Hello, Hey, do you have a copy of TV Guide?
No?
No, why I can't find my copy? And I was wondering what was on TV? Don't don't you remember?
Don't you remember? Don't you don't?
Wait?
Wait, don't you remember calling people up on the phone.
I do remember that, Yeah.
Just just to see what was on. I remember calling on my aunt Tilly because I was too I was too lazy to get up off the couch to look for the TV Guide, so I just called her up. Who woman could hardly walk and she had to search around for a TV guide to go. I'm GIMILTT Media. I'm Jonathan Goldstein, and this is Heavyweight today's episode, Christina. This is the best of all possible worlds. My father
was fond of saying. The words were spoken contentedly, often while reclining in a barca lounger belt buckle undone after a large meal of baked beans and lamb chops. But what did my father know of other worlds? He'd held down the same job and was married to the same woman for decades plus. He hardly left the house. But what he did know was that this world had one thing over all of those other worlds. It existed for
my father. That was enough to make it best. I, on the other hand, am not one over so easily.
Sure.
Existence is a nice quality, a fine quality, but going so far as to call a world that contains both soul patches and puddles the best possible anything seems a little extreme, and so imagining other worlds the same, only better is just too irresistible. In spite of the pain such thinking inevitably invites. Why don't we start from the beginning. Okay, this is Christina, and like me, she knows this world can use a few tweaks. Overall, she says her life hasn't been a bad one, It's just not the one
she was meant to live. She's worked as a waitress, a receptionist, as a home care worker, the kinds of jobs you do, but not necessarily the kind you dream about. Lately, she's been helping run her husband's company.
It's a disc golfing backpack company.
Say sorry, say that again. It's a what disc golf backpack is? What is disc golf?
It's like ball golf, but instead of balls and clubs, you have frisbees.
Oh, when you say ball golf, you're talking about golf.
Golf like a regular golf.
Yeah, okay, I've never heard it referred to distinguished as ball golf, but I.
Well, only disc golfers call it ball golf.
So, but how do you how do you get a frisbee in a golf hole?
No, it's actually not a hole, it's a basket.
Oh my goodness. Before she started pining after better worlds, Christina was focused on just one, the world of small town western Canada.
I lived with my mom. She was a single mom. My dad left when I was around one, and my mom was diagnosed with schizophrenia.
Christina was just a kid, so a lot of it's now fuzzy, but she remembers bits of things, her mom going off her meds and beginning to hear voices, her mom waking her in the middle of the night and saying they had to leave right away. She remembers running with her mom down dark streets.
She started becoming violent and she would just you know, hit me with the phone handle, or this one time she came after me with a high heeled shoe. There's no food in the house. She wouldn't do laundry, like the dirty clothes would pile up in the living room, like, I remember this massive mound of dirty clothes, and I remember this kid made fun of me for having dirty pants, and so I started stealing clothes just so I could have clean clothes to go to school.
When you were a kid trying to survive on your own, the unthinkable can start to seem normal. To escape her house, Christina took a job caring for two boys not much younger than herself. She became a twelve year old live in nanny.
So I ended up moving in with this family and looking after the boys. They paid me a little bit, and I quit school to be a nanny.
When she stopped showing up at school, social services removed Christina from the nannying house, but instead of bringing her back to her mom, they took her to a fi her home. She was sent to live with an older couple and their grandson. They lived on the fancier side of town in a house decorated with candleholders and decorative pistols. The foster mother was a woman named Isabelle. Her grandson, David,
was the golden boy who could do no wrong. From day one, Christina struggled for Isabelle's approval.
My foster mother and I kind of butted heads a little bit or a lot.
Although Isabelle was only an inch taller, Christina was scared of her. Her foster mother communicated through rules and punishments.
She was very strict. I was five minutes late for curfew. I would be grounded for a month. It felt like I was always grounded and afraid all the time, and kind of walking on eggshells, and yeah, just feeling always really intimidated and scared. I was always scared.
