Read Online I Never Promised You A Rose Garden by Joanne Greenberg - Free Book Online Page B

three and a half hours. Four hours is standard and if you’re okay we’ll let you up in half an hour.” He left. Her joints were beginning to ache from the pressure of the restraints, but reality was still there. She was amazed that she had been able to come from the deepest place without the anguish of rising.
    After what seemed like a long time, they came to let her up. As they were freeing her, she studied the construction of the cocoon. There was an ice pack under her neck and a hot-water bottle at her feet. Sheets were spread over and under the complex of wrappings which made up the mummy case. Over the sheets were three canvas strips, wide and long, which were pulled tightly across her body at the chest, stomach, and knees, and tied to the bed on the other side. A fourth strip was knotted around her feet and pulled down to be tied around bars at the foot of the bed. The wrappings were large sheets that fitted around the body; three of them interlapped like white wet leaves, and one, on the inside, held the arms to the sides.
    Deborah was weak when she got up, and had difficulty walking, but her world-self had risen. When she was dressed, she went back to her bed to lie down. The unsecret unwife of the abdicated King of England was full of solicitude. “You poor little whore,” she said, “I saw what they did to you for not sleeping with that doctor! They tied you so that you couldn’t move and then he went in and violated you.”
    “What a prize!” Deborah answered acidly.
    “Don’t lie to me! I am the unsecret unwife of the abdicated King of England!” the Wife shouted. Her phantoms flowed to her, and she began to chat with them in a parody of all of gentility’s gossip and rattling teacups. Politeness made her introduce Deborah, from whom the streaky marks of sheet creases were just beginning to fade: “And this is the little tart I was telling you about.”

chapter eight
    “Disturbed … what does disturbed
mean
?” Esther Blau said, looking at the report again. She was hoping that the word would change or that some other word would appear to modify it so that it could be transmuted into the pleasant fact she wanted. In its briefly impersonal way, the monthly report counseled patience, but the facts it contained were unambiguous, and the signature at the bottom was that of another doctor, the administrator of the Disturbed Ward. Esther wrote immediately to the hospital and shortly received a reply saying that a visit would not be wise.
    With a fear verging on panic, Esther wrote to Dr. Fried. Perhaps she might go down again, not to see Deborah, since the hospital thought it unwise, but to confer with Deborah’s doctors about this change. The answer was the attempt of an honest person to reassure. It, too, counseled patience. Of course, if she and her husband felt it necessary to come, they would be given appointments, but this seeming setback was in itself no reason for anxiety.
    Esther remembered the screams from that high, double-barred place, and she shivered. Reading the letter overagain and again, she located the subtle strain of its meaning, like a hidden message. She must not let her fear, or Jacob’s, interfere with what was happening to their daughter. She must wait and endure. Quietly, she put the letter and the report away with the others. She did not look at it again.
    “I wonder if there is a pattern …” Dr. Fried said. “You give up a secret to our view and then you get so scared that you run for cover into your panic or into your secret world. To Yr or there.”
    “Stop making my puns,” Deborah said, and they laughed a little.
    “Well then, tell me what the rhythm is, of these upsets of yours.” She was looking at her patient intently, interested in that world which had been a refuge once, had suddenly gone gray, and was now a tyranny whose rulers Deborah had to spend long days of her life propitiating.
    “One day …” Deborah started. “One day I was walking home from