Tunneling to the Center of the Earth Read online

  The Beamers are very attractive, very polite, and very enthusiastic about the possibility of my becoming a part of their family. Though I fear disliking them, I see enough good points to know how to work around it. “We know this is strange,” Mr. Beamer says. “We thought about this a couple of years ago,” and I nearly flinch because I remember that this is when the grandmother broke her hip, but I keep smiling. “But we had to weigh the options and decide if we wanted Greta to have access to something like this.” They are both grinning at me so I say, “Well, I think the pros outweigh the cons by an overwhelming percentage. I think you’ll find this to be even more true after a few outings, when you get to see how well Greta responds to this new presence in her life.” They both nod, encouraged, reassured of their own decision-making skills, their know-how, their ability to take a problematic situation and fix it.

  “Well,” Mr. Beamer says, looking hopefully at his wife, who is nodding, “I think we can wholeheartedly say that we are very happy to have you become a part of our family,” and I lean forward to shake his hand. Then he finishes the sentence, “Mom.” Both of them laugh, and my eyes go to slits, but I am still smiling, still moving my hand toward him. He shakes it and I am counting the seconds until I can leave. I feel all the anger and guilt about this job returning, emotions that will become problematic if not repressed.

  “How is this different?” asks Martha, nearly drunk on gin and tonics, a book held upside-down in her hands. “I still don’t understand the problem.”

  “She’s not dead,” Angela, another stand-in, says, exasperated.

  “She is to us.”

  “But not to them,” Angela responds.

  “No,” I say. “She’s dead to them too. That’s the problem.”

  “It shouldn’t be,” says Martha.

  “It won’t be,” I say, though I still can’t shake the doubt, feel I am getting out of practice.

  A week later, backstory rehearsed and rerehearsed, I sign out one of the cars from the main office, a gray Cadillac—all the stand-ins’ cars are Cadillacs or Oldsmobiles—and drive the twenty-five minutes to the Beamers’ house. For the first visit, it seemed easier for the child, Greta, to meet on familiar ground. I pull into the driveway, stare into the rearview mirror until I am happy with the expression on my face, and walk to the door, where the Beamers are waiting: husband, wife, daughter. “Grandma’s here!” shouts Mrs. Beamer and I nod, still smiling, and say, “I certainly am.” The Beamers nudge the girl toward me. “Say hello to your grandmother,” Mr. Beamer says. Greta is having none of this.

  She holds onto her father, hiding behind one of his legs. “Say hello,” her father repeats, but she moves entirely behind him. “You remember Grandma?” I say, deciding that she needs to hear my voice and see that I am not dangerous before she commits. She peeks out at me and I get to see her. She is prettier than her picture had prepared me for, blond curls, big blue eyes, like a fake child that someone would make in order to convince people to have children. “You look different,” she says, and I see Mr. Beamer about to say something, something that will not help the situation, and I respond, “You look different too. You were just a little thing the last time I saw you. You look so grown up, I can hardly believe I’m looking at the same girl.”

  She steps out from behind her father and walks up to me. I’m not going to force her into a hug, but I know it would look good, would reassure the parents. “You don’t remember Grandma?” I say, and she stares at me so hard that I have to remind myself not to pull back. And then she leans forward, puts her little arms around my neck, and I know it will only get easier now, that things will fall into a familiar rhythm. We are a family.

  One of Martha’s families killed her off. She is stunned, shaken beyond what I would have expected. We all anticipate being killed off at one point or another. Once the child becomes older, and visits to the grandparents are a chore more than a treat, parents tend to move into the next critical stage of family experience: death. It is a strange experience, to be informed by your arranger that a family has decided to downsize. The child, now older, experiences the finality of death but maintains the memories of you, which is what the parents wanted in the first place. They take out notices in the obituaries, have funerals, place an urn on the mantle. And we just wait for another family to take their place. But Martha was taken in her prime, suddenly removed from a fam, and this distresses her to the point that she is drinking so much that a few of her other fams are worried.

