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    Tunneling to the Center of the Earth: Stories
    Tunneling to the Center of the Earth: Stories
    Tunneling to the Center of the Earth: Stories
    Ebook217 pages4 hours

    Tunneling to the Center of the Earth: Stories

    By Kevin Wilson

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    A debut short story collection in the tradition of writers like Kelly Link, Aimee Bender, and George Saunders—strange, imaginative, and refreshingly original—now back in print as part of Ecco’s “Art of the Story” Series, and with a new introduction from the author


    Kevin Wilson’s characters inhabit a world that moves seamlessly between the real and the imagined, the mundane and the fantastic. “Grand Stand-In” is narrated by an employee of the Nuclear Family Supplemental Provider—a company that supplies “stand-ins” for families with deceased, ill, or just plain mean grandparents. And in “Blowing Up On the Spot,” a story singled out by Ann Patchett for Ploughshares, a young woman works sorting tiles at a Scrabble factory after her parents have spontaneously combusted.

    Southern gothic at its best, laced with humor and pathos, these wonderfully inventive stories explore the relationship between loss and death and the many ways we try to cope with both.

    Editor's Note

    Bizarre & brazen…

    Wilson tells bizarre stories in a brazen voice, spinning surprise endings that will have you laughing over life’s absurdities.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateOct 6, 2009
    ISBN9780061971082
    Author

    Kevin Wilson

    Kevin Wilson is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels Nothing to See Here, which was a Read with Jenna book club selection; The Family Fang, which was adapted into an acclaimed film starring Nicole Kidman and Jason Bateman; and Perfect Little World; as well as the story collections Tunneling to the Center of the Earth, winner of the Shirley Jackson Award; and Baby, You’re Gonna Be Mine. His fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, Southern Review, One Story, A Public Space, and Best American Short Stories. He lives in Sewanee, Tennessee, with his wife and two sons.

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    Reviews for Tunneling to the Center of the Earth

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    • 5/5
      I'll be honest - the title and cover art grabbed my attention for this book, but I'm so glad it happened that way. These are some of the best, most innovative and interesting short stories I've ever read. The first story pulled me in and each of the following were just as fascinating. Wilson writes in a world where there is a company of stand-in grandmothers for families who aren't ready to tell their children that granny has passed on, where letters must be manually sorted in a Scrabble factory, where a museum of whatnot is a setting for love. Another book I'll be recommending to everyone.
    • 4/5
      Now that I've decided to try to 'review' each book that I have cataloged, there will be books( like this one) where I may recall reading it some years ago, may or may not remember how or why I liked it, but still can recall only a few or maybe no details about the experience.
    • 5/5
      Love it. I used to hate short stories until I read this. Amazing.
    • 5/5
      I picked up Tunneling to the Center of the Earth as I was wandering around at Parnassus, the only indie bookstore in Nashville, TN. Wilson's short story book, along with his novel, were laid out on the "Local Authors" table. The collection of short stories was not what I expected. In a good way.

      If I were to compare, thought Wilson does not need to be compared, I would compare this collection to Etgar Keret's collections, perhaps The Girl on the Fridge. Sure, Wilson's characters are very in-the-middle-of-America-why-would-anyone-live-here, somewhat like the characters of McCullers, though fifty years later and less bound by poverty and ignorance. But the uncanny feel of the stories, the deadpan narration, the very-American-yet-strange lives did remind me of Keret. In these stories, ordinary lives are so strange that truly strange things seem rather ordinary. Lives are lived, days are spent, and nothing much happens, until it does. When it happens, it is an ultimate move from within, and just how many days have to be spent walking back and forth from the factory, counting the steps, is anyone's guess. Yet Wilson captures something in his stories that's hard to explain. A mood, a feeling of being on the brink and not knowing it, an anticipation that's part desperation and part hope (again, McCullers comes to mind here.)

      Highly recommended for those who like stories about ordinary people and those who have the patience to wait for something good and precious.



