cleared away, she asked for her schoolbooks. The attendant brought them out and handed
them to her with something of a respect for what they symbolized. She opened the first one.

“A
N EQUILATERAL TRIANGLE IS ONE IN WHICH THE ANGLE OPPOSITE AC IS EQUAL TO THE ANGLE OPPOSITE AB AND IS ALSO EQUAL TO THE ANGLE OPPOSITE BC
.”

“You rotten whore! Let me go!” sounded from the dormitory.

You are not of them,
Anterrabae said quietly.

I am of them. Furii says that you will be a contribution, but I don’t yet know how,
Deborah said to him.
I will have to learn how. Then, maybe …

“A
LINE BISECTING AN
80-
DEGREE ANGLE FORMS TWO ANGLES WHOSE SUM IS
80
DEGREES
.”

Mary: “I wonder if insanity is catching. Maybe the hospital could sell us for antibodies.”

Will you not save us as a shield against your hard rind, Bird-one?

I can’t do that anymore. I am going to hang with the world.

But the world is lawless and wild….

Nevertheless.

Remember your own childhood
—
remember Hitler and the Bomb.

In spite of it.

Remember the blank-wall faces and the “sanity papers
—”
and hungering after ones that go hand in hand.

No matter. No matter what.

We could wait until you called us….

I will not call. I am going to hang with the world. Full weight.

Good-by, Bird-one.

Good-by then, Anterrabae. Good-by, Yr.
“T
ECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCES AFFECTED
W
ESTERN

E
XPANSION IN MANY SPECIFIC WAYS
.”

Constantia: “Can’t you see that I’m suffering, you goddamn pigs!”