Fifty Supervised Hours

The flyer had been taped to the bakery window for three weeks before Jenna actually read it. She read it the morning after a Tuesday that had gone badly, a Tuesday that started with a color correction on a client who cried in the chair and ended with Mike calling to say he'd be on a job until nine. Again. Somewhere in the middle there'd been a walk-in who wanted "just a trim" and argued about the price for twenty minutes.

CERTIFICATION COURSE: CLINICAL HYPNOSIS, TWELVE WEEKS. TAUGHT BY PAULA GRANT, C.H. Evenings, above the bakery on KK.

Jenna stood on the sidewalk with her salon key still in the door and read it three times. She'd wanted to learn hypnosis since she was nineteen and watched a stage show in Wisconsin Dells where a hypnotist made a grown man cluck like a chicken, and something about it had lodged in her and never come out. Not the chicken part. The part where a voice could reach into somebody and rearrange them. She'd bought books. Even a lousy DVD set. She'd never done anything with any of it.

She pushed the door open and climbed the stairs that smelled like cinnamon before she could talk herself out of it.

Paula Grant turned out to be a woman in her fifties with silver-shot hair cut short and reading glasses pushed up on her head, setting out folding chairs in a room with a squeaky floor. She looked up like she'd been expecting Jenna, which was impossible, and didn't seem surprised anyway.

"You're early," Paula said. "Class doesn't start for a month."

"I saw the flyer. I wanted to, uh. Ask about it."

"Ask."

Jenna had expected a sales pitch. She got a stapled syllabus instead, and Paula watching her read it over the top of nothing, because the glasses were still in her hair.

"Twelve weeks, one night a week, plus fifty supervised practice hours," Paula said. "You can't do the hours alone. You need a subject who'll commit. Most people quit right there."

"Why?"

"Because it's fifty hours, and because it's hard to ask someone to sit still and trust you for fifty hours when you've never done it before." Paula took the glasses down and put them on, and her eyes behind them were steady and unhurried. "It's also the part that makes you good. Anyone can learn the scripts. The hours teach you to watch a person."

Jenna's stomach did something complicated. Fifty hours. She thought of Mike on the couch with his feet in her lap, Mike who fell asleep during the previews, Mike who would absolutely sit still for her if she asked. "The subject, do they have to be, like, a volunteer-volunteer? Or can it be someone you know?"

"Usually is. Spouses are common." Paula said it plainly, no eyebrow, and Jenna felt her face go hot anyway, the way it always had, over nothing, over everything.

"Okay," Jenna said. "I want to sign up."

"Fill this out. First class is the fourth."

That was it. That was the whole enrollment. Jenna walked back down the cinnamon stairs holding a clipboard and a syllabus and feeling like she'd jumped off a diving board.

She waited until Friday pizza night, because Friday pizza night was when Mike was actually Mike, off the ladder, showered, feet up, one hand in the box and one hand somewhere generally in her direction.

"So I signed up for a class," she said, going for casual and hearing her own voice pitch up on the last word.

"Yeah? What class?"

"Hypnosis. Certification. It's twelve weeks and there's this practice requirement where I need someone to, you know. Hypnotize. Fifty hours of it."

Mike took a bite, chewed, looked at her. "You want to hypnotize me?"

"I mean. Only if you want. It's just sitting in a chair."

"Fifty hours of sitting in a chair."

"It's over months, it's not fifty hours in a row, that would be insane, nobody could..." She stopped because Mike was grinning.

"Jenna. I fall asleep watching commercials. You're telling me you need a guy to sit still and relax while you talk to him, and you're asking like it's a favor."

"Is that a yes?"

"That's a yes. Might be the easiest yes I've ever given you." He pulled her feet-side of the couch into his lap and stole her slice. "Wait'll I tell the guys my wife's going to make me cluck like a chicken."

"It's not a stage show, it's clinical, there's a whole ethics section..."

"Bawk," said Mike, serenely, and ate her crust.

The first class was seven people in folding chairs, and Paula opened with the least exciting introduction Jenna had ever heard, which somehow made it more exciting, because Paula talked about trance the way a mechanic talks about an engine, and Jenna had never heard anyone talk about it like that. Not spooky. Not stagey. A trainable state of focused attention, a skill you could measure.

"People think it's magic or it's fake," Paula said. "It's neither. It's the most ordinary thing in the world done deliberately. Now. I need a volunteer."

Mike's hand went up before Jenna could stop it, and Paula looked at him, and then at Jenna, one beat, reading glasses catching the fluorescent light.

"Your husband," Paula said. It wasn't a question.

"He's my practice subject," Jenna said, and hated how defensive it came out.

"Good. Come up front."

Mike sat in the chair at the front of the room like it was a barbershop chair, relaxed, legs stretched out, and Paula stood beside him and explained what she was going to do, out loud, to the whole class, while she did it. Progressive relaxation. Eyelids first, then breathing. Jenna took notes and stopped taking notes somewhere around the second minute because Mike's face was changing.

She'd seen Mike relax a thousand times. This wasn't that. His shoulders dropped like something had been cut. His breathing went slow and deep, and his face went smooth in a way she'd only ever seen on him in sleep, except he wasn't asleep, because when Paula told the class to observe his eyelids, they were moving. Rapid, tiny, like he was watching something behind them.

Under two minutes. Paula had said some people sink fast and Mike had gone under in under two minutes, for a woman he'd met forty minutes ago, and something about the ease of it, the trust of it, his big electrician hands lying open and empty on his thighs, did something to Jenna that she was not prepared for and did not have a file for.

It started as jealousy. She recognized that part. Paula touched his shoulder to shift his posture and Jenna's whole chest went tight. But underneath the jealousy, in the same exact spot, low in her stomach, was heat. A slow twist of it, shameless and specific. Mike, gone. Open. Doing whatever a voice told him to do, and the voice wasn't hers.

She crossed her legs and stared at her notebook and wrote arm levitation in handwriting that came out shaky.

Paula counted him up at the end, and Mike blinked, stretched, grinned around the room like he'd had the best nap of his life, and when he sat back down next to Jenna he said, "Whoa. That's weird. That's really weird. It's like ten minutes went by."

"It was four," Jenna said.

"Huh." He rubbed his face. "You're going to do that to me?"

"Fifty hours," Jenna said, and her voice came out lower than she meant it to.

Paula, collecting her notes at the front, glanced over once. Just once. Calm and unhurried, like she'd noticed something on the page Jenna hadn't written yet.

Jenna packed her bag and kept her blush down with sheer professional discipline, the same discipline she used on crying clients, and thought, all the way down those stairs, that fifty hours was going to be a lot more interesting than the syllabus let on.