    • 5/5
      I am not normally a fan of offbeat, fantastical stories, preferring fiction with realistic situations that shed insight on circumstances I might share in my own life. But Kevin Wilson, who goes back and forth between the real and surreal throughout this collection, won me over big-time. Even his often odd premises - like parents who hire professionals to pretend to be grandparents to their children - bear too close a resemblance to reality, given how many parents won't take their children to nursing homes to avoid exposing them to the harsh reality of such places. And in that story, the all too recognizable human traits - like the guilty conscience of the protagonist who serves as a surrogate grandparent -- quickly take over. When he does tell a "straight" story - like "go, fight, win" or "Mortal Kombat"- he mines some incredibly powerful and moving feelings, like isolation, detachment, and ultimately indifference to being social outcasts as the characters go about constructing their own separate, and slightly weird worlds that make more sense to them that the ordinary world they can't find a place in.

      The 11 stories in the collection are:

      1. Grand Stand-In - 26 pp - Great piece about a woman who works for a company that provides "surrogate" grandparents for families so they can avoid explaining to their kids when a real grandparent has died, or even more cruelly, when the "sandwich generation" couple no longer finds their parents suitable companions for their children. A very twisted world that the author gets you thoroughly engrossed in with the portrayal of a stand-in grandmother whose conscience gradually becomes plagued by the deception she helps facilitate.

      2. Blowing Up On the Spot - 18 pp - Another wonderfully offbeat story. A 20-year-old guy works as a sorter in a Scrabble factory and must cope with the death of his parents, who spontaneously combusted, and his traumatized younger brother who now makes repeated suicide attempts.

      3. The Dead Sister Handbook: A Guide For Sensitive Boys - 11 pp - An incredibly poignant story. A boy who has lost his sister creates a guidebook, with encyclopedic entries, on how to cope with, foresee, and make sense of a sister's death.

      4. Birds in the House - 17 pp - Four brothers compete for the rights to a Southern mansion after their mother dies and makes them go through a bizarre ritual of building paper birds to determine who gets the house. Told from the perspective of one of the brother's sons, who has more love for his departed grandmother than any of the warring brothers.

      5. Mortal Kombat - 20 pp - Two high school AV nerds begin a sexual relationship. One has genuine romantic interest; the other succumbs to the physical connection because they're both so horribly isolated from their classmates and families. A fierce game of Mortal Kombat becomes the forum for working out the tension in their relationship.

      6. Tunneling to the Center of the Earth - 12 pp - Three college graduates start digging a hole in one of their backyards. It then becomes a fantastical set of tunnels that enable them to escape the pressures and demands of a "normal" life.

      7. The Shooting Man - 14 pp - A bizarre tale of a man obsessed with a circus freak show and the efforts he makes to convince his friend and girlfriend to see the star attraction - a man who shoots himself in the face.

      8. The Choir Director's Affair (The Baby Teeth) - 10 pp - The friend of a philandering husband worries about the impact his friend's affair will have on the man's new baby, who has an extremely premature set of teeth.

      9. Go, Fight, Win - 41 pp - An amazingly good novella about two very mixed-up kids. A lonely and shy 16-year-old girl becomes even more isolated when she moves to a new town and her mother insists the best way to make friends is to join the cheerleading squad. She goes through the motions with her team who do make an effort to include her, but she feels no sense of belonging. Her only relief comes from building model cars. (Hence the great illustration on the book's cover of the snap -away parts that come in model kits.) The only person the girl manages to connect with is the strange 12-year-old boy who is her neighbor, who goes through his own odd obsessions - recently with trying to fly, and now, more dangerously, with playing with fire.

      10. The Museum of Whatnot - 21 pp - Another fascinating story, in which the weirdness of the premise provides the perfect vehicle to demonstrate the main character's emotional state. A woman who has cut herself from all meaningful connections to anything - both people and inanimate belongings - works as a curator in a museum that displays people's collections of banally routine items - like a lifetime's worth of toe-nail clippings or rubber-bands and paper clips. One visitor who keeps coming back to find meaning in his estranged father's collections of all the spoons he owned over the course of his life challenges the woman into forming a connection with something, and someone, less trivial.