And when she got scared, Christina would go silent. As a result, she never once stood up to Isabelle. It was while living in Isabelle's world that another better world presented itself to Christina, a world with rules that were easy to understand, a world where someone was always keeping score and keeping things fair. This was the eighty four x fifty foot world of a basketball court.
I can't explain how much I was obsessed with basketball. I would practice at like six in the morning at the school. I would practice on weekends. I'd watch the NBA games with Clyde the Glide and Charles Barkley, and then my name was in the paper a few times. I think I have some paper clippings of like high scoring. I loved, loved, loved basketball.
On the basketball court and it was never scared. It was a place where, for the first time in her life, she felt in control and confident. Her foster brother, David, a popular jock, spent hours helping her get better. She joined a team and quickly became a high scorer. Eventually she was made team captain.
They would always put me inside, like I would always have to guard the post.
When Christina talks about basketball, she lights up, and I want to encourage her to keep talking by asking questions. But my only real knowledge of basketball comes from watching the Harlem Globetrotters. I was in my thirties before I learned it was illegal to bring stilts onto the court, so my questions are limited.
We tall no only five to six. But I guess I kind of had this unrealistic view of myself where I thought I was taller than I was because off court, I was like kind of meek, and I'd just follow the crowd and I wouldn't create any waves. I didn't really have an opinion, but on the court, I was a force to be reckoned with. It was like the only time where I felt powerful.
It was around this time that a plan began to take shape. If she kept practicing and kept winning, she'd get a basketball scholarship. Christina knew that was her only hope of getting into college.
I wanted to get out of that circle of welfare and illness and living from paycheck to paycheck and just feeling just being poor.
It sucked, which brings us to the moment that thirty years later, Christina still can't stop thinking about. She'd just come home from school when Isabelle called her into the kitchen, sat her down at the table, and presented her with an ultimatum.
She said, you have to get your grades up. You have to work harder at school, and so in order for me to be able to play basketball following year, which would have been eleventh grade, I had to have an average of a bee in every class. But I was really bad at math and chemistry, and I didn't make it. I wasn't allowed to play basketball.
What she remembers most about that time was watching a lot of TV and overeating and the chores. After forcing Christina to quit the basketball team, Isabelle handed her chores that felt like ironic punishments from the Judy Bloom version of Dante's Inferno. She had to bake cookies for the family, but because of her weight gain, she wasn't allowed to eat any, and when she dusted the house, Isabelle instructed her to pick up David's basketball trophies, dust each one,
and dust the shelf underneath. All the while, Christina felt her loss acutely of basketball and the better world had promised.
She took something from me that I that I've not been able to get back.
What is that thing?
Yeah, and I don't even know. I don't. I don't. When I say that out loud, it sounds ridiculous, but it feels like that passion for something it dashed this huge dream that I had.
For my life. Christina still wonders why why did Isabelle take away basketball, the only thing that really mattered to her, that would have given her a better life, But all these years she's been too afraid to ask.
She's going to be ninety five in July. The thought of talking to her about it petrifies me a little bit, like there's still a part of me that is scared of her, which is ridiculous. And what do you want, I think, yeah, I think I want to know, like why she made my life so difficult, if it was just to break me down, if she had some kind of thing against.
Me, And what do you want to hear her say?
I guess I want to just hear her say that she just genuinely wanted me to have better grades. But I know that that's just such bs. For whatever reason, I've let go of a lot of things that have happened, but for whatever reason, this one thing, the basketball thing, not letting me play basketball. I'm having such a hard time letting go of that and forgiving her. I want to let it go.
So you want to go talk to her?
Yeah?
You, and you want me to come? Yes, I get really mealy mouthed when I'm in the same room as like strong willed, scary older women. I'll tell you that right now, I'm not going to be much help.
So we're doing it.
It sounds like we're doing it all right. We're gonna go talk to that scary lady after the break. How much mincing can a Meilie mouth mince? When a Melie
mouth meets a menacing miss who writes this stuff? I guess I do once I gave Christina my word that i'd help, I approached CEO and Gimblet founder Alex Bloomberg to ask if he could fly me to the British Columbian interior to confront a ninety five year old woman about something she may or may not have said some thirty years ago, to which Alex asked, why are you always standing just outside the door whenever I get out
of the bathroom? And I said it was a coincidence, although I might have pronounced it Quinki dink to be playful. And he asked how long this trip would take me out of the office, and I said a week, and he said to take longer if I needed it. So I was off to Canada.