  “I didn’t deserve to be killed,” she says. “Nothing I possibly did was enough to deserve death.”

  “Death is natural,” I tell her. “We all die.”

  “Maybe you do,” she spits. “I was so good, fams were going to keep me until I outlived all of them. They were going to be leaving me money in their wills.”

  “At least it was sudden,” Eugenia says. “You didn’t have to provide foreshadowing. No dizzy spells, a tumble in the shower, something mysterious on an X-ray.”

  “How did you go?” I ask.

  “Oh, this was the worst,” Martha says. “In my sleep. Peaceful.”

  “That’s nice, though,” Angela says.

  “I wanted a skydiving accident,” Martha says. “I wanted a bank robbery gone bad.”

  “It’s just part of the job,” I say. “These are the things we have to deal with.”

  “Well,” says Martha, taking another sip from her drink. “We’re getting too old for this. We’re too old to have to deal with dying.”

  I spend another evening at the Beamers’ house. Greta and I play a board game where you move your piece around a giant mall and buy things with a gold credit card. Everything seems way too expensive and I can’t justify the cost, so I lose, which is good. Grandma should always lose. The Beamers have been gone since I arrived, hidden away somewhere in the house. Even when they come to my house, they step out to make a phone call or remember an errand they need to run. I am beginning to think that they might just want a babysitter, and not a grandmother, but I’m not going to be the one to tell them that.

  Greta, on the other hand, is wonderful. I listen to her count out numbers in Japanese—itchykneesunshego—so fast that she cannot possibly understand what she is saying, which is pleasing to me. I like the fact that she may be forced into older pursuits, but she is not succeeding quite so easily, that she is still a child. I make a cat’s cradle with yarn and it takes her a very long time before she puts her hand through it, her eyes wide open. When I complete the trick, she laughs so suddenly, so loud, that I laugh just as loudly. It is a good laugh, and I remind myself to practice that laugh for other fams.

  I watch a video with Greta, which I find incredibly disconcerting but she sings right along with the giant blobs of color that dance around the screen. When she grows tired, she climbs into my lap and rests her head against my chest. I rock her slowly until I realize I need to get home, that I have to prepare for the Mead fam, who will be arriving this weekend. But I sit a few more minutes, reluctant to wake her, until I can’t put it off any longer.

  “Can you sing me the lullaby?” Greta asks me as I am tucking her into bed. I freeze.

  “What lullaby?” I ask sweetly, while in my head I am furiously sifting through the information for this song. Am I becoming forgetful? Am I losing my touch?

  “I don’t know what it is,” she says, “but you sang it to me before.”

  An image flashes in my head of Greta and her real grandmother, a lullaby, two people who really care about each other. I shake it off.

  “Well, Greta, your grandma is becoming forgetful in her old age. I’ll have to think about it. How about this one though?”

  I sing “Goodnight, Irene,” and my voice sounds too low, not delicate enough, and I make a mental note to sign up for singing classes at the community center. When Greta finally falls asleep, I kiss her softly on the cheek and walk out of the room. “Sweet dreams,” I say, but of course she can’t hear me. I just want to say it.
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  I walk down the stairs, into the exercise room, where the Beamers are riding machines to infinity.

  “You never mentioned the song,” I tell them.

  “What?” they say in unison, the sound of their machines slowing down.

  “The song,” I say, a little overexcited, “the fuc—the lullaby that I used to sing to her.”

  “I don’t recall there ever being a lullaby,” says Mrs. Beamer. “Greta might be imagining things.”

  “If you aren’t providing me with all the information,” I tell them, trying to remain calm, “this could fall apart and everyone would be very unhappy. If Greta had a more detailed level of previous interaction that I wasn’t told about—”

  “Mom,” says Mr. Beamer, “I assure you that we are invested in this as much as you, even more so.”

  “So you’ll get me that song?” I ask.

  “Oh, well, I don’t know how we could do that,” he says, almost stammering.

