The mobile rings, and for a moment, Jacqueline is confused. She never noticed it sitting down at the bottom of her purse, even though logically she knows that her fingers must have brushed against it on dozens of occasions while looking for her keys or her change or her nail file. It's a brand new phone, as well, an expensive purchase she feels certain she would have remembered making given her constant arguments with Tom over 'needless extravagances'. Not that she wants to think about the way he pays more attention to the credit card bill than to her.
But none of that changes the fact that the phone in Jacqueline's purse isn't hers. When she slowly lifts it out to look at the display screen, she doesn't recognize the phone number that's calling her. She answers it hesitantly, wondering for a moment if perhaps some other woman didn't accidentally put her phone in Jacqueline's purse during a sewing circle meeting or a book club get-together or any of the other little social activities Jacqueline uses to fill her day while her husband is busy with his practice. "H-hello?" she says, expecting to hear a stranger's voice asking about an entirely different person.
In a sense, they do. "Is Jackie Big Tits there?" Jacqueline's mouth forms a perfect 'O' of astonishment as she hears the crude, sexist question blurted out almost casually into her ears. Her eyes widen in amazement. And to her surprise, she finds that she knows exactly what this call is about.
*****
"So let's talk a bit about what you want out of this session," Doctor Hofmeister said gently, leaning forward in his chair with an earnest expression on his ruddy pink face. "You said that Bianca Stabler recommended you to me? Obviously, confidentiality concerns prevent me from discussing her issues, but if she's spoken to you about what she came here for, I can tell you that I can do something very similar for you."
Jacqueline shrugged, feeling self-conscious as ever about the gesture despite Bianca's assurances that Doctor Lawrence Hofmeister was fully respectful of women. 'Between you and me,' she'd said, a conspiratorial look in her bright blue eyes, 'I think he might be gay.' Even if he was, though, Jacqueline still half-expected him to start staring at her breasts anyway. Certainly everyone else did. She would almost consider surgery to get them reduced, if she didn't suspect that her husband would serve her with divorce papers the next day. $750,000 a year bought a lot of back massages.
"I guess I hadn't, I mean..." Jacqueline blushed, her pale cheeks going beet red for a moment as she felt the old insecurities creeping in. She hated sounding stupid in front of someone intelligent like a doctor or a lawyer or a scientist-it was what made Tom's parties so stressful for her. She was always terrified of saying the wrong thing and being instantly written off as Tom's trophy wife, bought and paid for with fancy dresses and daily beauty appointments and a maid to do all the work. And of course the stress made her babble to fill the awkward silences, which only made her feel dumber, which made her babble more in a death spiral of social anxiety. But she didn't think hypnosis could help with that.
She started over. "Bianca keeps saying that whatever my problems are, hypnosis can solve them. I mention that I forgot my car keys, and it's 'Hypnosis really improved my memory!' I say 'I really shouldn't' to the dessert cart, and it's 'Doctor H can help with those cravings.' I mention that I'm stressing out about Saturday night's party, and she says, 'You know what's really good for stress relief?' It's like she thinks it's magic or something. I finally agreed to a session with you just to get her out of my hair, to be honest."
Doctor Hofmeister chuckled. "The young woman is nothing if not persistent," he said, his hazel eyes twinkling in amusement. He didn't look like he should be calling Bianca 'young', though; the beard hid his baby cheeks a little, and guys always looked a bit older once they went bald, but he looked to be about the same age as Jacqueline and Bianca. "I really should discourage that kind of behavior, but it does wonders for my practice."
He chuckled, and Jacqueline let out a snicker right along with him-certainly Jacqueline wasn't the only woman in their social circle of bored housewives that had gotten an earful about the restorative powers of hypnotherapy with Doctor Hofmeister. She was pretty certain that some of the others had already been in to see him-Nancy was always ducking out of lunch for appointments now, and Millicent had skipped book club three times in the last four weeks with vague excuses. They probably didn't want Bianca to get even more smug than she already was by admitting that they had broken down and given 'Doctor H' a try. Certainly Jacqueline wasn't about to mention it, either.