Tail de nos ai, are you to?
I meet Christina and her husband Levi at the Colonna Airport in British Columbia. They'd just flown in from Portland, and the look of trust on their faces is daunting. When meeting new people, especially people I'm about to help. I'm more comfortable with looks of skepticism or anticipatory disappointment. Trust was disconcerting, Yes I have. It was an hour and a half drive to Isabelle's. So we made our way to the airport rental desk to get a car Goldstein G.
O L D.
And I just asked what that is there?
Oh, it's just a we're doing a radio story.
So I've just do you mind turning that off and put away?
Yeah? If I couldn't even stand up to the car rental clerk, what hope did I have of helping Christina stand up to Isabelle.
It's hot in here, I want to.
Say, it's been well over two years since Christina's seen Isabelle. She's feeling anxious, so I try to keep the mood positive. I bet the thrift stores are really good around here. I point out foreign license plates, and because we're in a foreign country, there are many pretty Have you guys been watching this show called Little Big Lies or big little Lies or little big Lies? Well set, I think so. Isabelle lives on the ground floor of a squat apartment
block mostly inhabited by seniors. We wait. When no one answers, we ring the bell. The door opens. I heard you the first time, Isabelle says. Christina smiles in spite of herself. She can't help but get a kick out of Isabelle. Isabelle peers up at us from behind her walker, Christina's husband, Levi makes introductions, isabel Hi, how are you doing?
Oh?
That?
Oh? Is me reacting to Isabelle's handshake, a surprisingly powerful thing that yanks me through the doorframe. Although a diminutive woman with white, puffy hair and wirerim glasses, Isabelle's just established herself as the alpha. Nice to meet you, Nice.
To meet you.
Okay, you seem to be doing great.
I'm doing not bad for my age, I guess.
Isabelle's apartment is tidy and dim, decorated with candles that haven't been lit in years. We slowly follow her down a narrow hallway to her living room, where she seats herself in a faded blue mechanized armchair. On the drive over, Christina mentioned that Isabelle is legally blind, but I misremember this as Isabelle being legally deaf, so I compliment her on how well she's following along. Well, I'm not talking very loud, and you you've been able to hear everything.
So I did say there's nothing wrong with my ears right.
And you did.
Not.
To recover from this faux pas, I offer Isabelle a chance to feel my face run her hands through my beard, which is something I think I saw done in the mirror. If ever, you want to feel my stubble, or I.
Don't go running around feeling beards.
I decide that now's as good a time as any to offer around the airport treats I bought during my layover. I brought some refreshments. Since I don't want to put Isabelle out by asking for a party tray, I scooted my travel socks and underwear to the side of my backpack and proffer them straight from the bag, some chocolate covered nuts and such.
Not right now, thank you?
No, okay, I'll leave them in the bag. If I've learned anything from my work in the business of forcing people to ask terrifying questions, it was that it's always best to just get it over with. Ask the question why did you ruin my life? Get the answer, and head back to the hotel bar to eat the juiciest, fattiest tea bone steak that Gimlet Media's fourteen dollars per dim allows. But staging is everything I need to be
off hand subtle. Do you Christina, do you have anything that you you want to ask about, or Christina looks down at her hands and tightens her lips. Of course I understand her hesitation. Isabelle is even more intimidating in person than Christina made her out, and nothing about being here can possibly feel much like coming home. The walls and shelves are loaded with photos of Isabelle's children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren, but there isn't a single photo anywhere
of her only foster child, Christina. To break the silence, I ask Isabelle why she originally took Christina into her home in the first place.
And one of my children left a child for me to raise my grandson. Yeah, so I thought life was just my husband and I. We were both older. It would be kind of very dull for him. So I thought that having someone else around the house would make make it a little more homey for him. But I hadn't chosen Christina. Christina was brought to me and it was just she was just there. This wild looking thing seemed a little bit of training to live in a home,
so obviously she hadn't been brought up with anything. I just thought any child living under my roof had to be taught.