  “Well, I think I know how we could do that,” I say and then I remember who I am, an employee, and who they are, my client, and I brush the hair out of my face and smile. “I’m sorry,” I say. “Greta has been happy with me, I trust?”

  “Oh, she loves you,” says Mrs. Beamer, her machine back in full swing.

  “I’ll make sure it stays that way. And I won’t bother you with these small details anymore.”

  “Thanks, Mom,” Mr. Beamer says, and I walk back to my car and disconnect from the love I feel for the Beamers, which is incredibly easy. Then I disconnect from Greta, and, though it takes the entire car ride back to the main office, I have forgotten her as well. By the time I make it home, all I am thinking about is that lullaby. I tell myself that it is purely to improve job performance, that I need this song to fully establish my position as “grandmother,” but there is a small part of me that wants something else. I want to meet the grandmother.

  We are required to have monthly physicals to ensure that we are healthy enough to be grandparents. The company needs lead time if something unexpected turns up.

  “You having any problems lately, any new sources of stress?” my doctor asks, tapping his pencil on my chart. “I have constant sources of stress,” I say. “Tina’s hamster died. We talked for an hour last night, unscheduled.” He taps the chart one more time. “High blood pressure,” he says. “High blood pressure can go all kinds of ways. Watch it. Calm down.” I am calm. I am so calm that I don’t even feel nervous when I leave the doctor’s office, take the walkway to my family arranger, sit down in front of him, and ask him for the Beamer grandmother’s address.

  “Crazy,” he says. “That is crazy and you are not crazy. You’re a pro.”

  “I just want to observe,” I tell him. “I need to find some gestures, turns of phrases, that will help keep the child invested and unsuspicious.”

  “The kid is suspicious?” he asks, almost jumping out of his seat.

  “No,” I shout. “She’s fine. She loves me. They all love me. I just need to see the grandmother. I need to get a lullaby—”

  “What?”

  “A lullaby that the girl remembers her grandmother singing. The parents are drawing a complete blank. Just let me have the address.”

  “What makes you think I have it?” he asks.

  “You have it.”

  He nods and turns his computer screen toward me, types a few commands, and there it is.

  “I could lose my job if this gets out,” he tells me.

  “I’m a pro,” I say. “I could make this lady think that I’m her grandmother.”

  He doesn’t laugh. “Don’t do that,” he says. “Just get the lullaby and leave.”

  “Who do you love better,” Peter, one of the McAllister children, asks, “me or Julie?” Julie climbs onto the sofa, too, eager for my answer. “I love both of you in equal amounts,” I tell them. “I love all of my grandchildren exactly the same.” Which is the truest thing I’ve ever said.

  Cal is in my bed tonight. “We should do some couples work sometime,” he says. “A lot of families want both grandparents now. There’s one fam right now that has all four grandparents contracted through the company.” I kiss him, shut him up, and then I say, “Come with me to visit this woman.” He shakes his head. “No,” he says. “I don’t want to be a party to that.” I tell him that I need to see her. If I can see her and not get discouraged, not feel like the worst person in the world, I keep telling myself that I’ll be even better at my job, that nothing will keep me from being anything less than a perfect grandmother.

  “We should just quit,” he tells me. “Get away from all this and be normal.”

  “The money is good,” I tell him.

  “I have money,” he says.

  “I like the work,” I say. “It’s challenging.”

  “You don’t like the work,” he says.

  “Well, I like the moments when I forget that it’s work.”

  “That’s what other people experience all the time.”

  “No it isn’t,” I say. “That’s why people pay us money to love them.”

  “I’m a friend of the family,” I tell the nurse at the retirement home. “An old family friend.”

  She nods and leads me down the hallway. The ease of this astounds me at first but then I realize that people will believe anything, are looking for an excuse to believe what you say.