      11. Worst-case Scenario - 16 pp - A man whose job is to lay out the worst-case disaster scenarios for companies and people begins to deal with the consequences of his doomsday predictions when a young mother who hired him becomes crippled with fear over all the dangers her young child could fall victim to.
    • 5/5
      Oh my! What a strange, twisted, wild world Kevin Wilson creates when he sits down to write. This collection of stories, where Wilson turns the mundane into the surreal into the achingly beautiful surpassed every expectation I had for it. It’s been sitting on my shelf for a couple of years and I’m not sure what prompted me to pick it up now but am I ever glad I did.Each story is finely crafted but I’ll warn you now, it’s a weird, weird world. For instance, ”Worst-Case Scenario,” opens this way:”I work for Worst-Case Scenario, Inc. I have a degree in Catastrophe from a small college in the Northeast, where I learned all the ways that things fall apart. I am a field agent in ‘what could happen.’ I go to amusement parks and punch numbers in my computer and tell them how many people could die on a ride, what we call absolute disaster. I calculate what would happen if a city bus full of people was taken hostage and then got stuck in a freak blizzard during rush-hour traffic.”Part whimsy, part startling possibility and always told with a wink each story is shot through with humor and before you know it, Wilson cunningly convinces you that everything he’s telling you is certainly a possibility.Each story is a gem; most are stories of loneliness and isolation. In ”Grand Stand-in,”the unmarried and childless narrator relates her story as an employee of a company that supplies substitute grandparents for families that have that need. She can contract for once a week visits or even only once a month phone calls; whatever the family needs. In ”Blowing Up on the Spot,”a teenage boy is left to care for his younger brother when his parents self-combust on the subway. In ”Museum of Whatnot”, a young woman, with a degree in Museum Science is the caretaker of the Museum of Whatnot where she meets an older man who takes an unexpected interest in her. ”Tunneling to the Center of the Earth,” tells the story of three recent college graduates without prospects, who find themselves digging a tunnel in the backyard My favorite story was ”Birds in the House” where four brothers, who absolutely hate each other, are forced by the terms of their mother’s will, to spend time together making a thousand paper cranes which will be set on a table. Four fans will be set in motion by the oldest grandchild, the story’s narrator. The last crane left on the table will determine which brother inherits the ramshackle mansion. The ending left me holding my breath.There’s an interview with the author at the end of the book and he talks about the different writers who have influenced him. Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio and especially his story ”Sophistication,” influenced Wilson’s story ”Worst-case Scenario”. Since I just read Anderson’s book a few weeks ago I had to return to it and try to make comparisons. Wilson admired the way in which Anderson connected two lonely, isolated people and tried to do the same in his story. And he does so, beautifully. Highly recommended.
    • 3/5
      The author of this book is quite young - possibly mid to late 20s. The characters in the stories here are all either on the verge of adulthood or are young and are being forced into a premature form of adulthood. Perhaps I would have enjoyed these stories more when I was 10 years younger and facing a similar time in my life. Or maybe I would enjoy them if I were 10 years older and had enough distance from that time in my life to not just feel utterly relieved that it's over.He has beginnings and middles of stories down but his endings are often disappointing. They seem abrupt and out of place. There is something to be said for leaving the reader wanting more. Many of these stories, however, just feel incomplete.His styles vary from story to story like he is still experimenting and searching for his voice. This is not a bad thing and the PS material at the back of the book lets him explain which authors/stories were his inspirations for each story.Wilson is a fine writer and there are a couple of stories in this collection that are outstanding. Very promising debut collection from a young writer. I look forward to reading more from him.
    • 5/5