"She's not wrong, though," Doctor Hofmeister said, once the moment of comfortable laughter subsided. "Hypnosis is really quite a versatile tool. If you'd like, I can put you under first, and you can let your subconscious guide you to the problem you don't know you have." He took out a pendulum, a simple polished amethyst on a silver chain, and held it just above Jacqueline's line of sight. "It'll only take a few minutes, and I think you'll find that even if you don't have anything much you want to talk about, you'll enjoy the experience of relaxing."
Jacqueline froze, her eyes fixed nervously on the swaying pendulum as if afraid that it would lunge for her. Somehow, the reality of hypnosis seemed a lot more unnerving than the abstract concept; once she was confronted with the idea of actually going into trance at the direction of a complete stranger, it seemed almost terrifying. "Um, well, I, I don't... I don't really think I have..." She trailed off into silence, embarrassed once again by her own verbal ineptitude.
"Oh, you'd be surprised," Doctor Hofmeister replied soothingly, his hand remaining perfectly steady even as the pendulum settled into a slow, easy rhythm across Jacqueline's field of vision. "Everyone has things that are bothering them from time to time, and everyone benefits from a chance to discuss them. Trance just lets you get out of your own head a little, allows you to relax and let go of your thoughts by focusing your attention somewhere else to help your brain unwind and take a little break. It's nice to have something to distract your mind from any worries and cares, so that you can just feel warm and peaceful and happy for a while."
Jacqueline opened her mouth to object... but somehow, it did feel kind of comfortable to lay back on the couch and let her eyes follow the pendulum as it moved back and forth, back and forth. The chain caught the light just a little in places, making it seem as though it was sliding across an arc of sparkling silver again and again with each swing, and Jacqueline found that her gaze seemed to go from side to side almost effortlessly in time to the motion of the amethyst stone. As though she wasn't really thinking about it at all.
"And sometimes," Doctor Hofmeister continued, his voice dipping into a slightly lower register as it softened into a breathy murmur, "the more you get outside of your own head, the easier it is to recognize what's going on inside that brain of yours. It can be so nice to focus those heavy eyes on the pendulum, keep staring as it swings back and forth, just following the stone with that blank, sleepy gaze and letting that drowsy, dreamy body relax, and letting the mind float free a little. Almost like it's on a tether, and hypnosis is letting that tether play out further and further to let you see Jacqueline from the outside."
Jacqueline blinked, her eyes feeling strangely and unaccountably heavy as she gazed up at the swaying stone. It felt like it was becoming difficult to keep them open, as though the constant effort of looking just a little bit higher than her eye level was exhausting her so much that she couldn't keep following the pendulum with her stare and think at the same time, and Jacqueline's expression went just a little bit slack as she tried harder to concentrate on the motion of the swinging amethyst.
"And sometimes," Doctor Hofmeister went on, his voice settling into a soporific drone that made Jacqueline feel like he'd somehow been talking forever, "the things that you see when you look at Jacqueline from the outside can make her a little uncomfortable to know that someone knows that about her. Even if that someone is just her. Can't it?" Jacqueline nodded loosely, her head nodding forward with a deep sigh that seemed to exhale the tension out of her body in a rush. She always hated that about therapy, having to do all that deep examination of the ball of insecurities and anxieties that always seemed to be lurking just under the surface. It felt too much like poking a bruise.
Doctor Hofmeister smiled gently. Jacqueline saw it out of the corner of her field of vision, but her attention was mostly focused on the pendulum now. "So what we can do is take the 'you' that's floating on the end of that tether and give her a name, so that the 'you' that I'm speaking to isn't Jacqueline at all and Jacqueline doesn't have to listen to what we're talking about. Does that make sense?" Jacqueline nodded again, her head sinking a little bit further forward and her eyes now having to roll all the way up behind her eyelids to keep the swinging stone in view.
"That's right," the doctor said, stroking Jacqueline's mind with tones of warm praise. "Jacqueline doesn't need to listen to us talk, or even to think about what we're saying. She can stay safe and warm and comfortable inside her own mind, with the pendulum, and you and I can share the important things. I think I'm going to call you Jackie. Does that sound like a good name?" Jackie's brow furrowed in concentration, her eyes squeezing shut as she tried to process the logic of Doctor Hofmeister's words. It all seemed so reasonable, and yet somehow it seemed like such an intense and overwhelming way of handling her problems. She, she didn't know if it was the best idea, making a whole other person in her brain just to talk about herself...
