“Everything was just fine,” she says. “And then suddenly, right after Christmas, I started having these headaches, and now they keep getting worse and worse. Sometimes they start in the daytime and I have to cancel my classes and go back home and go to bed. Other times I just think they’re starting and I get so worried I can’t do a thing. I thought I was getting one when I came in here, if you want to know, but I didn’t. I just can’t ever tell. I think about them all the time. Sometimes, and this is the worst part, they start at night and I wake up half dead with them and then of course there’s no sleeping for the rest of the night after that. I’m getting so tired,” Sybill says.
“It must be terrible for you,” Bob says.
Sybill sinks back in her chair. He’s really very nice, she thinks. He would never make you bark. Sybill tells Bob that the headaches are growing both more frequent and more severe, that she averages three or four a week now, and she worries about holding on to her job. She describes the headaches, how they start with her eyes, how objects and people begin to glow, to shimmer, before the light around them collects itself and strikes into her brain. “Just exactly like lightning,” she says. Bob sympathizes and says, “Migraine, of course,” which of course it is. She describes how the shooting pains start sometimes at her neck, other times at her forehead. Then the headache spreads out to cover her whole head, growing heavier, like an iron hat squeezing tighter and tighter. This is the point at which Sybill wakes up, if she has been sleeping. “Imagine waking up to that!” Sybill says.
Bob shakes his head back and forth, frowning, obviously moved by her pain. All in all he is one of the nicest little men she has ever talked to, a big relief. Usually Sybill doesn’t talk to men at all, or at least not about anything very personal. But Bob, she can tell, is really interested, as interested as Betty or any one of her women friends. Plus he’s not exactly a man, either, being a hypnotist. So she tells him all about the headaches and he writes down Dr. Rowland’s name and a lot of other information such as her age, place of birth (Booker Creek, Va.), education (B.A., Longwood College), and so on, and then he says he wonders if she’ll be a good subject for hypnosis.
“What do you mean?” Sybill asks.
“Well, some people are and some aren’t. It depends upon what we call your suggestibility.”
“You mean it might not work on me?” Now that she’s here, Sybill can’t stand to think she’s gone to all this trouble and spent twenty-five dollars for nothing.
“Well, let’s see.” Bob smiles at her. “Why don’t you just hold your arm out with your palm up, like this?” Bob holds his own arm out to show her. “Now, when you do this, I’m going to put a nickel on your palm. Okay?” He scoots his chair forward, away from his desk.
“Okay.” Sybill holds out an arm which seems mostly unrelated to her, suddenly; she approves of the navy sleeve, the red cuff of her blouse, the gold bracelet.
“Now open your hand,” Bob says, and she does, and Bob places the nickel on her palm. “In a moment, when I give you directions, your hand will turn over, and the coin will fall on the floor.”
“It won’t,” Sybill says. “This is silly.”
“We’ll see,” Bob says. He pauses—Sybill hears only the hiss of the air conditioner. Her arm is beginning to ache. His soft voice starts again. “Now your hand will turn over, and the coin will fall onto the floor. Observe your hand as it slowly begins to turn, turn, turn, turn—”
Sybill watches as her arm turns, as the coin drops onto the thick tan carpeting at her feet. This arm has nothing to do with her at all. Sybill feels special, like somebody on That’s Incredible.
“You did very well,” Bob tells her. His voice is so calm, she sees why he’s good at his job. “Now I want you to come over here.” He stands up and walks to a dropleaf table in the corner, beside a door which undoubtedly leads into the rest of his house. He seats himself in a ladderback chair at the table and motions to Sybill to do the same. He puts a gold ring, with a string tied to it, on the table before them. Sybill is thrilled. “When I tell you to,” Bob says, “I want you to pick up the end of this string. I want you to stretch your arm out across the top of this table, letting the ring dangle, and imagine that you are looking at a large circle which is in the tabletop. I want you to let your eyes move around and around this circle, until the ring on the end of the string begins to move in a circle also. The ring will move all by itself.”