  Mrs. Beamer is sitting up in her bed when I see her, and I almost turn around and walk out of the building. She looks nothing like me, thin, wispy white hair and deep, sunken eyes, and somehow this makes me feel strange. I wonder how Greta could possibly mistake the two of us, but almost immediately I feel a sense of pride at making such a convincing switch. She smiles when I walk in, and I smile back. When the nurse leaves, Mrs. Beamer’s smile fades a little, becomes confused, and she asks me, “I’m sorry, but who are you?” I start to answer but I have no idea what to say. “A friend of the family,” I say, finally, and she smiles again. “That’s nice,” she says.

  I tell her that her family asked me to come visit, to let her know how they are doing. “They miss you,” I say. “Well, I miss them too,” she says. “I don’t see them as much as I’d like.” I pull out a few photos of Greta that I have taken, pictures I think a grandmother would want to see. “Who is this?” she asks, and I feel so sad that she must be regressing even more quickly in this place. “It’s Greta,” I tell her. “Your granddaughter?” She shakes her head. “That’s not my Greta,” she says and I don’t have the heart to argue with her. She reaches toward her nightstand and hands me a picture frame. “That’s Greta,” she says, and points to a small girl with blond hair and her two front teeth missing, standing between Mr. and Mrs. Beamer. It is not Greta.

  I feel dizzy, cannot quite understand how to proceed. “This is your granddaughter?” I ask, and she nods. “She visits you?” I ask, and again she nods. “Once a month,” she says. “My son and his wife are very busy with their careers so they have a driver bring Greta to see me and we have a wonderful time together, just the two of us here in the room. Isn’t she beautiful?” I respond that she is, trying to piece this together, and then I understand. The idea is perfect, and I immediately feel sick. Child stand-ins. A double-switch.

  “Are you all right?” Mrs. Beamer asks me, but I don’t respond. I can only think of a little girl sitting in a car on her way to this nursing home. I imagine her taking what little she knows about family and love and leaving them in the car while she goes inside to see her grandmother whom she has never met before. I always think that what I do is so hard, but maybe it isn’t. Maybe it’s the easiest thing in the world.

  “Excuse me,” Mrs. Beamer says, still trying to get my attention.

  “Yes?” I say finally, remembering there is someone else in the room, wanting nothing more than to leave.

  “Did you need anything? Why did you come see me?”

  I remember why I am here and try to recover. “Well,” I tell her, “I wanted to see if I
could hear you sing the lullaby, for Greta.”

  “Oh, I suppose so. She hasn’t asked me to do that in a long time.”

  I take out my tape recorder and she sings, softly, something about the moon being made of old green cheese. It isn’t particularly good, but she sings it as if it means something, and I know that it does. When she is finished, I turn off the recorder and leave.

  “Tell them to come soon,” she says, but I don’t say anything.

  One stand-in quit after only a few months. “I feel like a prostitute,” she said.

  “Oh please,” Martha answered, “Prostitutes have it easy.”

  I knock on the Beamers’ door until Mr. Beamer shows.

  “Oh, hi, Mom.” He frowns, touches his finger to his temple. “Do we have something scheduled for today?”

  “I saw someone today.”

  “Who?”

  “Your mother.”

  “Well, you shouldn’t have done that.”

  “Why?” I ask him. “Why would you set your daughter up with a new grandmother and give your mother a new grandchild?”

  “We should talk about this another time,” he says, clearly annoyed. “Or perhaps we shouldn’t talk about this at all.”

  “It’s ridiculous.”

  “No,” he says, getting angry. “It’s not ridiculous at all. We wanted Greta to have a grandmother who could enrich her life, who could do the things that my mother simply can’t do. So we gave Greta the best grandmother we could find.”

  “Me,” I say.

  “You,” he answers. “But I love my mother so we found a child stand-in who visits once a month and, from what we read in the stand-in’s monthly reports and from the letters my mother sends us, she makes my mother very happy. Everything works out. Greta can be shy, reticent to engage with people. This girl, she’s been on TV; she’s amazing. Just like you. We wanted the best for our family and we got it.”