Something meaning like what kind of things like you mean normal like rules and.
Well rules, yeah, the rules. I don't think that our rules were terribly.
Strict, really, I mean I felt like they were strict.
Well maybe you thought so, that most kids do, but there were the the same rule as my kid's head.
Christina hesitates. You can see it's hard for her to talk back to Isabelle even now.
But then she says, but David didn't have rules, No, he didn't need any.
He is the most perfect person I've ever.
Raised, Christina. Another person she happened to have raised, is seated a couple feet away from her. Christina stares ahead blankly, not saying anything. So I press Isabelle, Well, you must have done something wrong. I mean it's only.
Very little. You'd be surprised how perfect he was.
Was that hard though, being like side by side with someone who.
Is just so No, I think it was good for.
Her, Christina, Is that is that how you feel?
It was hard?
Yeah?
It was really hard.
Something else that's been hard is finding the courage to ask the question that brought her here. Christina gives it a shot, but after some throat clearing again, she goes silent, go ahead and ask.
I think the one thing that I have kind of always wondered is do you remember I think it was in tenth grade and I had been playing basketball and you told me that I had to get my grades up where I couldn't play basketball anymore.
Do you remember that?
No?
Okay, so I didn't get my grades up and I had to quit the team.
I don't remember that, Agittall, I don't know. I still.
Was. It was devastating for me.
Why did you get your grade out there?
Yeah?
I asked Christina if she could explain to Isabelle why losing basketball hurt so much.
Not without crying.
I felt like.
It was like the one thing that I.
Was really good at.
Are you surprised to hear Christina talk about how much she loved basketball?
Like?
Was that something that you knew back then?
I didn't know what.
No, did Christina? Did you ever express it?
I don't think she did. I don't think so. No, I don't think you did.
I think the reason why, like it still affects me now, it is because I didn't fight.
For it, and how could she have. She never felt like she had the right to stop her feet to slam the bedroom door in so many words, to act like someone's kid. I thought that maybe if I could get Isabelle to put herself in Christina's shoes, it might help her understand. Was there anything that you can think of that's comparable from your own life, Isabelle, Like something that you really felt very passionate about, like the thing that you really that was your great love.
Not really. I always wanted to go to school more than I did. I really wanted a good education, which of the country you weren't able to get.
Her father was a rancher, Isabelle says, and her mom died when she was little, so her dad raised the kids by himself, and Isabelle, being the eldest, had a lot of responsibility.
I used to miss school every year when I go to be a certain age and had to herd cattle. So I'd missed about two months or a month of school every year when I was old enough to do this. But I was first in my class from the day I started till the day I finished. I was never anything but first in my class.
Was that typical that a lot of kids in the class have to miss?
No, just me and well we were brought up by our dad. Men bring up children differently than women.
Yeah, and what ways? How do you mean?
I mean my dad didn't teach me to ride horseback. He just threw me on a horse and told me to go. You know a woman wouldn't do that, And don't think not likely. My father was quite fond of me.
Actually, yeah, how far did you go in school?
Just? Grade nine? I took grade nine by correspondence, so.
You didn't You never ended up getting there the high school degree.
No. Yeah, school was an important thing to me because I felt that's how you'd make your living.
Yeah, but I.
Remember when I was through school, my stepmother looking in the paper and she found a dishwashing job for me. She thought that I always capable of was washing dishes in some restaurant. I felt very insulted. It always surprised me when kids didn't want to get all the education they possibly could.
Isabelle motions towards Christina.
There's only so far you can go on basketball. I always felt your education was more important. But as a kid, sometimes you know, you don't see that. I knew. I tried to teach her to be self sufficient because I knew that she'd only have herself to depend upon.
Isabelle wanted to give Christina something she never got herself, a good education. But by depriving Christina basketball, Isabelle took away just that. At the time, though she didn't know it. What Isabelle did know was that when Christina showed up at her door thirty years ago, she was already in her sixties. Isabelle was old, and if she were to die, Christina would be left all alone. She'd only become a foster child because no one in her extended family had
stepped up to take her in. She had no one else. What did you know about Christina's childhood before she met you?