Lord. Sybill picks up the end of the string and holds her arm out, thinking that whatever happens from here on out, she’s almost gotten her money’s worth already. “Now,” Bob says. Sybill lets the ring dangle while she looks around and around the top of the table, just exactly as if a circle were really there, although it’s not, and she’s not even surprised when after a while the ring starts to move too, slowly at first and then faster, exactly like one of those mechanical swings at the fair. “Now the ring will stop moving, gradually, it is moving slower, and even slower now, as you see. When it comes to a complete stop, you may place the ring back on the table again and resume your original chair.”
And he’s already there, in the chair at his desk, smiling at her.
“Well?” Sybill asks. Her heart is beating away in her throat, she feels like she might be having a hot flash, maybe it’s time for the Change of Life. This whole thing might be nothing but the Change of Life coming on.
“I think we can work together very well.” Bob looks concerned, sweet, tired.
“Then you can hypnotize me okay.” Actually Sybill thinks this is not surprising. She’s been good at everything she’s ever tried her hand at, all her life. But she doesn’t say this to Bob.
“We’ll talk more,” Bob says, “and I’ll speak with Dr. Rowland. Next time we’ll try a light trance and perhaps I’ll begin to ask you some questions.”
“What kind of questions?”
“Questions concerning your headaches and what events might happen to trigger them—sometimes the simplest events trigger complex emotions which we ourselves are not even aware of.”
“I’m not here for any psychiatric,” Sybill says. “I want you to leave my subconscious out of this.”
Bob smiles. “You made your position on that issue quite clear on the telephone. Nevertheless I feel that there are certain facts which might be brought to light which could, perhaps, help us to understand the origins of your pain—”
“You mean my family?” Sybill asks suddenly. Her nails look just awful; she doesn’t know why she keeps chipping away at them like this.
“Your family, yes. Perhaps.”
“They’re such a mess!” Sybill says. Now she’s sure Bob will think they’re more of a mess than anybody else’s family is, just as she’s sure that she’s his most suggestible patient. Once Sybill goes into something, she goes whole hog.
“At any rate, I feel sure that I can offer suggestions to you which will help you, in the posthypnotic state, to deal more effectively with the headaches. Your anxiety level can certainly be reduced. Now there’s one more thing I’m curious about,” Bob says. “The rest will keep until next week. I wonder if you can think of any way in which your life since Christmas has been different from your life prior to that date. I wonder if any change has occurred at all, no matter how insignificant it may appear to you.”
Sybill swallows hard. She might have known this was coming. She hasn’t told anybody, not even Betty, because it’s so silly, after all these years. Should she tell Bob, a perfect stranger? But Sybill reminds herself that she’s here to get her money’s worth, and that her Blue Cross might not even cover hypnotism. She might have to pay for this whole thing out of her own pocket. But is it even worth telling? It’s nothing much, after all, just silliness. Still . . .
“There’s a man in one of my condominiums,” Sybill says after a while. “A widower, his wife died last spring, so he sold their house and bought into The Oaks. He’s
only been with us for two months, this old Mr. Edward Bing. He’s not Chinese,” Sybill adds abruptly, “in case you might have thought so from the name.”
“No,” Bob says gravely. “And?”
“And he wants to go out with me,” Sybill says. “I can just tell he does. He’s not that old. He’s said . . . he’s done . . . oh, he’s done a lot of things. It’s perfectly clear to me.”
“Well?” says Bob. “After all, you’re a very attractive woman, Miss Hess. I take it you’re not interested?”
“Oh, heavens no!” Sybill laughs heartily. “Not in Edward Bing! Besides, even if I was interested, which I’m not for one minute, believe me, I couldn’t very well have an affair with him, could I? I mean a date, of course—” She flushes and thinks again of the Change of Life—“I couldn’t have a date with all these headaches, waking up in the night and all.”
“I suppose not.” Bob’s eyes, like bright blue marbles behind his wimpy pink glasses, seem very intent.
“Well, that’s all ridiculous,” Sybill says. “Believe me, Ed Bing is totally beside the point.”
“Let me ask you, Sybill”—Bob leans forward—“are you a virgin?”