      An utterly inspired collection of short stories, the whole package bubbling with affection, yearning, irony, sadness, character, humour; I honestly enjoyed every single one, which came as a surprise, as I usually find short story collections – especially if I’m not already familiar with the author – a bit hit and miss, or at least find some ‘filler’ material in the mix… not so with Kevin Wilson’s Tunneling to the Center of the Earth. After a while, I felt as though I were reading a complete work on a theme - unlikely people finding a way to connect with one another, or loss vs. finding that ineffable ‘something’ – but it’s the book’s shuffled deck of reality and surrealism, of the mundane and the remarkable, and that makes it so appealing. I won’t review every story, but my favourites were probably the relatively quiet ‘the museum of whatnot’ in which a young museum curator sorts and exhibits collections of the seemingly banal into displays of art while finding herself unwilling to add a single thing to her life, even the gentleman who comes to look at the spoons and stays to flirt with her, and the book’s opener ’grand stand-in’ in which a ‘granny for hire’ realises she must let go of the people who have defined her working life. Imagery and ideas from every story have stayed with me; this man has crafted a talent for the short story, I hope we see more of them, even if he moves on to novels.Incidentally I love these Harper Perennial soft paperback editions, with the false ‘dust jacket’ flaps, and spines that are malleable in a way that doesn’t crease, and pleasant rough-guillotined front edge - made it a pleasure to read in every sense.
    • 5/5
      Franz Kafka, Michael Chabon, and the literature of the fantastic seem to be major influences on Kevin Wilson, whose collection of short stories, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth, will delight anyone who enjoys off-balance and well-told tales. Kafka’s influence is evident in the surreal situations Wilson creates: in one story, three young people who have just graduated from college but don’t have jobs decide to live underground for a time, and begin digging in their parents’ suburban yard; in another, a man has a job finding the Q’s in a Scrabble tile factory that rains letters down on him several times a day; in yet another, a museum is dedicated to the detritus of people’s lives. Chabon’s influence shows up in the fact that these stories are not the “contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory” stories, he said he was tired of in his introduction to McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, but, as Chabon requested, tales with plots. Wilson demonstrates that he can write artistically and thoughtfully and yet really tell a story instead of simply playing post-modernist games. And the fantastic comes into play in many of these stories, from the one about the parents who spontaneously combust to the tale in which families hire “grandparents” to enrich their childrens’ lives.This first collection is memorable. Take “Grand Stand-In,” the story about the fake grandmother, hired by a number of families to be available for hugs, kisses and chocolate chip cookies for children whose grandparents have died. Wilson carefully explains the sociological reason behind this need: people wait longer and longer to start a family, and by the time they finally get around to it, the people who would normally have offered grandmotherly and grandfatherly love are all dead. But who wants her kid to grow up without knowing the completely uncritical love of a grandparent? So these families, generally wealthy and able to offer their children anything, take the extra step of offering them grandparents. All is going well for the protagonist, who grandmothers five families and makes a tidy profit at it. She has never had a family of her own, so she gets a lot of enjoyment out of keeping track of what’s going on in her various families. But then the day comes when a family wants her to slip into the shoes of a grandmother who is still living but forced by her health to enter a nursing home – a situation that requires the protagonist to take a hard look at what she’s doing. When the twist comes toward the end of the story, it’s perfectly logical and terribly sad.Wilson seems especially good at inventing odd occupations for his characters. There’s the fellow who works in the Scrabble tile factory in “Blowing Up on the Spot,” mentioned above; he longs to be assigned the letter “E” instead of his terribly scarce “Q,” because he’s paid by the tile. Sometimes his fingers think he’s found a “Q” when it’s really only an “O.” Tough work! (Although the purpose of all this tile-finding isn’t explained, it appears that tiles are simply made in bulk and then sorted, so that by finding Q’s, the protagonist is ensuring there’s one in each game, no more and no less.) But that’s not the whole of the story, because this is the same story in which the protagonist’s parents have spontaneously combusted. No one knows why. It happened while they were on a subway. Simultaneous spontaneous combustion is almost unheard of, our protagonist tell us, and he keeps imagining what caused it and what his parents might have been thinking and feeling immediately before it happened.Another character, this one in “The Shooting Man,” works in a noise factory, the place where they put the “moo” into that container painted with cows that moos when you turn it upside down, and the voices into Chatty Cathy dolls, among other things. If you worked in such a place all day, every day, wouldn’t you be sort of fascinated at the freak show that comes into town? Especially when that show features a man who shoots himself in the face, right in front of the audience, every night. How does he blow out his brains one night and still perform again the next night? It’s not too difficult to figure out for anyone except the protagonist, though he finally gets it – when it’s too late.