Not much of anything that I can remember. Like her mother was ment lel. I guess she knows that. And I lost my mother when I was five, and my father eventually had a nervous breakdown, so I knew what it was like to live with them.
Challenged Bertha, Oh, what was it like?
Terrible? It was horrible. You didn't know if someone was going to kill you today or tomorrow, or what the heck was going to happen.
That's not an exaggeration. You're really were.
It's not an exaggeration. I remember taking my little brother and sister outside and trying to hide them. He was left with five little children. Yeah, and he was terrified that they were going to take the kids away from him. And I used to sit by his bed and hold his hand, and one day he said to me, Isabelle, why do you keep holding my hand? And in my own way, I was trying to let him know that we all loved him.
Isabelle eventually placed her father in a mental hospital.
I admitted him.
Oh, and you were how old.
At that time? I was appo fourteen.
Wow, that's a big burden.
Yeah, it was. And I thought, here, I'm fourteen, What the hell am I doing here?
All the while, as Isabelle talks, Christina, seated in an armchair beside her, listens quietly, her hands gripping the armrest. Without looking at Isabelle, she makes her presence known.
I have many memories of visiting my mom in the mental hospital when I was young, like seven, eight nine, kind of age ten.
It's weird.
It's a really weird experience to go knowing that the other people are mentally unstable and.
You can't predict what they're going to do.
Yeah, and my mom was, you know, kind of a zombie because of all the medication, and obviously it was like sad and upset that she had to be there and wasn't with me.
Yeah.
It was an awful place.
It makes you grow up way too fast.
Yeah, that's right. I mean I was never a kid until I got married and had my own kids, and then I had a lot of fund raising my own children. Yeah.
I think that's why I was a nanny, because I could be around kids and have a childhood with all these other children.
Yeah, that's what I what I did. I grew up with my own children. That's what was my childhood. Yeah, you know, I'd play with my children just like I was one of them.
Yeah, yeah, I did the same thing.
One day, one of the neighbors looked at me, one of the little girls, and she's just how old are you?
These were stories that neither Christina nor Isabelle had ever told each other. Watching them connect like this, it feels like a good time to bring the subject back to basketball. How much over the past thirty years, Christina's fretted over Isabel's decision. Knowing this now, I ask Isabelle, would you have done things differently.
Oh, I wished I had a known more about it at the time, But I mean, I still have no regrets about it.
It's as though Isabelle just doesn't understand what the word regret means. So I offer a working definition. If we were to set off in a time machine where we could return to that time, and Christina were to.
Say, I know what you're saying, but frankly, I don't know what i'd do. You know, I really don't. It would depend on what kind of a mood I'm in.
If you were in the mood that you're in right now, I really have no idea.
I could give you a lot of BS and tell you how good it would have been, but it wouldn't be in the truth.
I think like a lot of people would just give Christina the BS.
Yeah, I don't do that. I usually tell it truth.
Like most I can lie upwards of ten thousand times a day. It helps ease the friction of getting through life. People ask how I am, and I say fine, does this jumpsuit make my ass look fat? And I say no? And so on, lying all the day long until bedtime, at which point I'm not sure the lying stops. I can probably lie in my dreams. In other words, I hold lying to be the greatest gift God gave to man. But even with all of our lies and best intentions,
we still can't escape hurting one another. I don't think Isabelle is a cruel woman, but I do think she knows that hurting people and being hurt is the price one pays for being human.
There is nothing out of the ordinary in our lives, but just you know, even ordinary lives are could upsetting. Sometimes it's a decision that was made when she was younger. It wasn't the right one, but how many wrong decisions are made as we go along. Regretting something is a waste of time. You move on find something else to be passionate about.
In spite of their similar childhoods, Isabelle and Christina see the world so differently. Christina is a dreamer, and for her, the best possible world is the one that's always just out of reach. But for Isabelle, it's not about pursuing the best possible world at all. It's about making the best of this world, the one you're stuck in, and evidently with the people you're stuck with.
