“Gorse Is Not People,” a short story by Janet Frame

“Gorse Is Not People”

by

Janet Frame

Do you remember your twenty-first birthday? The party, the cake, and cutting a slice of it to put under your pillow that night, to make you dream of your future beloved; the giant key; the singing:

I’m twenty-one today!

Twenty-one today!

I’ve got the key of the door!

Never been twenty-one before!

Trivial, obvious words. Yet when the party was over and you lay in bed remembering the glinting key and the shamrock taste of the small glass of wine, and perhaps the taste of a sneaked last kiss in the dark, then the song seemed not trivial or obvious but a poetic statement of a temporal wonder. You had, as they say, attained your majority. You could vote in the elections; you could leave home against your parents’ wishes; you could marry in defiance of all opposition. You had crossed a legal border into a free country, and you now walked equipped with a giant tinsel key, a cardboard key covered with threepenny spangles.

Or perhaps your twenty-first birthday did not happen that way. Perhaps there was no party, no cake, no wine, and no kiss? I would like to tell you about Naida’s twenty-first birthday.

Naida was a dwarf, which is not really a rare thing. I suppose in our lifetime we see many dwarves—first, perhaps, at the circus, where they are advertised as the tiniest people in the world and we pay to watch them moving about in their almost walnut-shell or matchbox beds. Sometimes we pass them in the street and stare hard for a moment, then pretend we haven’t seen them, until they have passed us and we look back, saying, “It must be strange, how strange it must be, such tiny folk, and us out of reach, like tall trees!”

Now, dwarves are people in their own right, who move among us, and below us, and are usually bright people, and kind—living in a place where staircases are mountains, and streets are caverns; they are brave to walk menaced by cliffs of brick and peaks of polished snow.

But Naida didn’t live in what was called “the world.” Since her tenth birthday, she had lived in a mental hospital, in the ward where they put people who were strange in shape and ways—where old frail women were tucked under thin frayed bedspreads, waiting for the time when their jaws would drop suddenly in the night; where curious bland children with slit eyes and lips bubbling with saliva played with rag toys or a red wooden engine in a yard that was hidden from the outside world. Sickly yellow grass curled up through the cracks in the concrete, but no geraniums blossomed there. Should not children have geraniums, the dry, sturdy, dusty flowers with the red stony-velvet smell?

Naida grew up in that yard, until on her fifteenth birthday—because she was beginning to take too much notice of the male patients and was writing notes to the baker and the pig boy and the farmhands—she was put in yet another ward, where, it was said, people stayed forever. She was the youngest patient there, and the smallest; everyone felt sorry for her, and was kind to her. On Sundays, the minister sometimes let her choose the hymn: “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” “The Lord Is My Shepherd,” or “Shall We Gather at the River.” On Mondays, the sister of the ward took her to fetch supplies, or through to the matron’s office for the mail; and every morning at eleven o’clock Naida went with the nurse to collect the bread. She was also taken up by the group of women who came each month with string bags full of yellowed magazines—the Ladies’ Committee—and who had frightened looks on their faces, for they did not know how to talk to the patients but leaned forward and whispered to them, as if trying to share guilty secrets, and addressed them as “dear,” talking as they might have talked to children, which was a sad approach, sad also for the committee women, who were attacked by the self-proclaimed goddess who resented being asked, the week before Christmas, “And what would you like Santa Claus to bring you, dear?”

Read the rest of Janet Frame’s 1954 short story “Gorse Is Not People” at The New Yorker.