“The Museum of Whatnot” is one of my favorites. In this story, a young woman is employed in the title museum, charged with curating the detritus of people’s lives. She has to figure out how to display one man’s collection of spoons from different silverware sets, for instance, or the collection of letters from a teenage suicide. Not written letters, from one person to another, mind you, but letters of the alphabet this boy cut out of magazines and newspapers and saved in special notebooks. The woman’s real challenge comes when she gets a collection in from the estate of William Saroyan: rocks, paper clips, rubber bands, tin foil. It has to be displayed, because Saroyan’s will stated that no institution would get his papers if his other collections were not given equal standing. It’s not junk, and it certainly isn’t garbage; it’s “whatnot.” I’d honestly go to a museum like that just because it was so weird, wouldn’t you?Even stories that seem fairly straightforward, without a touch of the weird, tend to nonetheless be off-base somehow. There’s “Go, Fight, Win,” in which a 16-year-old cheerleader becomes fascinated by a 12-year-old boy. Is it love, hormones, or what? Why do these two click in what seems like an obviously inappropriate relationship? And why, exactly, is it so obviously inappropriate? It’s not like they’re stripping each other naked. It all feels so odd that you find yourself squirming a bit with discomfort while you read the story.Juvenile sex and love also make their appearance in “Mortal Kombat,” with two boys who are complete nerds, trivia champions on their school’s Quiz Bowl team. Neither of them thinks he’s gay, so why do they wind up kissing? It seems as much a mystery to them as to the reader, and that seems to be the point.Wilson’s stories were all previously published in literary magazines, some of which I’ve never seen or heard of before, so I’m glad this collection is available. The book also has an “about the author” section in the back of the book that had me laughing out loud, along with an interview with Wilson about specific stories and a section called “The Stories Behind the Stories” that talks about Wilson’s influences. I’m sure the idea of this section is to give book groups guidance if they should wish to read this book together, but it’s fun even for the individual reader. Wilson is on the threshold of a great career.
    • 4/5
      Some good stories here, much in the same vein as Aimee Bender and George Saunders. Reality with a heaping spoonful of the bizarre thrown in. I very much like Wilson’s writing style, and I think he manages to make his characters a little more real for all their odd circumstances than some modern short fiction writers. A very nice random-short story-collection-on-a-Saturday-afternoon find. The question and answer section with Wilson at the end is worth reading as well.
    • 4/5
      She is a fake grandma. Although she has never had any family herself, at 56 she works for a company called Grand Stand-In, which specializes in providing grandparents to families that don’t have them. After all, as many people are waiting longer to get married and have children, many parents find themselves without living parents of their own and feel that their children are missing out on the experience of having grandparents. A Grand Stand-In can function like a regular grandparent, but can be easily killed off when the relationship becomes tedious. She loves being a Grand Stand-In, until she stands in for a family that challeneges her ideas of right and wrong.Quirky, yes? This is the epitome of Kevin Wilson’s book of short stories, the story I think was the very best in the entire collection. If you like short stories, or you like quirky, “Tunneling to the Center of the Earth” is something you should check out. The only problem with quirky is that different types/examples of quirky don’t work equally well for everyone. Everything in this collection was well-written, but I definitely had a range of not really liking, liking alright, and really liking the different stories. The title story, for example, was enjoyable enough, but didn’t do much for me. My favorites were the first, ‘Grand Stand-In,’ the second, and the last. Interestingly, these were 3 of the 4 stories that particularly centered around people with quirky jobs, instead of people with quirky families or those who were just quirky, so evidently that is what most appeals to me. Because of this difference in quirky tolerance levels, I’m guessing that most people won’t love every story in this collection, but that many people will find at least a couple stories they think are fantastic.

    Book preview

    Tunneling to the Center of the Earth - Kevin Wilson

    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 club 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 ethics 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.

    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

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