I Never Promised You A Rose Garden Read Online Free

these things were so, so be it, and she would leave this office at least having stated her tiredness and disgust at the whole dark and anguish-running world.
    The doctor said simply, “Well, that seems to be quite a list. Some of these, I think, are not so, but we have a job cut out for us.”
    “To make me friendly and sweet and agreeable and happy in the lies I tell.”
    “To help you to get well.”
    “To shut up the complaints.”
    “To end them, where they are the products of an upheaval in your feelings.”
    The rope tightened. Fear was flowing wildly in Deborah’s head, turning her vision gray. “You’re saying what they all say—phony complaints about nonexistent sicknesses.”
    “It seems to me that I said that you are very sick, indeed.”
    “Like the rest of them here?” It was as near as she dared go, already much too near the black places of terror.
    “Do you mean to ask me if I think you belong here, if yours is what is called a mental illness? Then the answeris yes. I think you are sick in this way, but with your very hard work here and with a doctor’s working hard with you, I think you can get better.”
    As bald as that. Yet with the terror connected with the hedged-about, circled-around word “crazy,” the unspoken word that Deborah was thinking about now, there was a light coming from the doctor’s spoken words, a kind of light that shone back on many rooms of the past. The home and the school and all of the doctors’ offices ringing with the joyful accusation: There Is Nothing The Matter With You. Deborah had known for years and years that there was more than a little the matter—something deeply and gravely the matter, more even than the times of blindness, intense pain, lameness, terror, and the inability to remember anything at all might indicate. They had always said, “There is nothing the matter with you, if you would only …” Here at last was a vindication of all the angers in those offices.
    The doctor said, “What are you thinking about? I see your face relax a little.”
    “I am thinking about the difference between a misdemeanor and a felony.”
    “How so?”
    “The prisoner pleads guilty to the charge of not having acute something-itis and accepts the verdict of guilty of being nuts in the first degree.”
    “Perhaps in the second degree,” the doctor said, smiling a little. “Not entirely voluntary nor entirely with forethought.”
    Deborah suddenly recalled the picture of her parents standing very single and yet together on the other side of the shatter-proof locked door. Not aforethought, this thing, but more than a little with malice.
    Deborah became aware of the nurse moving about in the other room as if to let them know that the time was up.
    The doctor said, “If it’s all right with you, we will make another appointment and begin our talks, because I believe that you and I, if we work like the deviltogether, can beat this thing. First, I want to tell you again that I will not pull away symptoms or sickness from you against your will.”
    Deborah shied away from the commitment, but she allowed her face a very guarded “yes,” and the doctor saw it. They walked from the office with Deborah striving assiduously to act as if she were somewhere else, elaborately unconcerned with this present place and person.
    “Tomorrow at the same time,” the doctor told the nurse and the patient.
    “She can’t understand you,” Deborah said. “Charon spoke in Greek.”
    Dr. Fried laughed a little and then her face turned grave. “Someday I hope to help you see this world as other than a Stygian Hell.”
    They turned and left, and Charon, in white cap and striped uniform, guided the removed spirit toward the locked ward. Dr. Fried watched them walking back to the large building and thought: Somewhere in that precocity and bitterness and somewhere in the illness, whose limits she could not yet define, lay a hidden strength. It was there and working; it had sounded in