Tunneling to the Center of the Earth Read online

  Tunneling to the Center of the Earth

  Stories

  Kevin Wilson

  For Debbie, Kelly, and Kristen Wilson, who made me.

  And for Leigh Anne Couch, who keeps me.

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Grand Stand-In

  Blowing Up on the Spot

  The Dead Sister Handbook: A Guide for Sensitive Boys

  Birds in the House

  Mortal Kombat

  Tunneling to the Center of the Earth

  The Shooting Man

  The Choir Director Affair (The Baby’s Teeth)

  Go, Fight, Win

  The Museum of Whatnot

  Worst-Case Scenario

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  There’s nothing in this warm, vegetal dusk

  That is not beautiful or that will last.

  —“TROPICAL COURTYARD” BY JOE BOLTON

  One hopes for so much from a chicken and is so dreadfully disillusioned.

  —“THE EGG” BY SHERWOOD ANDERSON

  grand stand-in

  the key to this job is to always remember that you aren’t replacing anyone’s grandmother. You aren’t trying to be a better grandmother than the first one. For all intents and purposes, you are the grandmother, and always have been. And if you can do this, can provide this level of grandmotherliness with each family, every time, then you can make a good career out of this. Not to say that it isn’t weird sometimes. Because it is. More often than not, actually, it is incredibly, undeniably weird.

  I never had a family of my own. I didn’t get married, couldn’t see the use of it. Most of my own family is gone now, and the ones that are still around, I don’t see anymore. To most people, I probably look like an old maid, buying for one, and this is perfectly fine with me. I like my privacy; if I go to bed with someone, it isn’t a person who has to spend his entire life with me afterward. I like the dimensions of the space I take up, and I am happy. But it’s not hard to imagine what it would have been like: husband, children, grandchildren, pictures on the mantle, visits at Christmas, a big funeral, and people who would inherit my money. You can be happy with your life and yet still see the point of one lived differently. That’s why it seemed so natural when I saw this ad in the paper: “Grandmothers Wanted—No Experience Necessary.”

  I am an employee of Grand Stand-In, a Nuclear Family Supplemental Provider. It’s pretty simple. With so many new families popping up, upwardly mobile couples with new children, there is a segment of this demographic, more than you would think, who no longer have any living parents. So many of these new parents feel their children are missing out on a crucial part of their life experience, grandparents. And that’s where I come in.

  I currently serve as a grandmother to five families in the Southeast. Each role is different, though I specialize in the single, still-active grandmother archetype, usually the paternal grandmother, husband now deceased, quite comfortable but not rich, still pretty, fond of crafts. I am fifty-six years old but I can play younger or older depending on what is needed. The families work out the rest of the details with the company. Old photos are doctored to include my image, a backstory is created, and phone calls and visits are carefully planned. For each project, we call them fams, I am required to memorize a family history that goes back eight generations. It’s difficult work, but it’s fairly lucrative, nearly ten thousand a year, per family; and with Social Security going down the tubes, it’s nice to have spending money. But that alone can’t keep you interested. It’s hard to describe the feeling you get from opening your door, the inside of your house untouched by feet other than your own for so long, and finding a little boy or girl who is so excited to see you, has thought of little else for the past few days. You feel like a movie star, all the attention. They run into your arms and shout your name, though not your real name, and you are all that they care about.

  I go by Gammy, MeeMaw, Grandma Helen, Mimi, and, weirdly enough, Gammy once again. At the beginning, I had trouble responding when someone said my fam name, but you get used to it.

  Tonight, while I’m writing birthday, congratulations, and first communion cards for the month, all for different families, I get a call from my family arranger, with offers of new jobs. “The first is easy,” he says, “just a six-week job, a not-dead-yet, one kid.”

  A “not-dead-yet” is when a family purchases, in weekly installments, a phone call from a grandparent who has, still unbeknownst to the child, recently died. It allows the parents time to decide what to say to the child, how to break the news to them. It’s a hundred dollars a call, no face time, but it’s morbid and I try to avoid them. Still, I have a fairly easy phone schedule for this upcoming month, and it’s useful to practice your voice skills, so I take it.

  “The next one,” he says, “is a little different than usual. We need somebody with good disconnect skills, so of course I immediately thought of you.”

  “Face time?” I ask.

  “Lots of face time,” he says. “We’re looking at weekly face time.”

  The more face time, the more preparation required. On the plus side, it makes it easier to establish a bond with the children. It pays a lot more too.

  “Okay,” I tell him. “I can handle it. What makes it so different? Do I have a husband?”

  “No,” he says, “It’s not that. It’s a switch job.”

  A switch job means the child already knows the actual grandparent but a switch is needed due to an unforeseen death. It has to be done just right, usually with situations where the family rarely sees the grandparent. A switch job with lots of face time could be a problem. You don’t want to make it worse on the child, add insult to injury.

  “Let me think about it,” I tell him.

  “Well, think about this too,” he says, and then he is quiet for three, maybe four, seconds. “She’s still alive.”