“None of your beeswax!” Sybill rises abruptly, furious, but Bob apologizes so meekly that she finds she can’t stay mad. Then she finds herself making another appointment anyway. She’s gone this far, after all. Besides, she knows it’s his job to ask questions like that. She’s not paying him to be polite. Leaving, she notices again the door at the back of the study, the door to the rest of his house, and envisions his wife right there behind it, listening, jealous. How silly! But Bob thinks Sybill’s a very attractive woman, he said so. She shakes hands with him; her hand would make two of his. “See you next week,” she says. Then he slides the glass door open and the heat hits Sybill like a ton of bricks. She hesitates, squares her shoulders, and marches back out into the damp hot rosy world.
* * *
Betty is just as jealous as she can be, she must have asked Sybill about Bob a million times. Betty wants to be hypnotized, too. The two women sit at the shiny maple table in Sybill’s dinette, as they do most nights, eating meatloaf, salad, and baked potatoes, while the TV plays on in the living room. Or the great room, as it’s called in the glossy brochures that advertise these condominiums. Betty has a way of running her tongue around the inside of her lips which Sybill has never noticed before; it gets all over her, though. Sybill is worse off, actually, since she saw the hypnotist. She’s had headaches two nights in a row and she’s real nervous. “I’m just as jumpy as a cat,” she says to Betty, who agrees.
“But Lord, why not?” Betty asks, waving her fork in the air. “If I had a strange man going down in my subconscious on Thursday I’d be nervous, too. Girl, I’d be more nervous than you! What do you reckon he’ll find out?”
“Probably nothing.” Sybill puts A.1. sauce all over her meatloaf. On TV, a blond reporter from California says that twenty-two volcanic eruptions throughout the world in the past year may have contributed to the current bad weather. “Or the cause may be El Niño, a fickle east-to-west countercurrent,” the blonde says. “In any case, this rainy spring, which has caused deaths, floods, mud slides, and havoc, is one of the wettest on record for many parts of the country.” The TV shows houses in Nevada and Utah, sliding down the muddy sides of mountains.
“Look at that,” Betty says.
“I would never buy a split-level in the first place,” Sybill says. “I wouldn’t want to live on a hill.”
“They say it goes back to your parents.” Betty runs her tongue around the inside of her lips.
“What does?”
“Everything,” Betty says. Sometimes Sybill just hates Betty, who only went to high school but acts so smart. Betty, who is a hospital receptionist, is a tall edgy woman with dark permanent curls and a jutting chin. Once Betty was married for three years, fifteen years ago. Now she claims she can’t even remember what that was like.
Sybill looks at TV where they are talking about Alzheimer’s disease which kills one hundred twenty thousand people annually and is the fourth leading cause of death. Sybill finishes up her meatloaf and lights a Merit and listens closely. Alzheimer’s disease causes memory loss, confusion, speech impairment, and personality change. It doesn’t say if headaches are a symptom or not. Huh. Sybill snorts. She doesn’t believe in Alzheimer’s disease because it doesn’t make sense to her that a disease that major could have been around for so long without anybody even noticing it, or naming it, or talking about it, or anything. The first Sybill ever heard of it was last spring.
“It’s just popular,” Sybill says.
Betty lights up too, staring at Sybill strangely.
“That Alzheimer’s,” Sybill explains. “Like anorexia nervosa. You never heard of that either until it got popular, and then it was everyplace.”
“I heard of it,” Betty says.
Sybill knows for a fact that all Betty ever does at the hospital is give out visitor passes. “Oh, come on.” Sybill’s patience is wearing real thin. “Nobody did.” She gets up and snaps off the TV before the sports and weather come on, even though they always watch the sports and weather, and frequently “Family Feud.” “I need to lie down,” she says.
“Well!” Betty, miffed, stands to go. “It probably all goes back to your mother,” she says.
“I love my mother, it’s the rest of them I can’t stand.” Of course this is not quite true of Myrtle. But when Sybill thinks of her brother and sisters in general, she feels a sense of confusion amounting almost to nausea. Arthur, Myrtle, Lacy, and Candy—especially Lacy and Candy. Just being in the same room with Candy embarrasses Sybill.