I wouldn't look after her. If you know, if I didn't care about it, it would have been different, I think, you know. But I was interested in what she did and how she progressed, and wanted her to do well at school, do well and everything. And I was very proud of her when she did. She was with us a long time. Couldn't get rid of her. Just kidding.
Isabelle pauses, and then she says, appraisingly, she.
Deserves a good life. I do have one good and I think it's better because she had some stability in it, which I feel she got to my house.
I'll get on that side. We say our goodbyes and head to the car. Outside Isabelle's, the parking lot has grown dark. Thank you.
Yeah.
As we get into the rental car, Christina lets out a.
Sigh, Well, so did how did you feel then about that?
It was just really intense and there's a lot of things that she said that were like that were very hurtful to me. It's like she affected me tonight, but not in the way that she used to. I didn't get I didn't get the fuzzy teddy bear cuddly.
Thing.
And that's okay that I didn't get that, but what I got was her, and and it wasn't everything I needed. But I feel like that's how she shows love. And it's not with hugs, and it's not with I love yous, and it's not with praise necessarily either. It's in a way that I understand now, Whereas before I just felt like she just didn't even like me, But now I can see that she loves me in her way and in the best way that.
She knows how.
In the end, it seems like this is why Christina came here, not to find out why Isabelle made her stop playing basketball, but to find out whether Isabelle loved her, And in her tough, straight shooting, slightly scary way, it's pretty clear she does. Do you know why I want to go to scott Haa Park. No, it's a surprise.
Oh oh, it's.
Not a big surprise. The next morning, before heading home, I take Christina and her husband Levi out to a nearby park. Oh have pits, I know. I have a paper bag I've been carrying with me since Brooklyn. It's a good thing you're wearing running shoes. When the anticipation reaches at Zenith, I revealed to Christina and Levi what's in the bag out of basketball, which I think they'd sort of guessed since we were now standing by a basketball court and I was dribbling a spherical paper bag.
I turned to LEVI, have you ever seen Christina play basketball before?
Maybe? Not? Yeah, I don't think we've ever played.
Christina says she hasn't played in over ten years. She doesn't even watch basketball on TV anymore. I hold out the ball and Christina looks at it. Then she looks at Levi, and then she takes it from my hands.
Check check, Oh rusty.
But when she gets going, it seems to come back to her.
Oh, behind the back, behind the back again.
It goes.
Trash talking, calling her own shots, driving hard to the basket. There was a different sign to Christina that was coming out on the court. It happened suddenly and easily.
You're going to get that. I think it's too nothing at this point. I don't think i've scored it, have I.
The best basketball players are said to have an almost supernatural ability to see a little head, to anticipate what will happen next. But Christina and Levi aren't that good, and so they play like a couple of kids for whom the future doesn't matter or the past, and in that space between, it seems like a pretty good life.
Okay, I love you.
Now that the Fernentures return into its goodwill.
Home, Now that the last month's rent is scheming with.
The damaged possible, take this moment to dissolve. If we meant it, if we.
Tried, we remember felt around for far too.
Take from Things That Accidentally Zero.
Heavyweight is hosted and produced by me Jonathan Goldstein along with Khalila Holt. The senior producer is Caitlin Roberts. Editing by Jorge just, Alex Bloomberg and Wendy Door. Special thanks to Emily Condent, Misha Gluberman, Stevie Lane, and Jackie Cohen. The show was mixed by Kate Bolinski, music by Christine Fellows, John K. Sampson, and Edwin. Additional music credits for this episode can be found on our website Gimbletmedia dot com
slash Heavyweight. Our theme song is by The Weaker Bands courtesy of Epitaph Records, and our ad music is by Hailey Shaw. Follow us on Twitter at Heavyweight or email us at Heavyweight at gimletmedia dot com. We'll have a new hot puppy of an episode next week.
Way, so, Jonathan, you have a wife.
I hear you say yes. Ye can't keep looking new over, can't.
I think I think I probably looked best from your perspective. I think it's a good look for me. It's kind of blurry,