  I am the queen of disconnect. Stand-ins must remember that fams are the client. You work for them. And yet you have to love them as if you have known them your entire life. The job requires you to spend large amounts of time not thinking about your fam, and then throwing yourself into the moment as if you haven’t stopped. Stand-ins must not, under any circumstances, intrude upon the lives of their fams beyond the agreed-upon situations. You cannot surprise them with a call when you are feeling lonely. You cannot arrive at their house because you just happen to be in the area. People who actually are grandparents seem to have the most trouble with this, this belief that family is forever. For stand-ins, family is only for the moment, for a few hours, and if you are good, you do not forget this.

  And I am the best. I get the highest approval ratings from my families, lots of monthly report cards that read, I wish she really were my mother or Can we adopt her?, but I don’t miss them when they are gone. I love them, but I know what kind of love it is. Disconnecting may seem cold, but it is what is required. And I am, as I have been told many times, so damn good at it.

  Later that night, I call the arranger back. “I’ll take it,” I say. I have lots of love to give.

  A few days later, at the community center, I tell some of the other stand-ins about the situation. Community centers are good places for stand-ins, free classes on subjects that are necessary to be effective. Every week, I take classes on many of the so-called “granny skills” that are so prized by clients: cooking, knitting, sewing (which I am particularly bad at), and flower arranging. The more skills you have, the more jobs you get. After a few classes, you can spot the other stand-ins, taking copious notes, and now we have a book c
lub made up only of stand-ins, though we never read and only ever talk about our fams.

  “So this switch job, what’s wrong with the real granny?” Martha asks. Martha specializes in multiple-husband, slightly alcoholic grandmothers who come from money. Martha does the opposite of disconnect; she works the families so well that she erases the need for disconnect, which allows her to show up, unannounced, at any of her families’ houses, usually around dinner, and they will welcome her inside. She has been doing this longer than anyone else I know, and she is very good at what she does.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe she doesn’t get along with the family. She might be opting out and heading down to Florida.”

  “Not likely,” Martha says. “Granny’s don’t leave. This is a family move. She’s in a wheelchair, I bet, or has some kind of degenerative disease. They want someone active.”

  “Are you going to take it?” another woman asks.

  “I already have,” I say. “I don’t like switches but it’s good money.”

  “For weekly face time money,” Martha says, “I’d do it and I’d even take care of their extra granny problem.”

  All of us laugh, no hesitation, and when we finally stop, Martha looks around at us, smiling.

  “For kind old ladies,” she tells us, “we are such bitches.”

  One of my fams is coming today so I start preparing. I go into my study and take out the box marked FERGUSON FAM. Inside, there are framed pictures, gifts from the grandchildren to be prominently displayed, an indexed ledger of past visits, and recipes for their favorite foods. I like the Fergusons. The two grandchildren are wonderful, bright and sensitive and affectionate. Both parents are enthusiastic about the situation, which is always best. It is hard to work with the children when one of the parents is constantly staring at you, thinking of all the things they could buy if they didn’t have to retain your services.

  I set up the pictures, place a few issues of Reader’s Digest on the coffee table, and get to work on the meal, a traditional fried chicken dinner with mashed potatoes and corn on the cob, with coconut cream pie for dessert. Until this job, I’d never made a pie in my entire life. For my first fam dinner, the blueberry pie came out nearly burned and I had to rely on the granny crutch of, “Oh, grandmother is getting so forgetful in her old age.” For any slip up, calling a child by the wrong name, mentioning a memory that is not the fake grandmother’s but your own, it is always useful to say, “Granny’s getting old, isn’t she, children?” Use it too much, though, and you’ve got them worrying about Alzheimer’s and before you know it, the parents have killed you off.

  By the time the Fergusons arrive, I remember everything about them, can ask about Missy’s ballet recital, Tina’s pet hamster, and tell them about my trip to Ireland with a senior citizens travel company (the Fergusons wanted a globe-hopping grandmother, to help teach the kids about other places and cultures). “MeeMaw!” Tina shouts. “I got a dollar from the tooth fairy.” One of her front teeth disappeared since our last visit. “Well,” I say. “I can’t let the tooth fairy get ahead of me,” and I reach into my purse and produce two dollars for her. I will have to include this in my report, verified by the parents in their own report, if I want to be reimbursed. And I will want to be reimbursed.

  After dinner, we look at photos of my trip to Ireland, mostly landscapes and buildings with a few pictures where I have been digitally inserted into the scene. The kids ask if they can come with me on my next trip and I tell them that these trips are only for old people. “Then come with us on our next vacation,” says Missy, who then looks at her father. Mr. Ferguson shrugs his shoulders and then says, “I think we could arrange that.” Free vacations are a rare bonus; Martha always gets free vacations.