“I can tell you’re holding back,” Betty says.
“I don’t know who you think you are, Dr. Joyce Brothers or who,” Sybill snaps. Of course she’s holding back, she has no intention of telling Betty or any other real person about old Ed Bing whose condominium even now is visible right across the pool, who’s probably cooking his own steak in his own dinette, this minute.
“Buenos días!” Betty leaves in a huff, and Sybill sinks down on her puffy white sofa and cries. Betty’s her best friend, after all. Sybill feels her eyes swelling up; she can’t get her breath. She’s not used to crying like this—to be honest, she hasn’t shed a tear since her Pekingese, Missy, passed away at the age of twelve, two years ago. Before that, it was all the way back to Love Story. It’s not that she doesn’t feel strong emotions, it’s just that she rarely cries. A line from a song on the radio pops into her head: “Used to be I was falling in love, but now I’m only falling apart.” Sybill can’t remember the next line, but the verse ends with the line “total eclipse of the heart.” Sybill thinks she’s having a total eclipse of the heart. And she’s not up to it, it’s been years . . .
Because Sybill is the kind of woman who gave up all those ideas long ago, gave them up so gradually she didn’t even realize she was doing it. As a young girl, she always expected to marry. As a young woman, she expected this, too. But she was in no hurry. It was a question of waiting for the right man to come along. While she waited, Sybill finished college and worked and dated others—such as the mathematics instructor at Douglas Freeman High School in Richmond where she first taught, a red-haired man who took her out to the Bonanza Steak House for dinner and even, on several occasions, tuned up her car, but somehow never got beyond that stage—nor, Sybill realized even at the time, did she want him to. Although kind, he was not Mr. Right.
For two whole years after that, she went out with Mercer Delaney, a pharmacist from Farmville, Virginia, who she met through a colleague at Douglas Freeman. This was the last time, looking back on it, that anybody ever offered her a blind date. Sybill and Mercer Delaney dated every other weekend when his sister came to stay with his mother, who lived with him. Sybill and Mercer attended many model airplane rallies—his hobby. Sybill spe
nt a lot of time sitting out in the wind catching cold while Mercer tried to repair his engine. Finally it came to seem to her that Mercer would never grow up, that his mother would never die.
Sybill’s most serious love, however, was illicit. A man who came to teach industrial arts at the technical school in Roanoke, where Sybill still works, began to show her a lot of attention—this was in 1975, close to ten years ago. His name was Joe Ross Miller. Joe Ross Miller started to drink coffee with Sybill every morning. He asked her opinion of world events. He confided in her about his wild son, his shy daughter, his neurotic wife. They had a lot in common, Sybill found, including a distaste for the messier, unrestrained elements of family life. They shared a sense of the way things should be. After a month or two, Joe Ross Miller’s manner toward Sybill changed. He began to stand a lot closer to her, to brush her hand accidentally. He asked her leading, suggestive questions, such as whether or not she liked taking long hot baths. Although he was bald except for a fringe like a monk at the back of his head, Joe Ross Miller had eyes like Omar Sharif, dark and hot. He had big strong white workingman’s hands, with dark curly hairs on the knuckles. After he had been at the technical school for three months, Sybill knew he wanted to have an affair with her.
But she was spared the big decision, after all. Sybill’s father (or stepfather, to be exact) died that winter, in late December, and while she was at home helping her mother run the funeral, Joe Ross Miller gave notice at the technical school, citing “personal reasons,” and disappeared. Sybill never found out what those “personal reasons” were. He might have found a better job; he was always dissatisfied, always looking. Or his neurotic wife might have had a complete nervous breakdown. Or he might have had one himself! What Sybill preferred to believe, though, was that Joe Ross Miller had left because of her, because he had decided to give her up. Since he knew they could never marry, seeing her that way, every day, had been too painful for him to bear. Actually, Sybill found, she was glad he made this decision. It was more sensible all around. When she returned to work after her stepfather’s funeral, she cleaned out her desk and opened the window and stood in front of it for a long time, letting the cold winter air sweep her up like a benediction.