  As they leave, I hug the children. I touch each of Tina’s teeth, making sure there are no other loose ones. She giggles and leans into me. Missy then hops onto the sofa and hugs me, and when no one is looking, I slip two dollars into her pocket, placing my finger to my lips so that she won’t say anything about it. As they walk out the door, the parents thank me for letting them come over. “Anytime,” I say, happy for the few hours of their company. While some parents will address me only through the children—“Say good-bye to your grandmother, kids, and thank her for the wonderful meal”—Mr. Ferguson calls me Mom and hugs me as if I were his real mother. As I wave to them from the porch, Missy spins away from her parents and runs back to me. “I love you, MeeMaw,” she says, and I tell her that that I love her too. And the truth of this strikes me so much that it takes almost four hours before I can forget about them, placing each photo back in the box, reminding myself the entire time that I love four other families as well.

  At the main office, I meet with my arranger and he gives me the details of the new project. The family is newly wealthy, people who dipped into the Internet boom and left before it fell apart. They are now, it must be said, loaded, which is why they can afford weekly meetings with a stand-in. “So,” I ask him, still unable to shake my curiosity, “why is this job being outsourced? What did the old lady do that was so bad?” The arranger shakes his head. “Probably best not to think about it,” he says but I remind him that I am a professional and in order to be effective, I need to anticipate possible problems, avoid the same fate. “It’s complicated,” he says. “I am sure that it is,” I reply. Finally, he explains.

  The Beamer family wants to start clean. They have a young child and new wealth and they want to forget their past life, which was, although not terrible, not great either. The husband sails and climbs mountains now, the mother does yoga and charity functions. The child is learning Japanese. It is all very impressive. What is not impressive, however, is the grandmother. Without making the Beamers out to be too callous, the grandmother is simply, well, boring.

  Two years ago, the grandmother slipped on some icy steps and broke her hip. The Beamers had to put her in a home. Recently, she had a stroke. The child, a little girl who is six years old, has not seen the grandmother since her removal to the retirement facility. The parents fear what the stress of seeing her grandmother in such a state would do to her. So they want to start fresh, with a grandmother that the child can interact with and form fond memories of that will last a lifetime.

  “So, basically,” I say, still wondering if I can do this, “the Beamers are evil.”

  “That’s not fair. These days, it’s not enough to have a grandparent,” he reminds me. “They have to be fun; they have to enrich everyone else’s lives in some way. Familial obligations are going the way of the buffalo.”

  “Good for us.”

  “Very good for us,” he says. “This works out okay, switching out for grandparents that aren’t even dead, we might just have a new market angle.”

  “Trade-ins,” I say.

  “I like that,” he says, nodding.

  I don’t say anything for a while, flip through the file he has given me. Do I really want to sink this low? And then I think about the child. Shouldn’t she be allowed a wonderful grandmother? Aren’t I a wonderful grandmother, however fake I may be? And a small part of me, no matter how much I hate it, is interested in the challenge, a switch, a magic trick, taking over and improving upon something.

  “You hate them, don’t you?” he says.

  “Yes.”

  “You’re going to make them love you, aren’t you?” he asks.

  “Yes,” I say. “Yes, I am.”

  I have dinner with Cal, who is sixty-four years old, and one of the best stand-ins. He has fourteen families, six more than the next closest stand-in. He fills a very impressive, high-demand role: decorated war hero, retired doctor, and a champion over-sixty marathon runner. It is a lethal combination. He is also, for reasons I do not question, quite fond of me. “Where were you when I was a younger man?” he sometimes asks. “You were too busy,” I tell him. “You wouldn’t have even noticed me.”

  Cal is not happy about my new fam. He has very specific ideas about the et
hics of this business. He always includes personal stories from the actual grandfather’s life, an attempt to provide the child with some sense of their actual family history. He spaces visits to his families far apart to allow himself time to decompress, to remember each visit—though I tease him that this is merely an excuse for his terrible disconnect skills. And he wouldn’t, under any circumstances, do a switch job.

  “Then why do it at all?” I ask him. “You don’t need the money.”

  “No, I don’t need the money,” he says. “But I need people to want me. I need to be of use.”

  I don’t know how to respond so I just sip my drink.

  “Stay with me tonight?” he asks.

  “All right,” I tell him.

  As we leave, I suddenly remember something and run to the pay phone in the lobby. “I just have to call one of my grandchildren,” I say, “and convince him that I’m still alive.”

  I meet Mr. and Mrs. Beamer later in the week, what the company calls “a meet and greet,” though it is much more than that. We have to agree on the specifics of the contract, go over the level of involvement, smooth out any possible backstory problems, and try to establish a preliminary bond with one another, so it will seem authentic to the child. It is also the last chance, for either the stand-in or the parents, to back out before the child is notified of the “new” grandparent. Before I walk into the room, I take all of my emotions that may cause problems during this session, all of my misgivings about the project, and get rid of them. I imagine placing them on an ice floe and pushing them out into the water, waving good-bye, though I am quite sure they won’t be coming back. And when that is accomplished, when I am ready, I go meet these people that I supposedly love so much.