#25 Becky and Jo

Do you remember Do you remember.

When you do you remember?

Do you remember when you once told me that we were talking about the blues, because you like, you were saying how you you love the blues? You know, you're just making you said that you really know. You said you love the blues, and then you told me that. I said, oh, who's your favorite blues musician and you said Jim Belushi. I said, really, there's so many great like blues.

You're an idiot.

Oh my god.

From Gimblet Media, I'm Jonathan Goldstein and this is Heavyweight Today's episode, Becky and Joe LA All around me cinematic landmarks, the Chinese Theater, Hollywood Boulevard, Sunset Boulevard, Sunsets, the Pacific Ocean, Tony Shaloub, the Observatory from Rebel Without a Cause, and the Hollywood Sign from the Entourage movie. Fun Fact LA is what industry insiders call Los Angeles. Hey, Becky, I'm in Los Angeles to see Becky. She grew up here.

Yes?

The California dream you just like? Open up the window in the kitchen. On the wall hangs the painting of a boat on the coffee table sits a pipe? Does your mom smoke a pipe?

No?

Just a conversation piece, but worth every penny, because as the tour draws to an end, the conversation begins. The story all started, Becky says a few months ago, while dining at an Italian restaurant with her parents and older sister Joe.

We were at my birthday dinner. My whole family was there.

Mom and dad.

Becky's mom and dad are divorced, so the whole family rarely gets together.

Like my parents, they're cordial, but like it's really birthdays.

Their chit chat proceeded along, and that way. Family restaurant discussions often do a lot of remember that person, remember this thing, remember that thing. This person was supposed to return, but never did, and now we don't have that thing or know that person. It was in this way that Becky came to mention someone the family hadn't talked about in years, Letitia. As soon as the name was uttered, Becky could see the power it still had over her older sister, Joe, even after so many years.

Becky brought up Leticia.

This is Becky's sister, Joe. For her, the very word was like a gut punch. But as she looked around the table, Joe saw their parents were struggling to even place the name.

It felt like people were trying to remember Leticia, like it was this hazy thing.

Everyone held little snippets. Letitia drove a red car. Letitia had small hands. Letitia was very beautiful. As the family batted around half memories, Joe remained quiet. Becky watched the emotions sweep over her sister's face.

Across the table in this very loud restaurant, I just got this wave of sadness about Letitia.

Leticia was Becky and Joe's babysitter until one day twenty years ago, when she suddenly vanished from their lives as movie producers. Becky and Joe's parents worked long hours and were rarely home, so from the time they were toddlers until they were young teens, the girls were looked after by a parade of babysitters, one after the other.

We had a babysitter named Melissa.

We had a babysitter named Robin.

There was a babysitter named Mae.

We had a babysitter named Candide.

Don't remember too much about Audriana.

Sixteen babysitters in total, sixteen young women lurking in the background of family photographs, dimly remembered each odd in their own way.

Helena, she was kind of an asshole.

She ended up falling in love with this exterminator that came to our apartment when we had fleas.

There was the babysitter who joined a cult.

She just said, now, my name is Mollie.

The babysitter who performed Reichi treatment on Becky. The babysitter who lied about a death in the family to scam travel money. Aislyn Aislyn Aislin brought Becky and Joe onto the front lawn one day and taught them a ten year old and a six year old had to put a condom on a banana.

And let us like pick a flavor of condom.

I just remember looking over across the lawn and seeing my sister, who looked so small to me, tasting a like grape flavored condom.

Also just going out on the lawn part like, I don't.

Oh, well, did you have a banana tree outside?

Nope? Huh.

Becky and Joe's parents were always absent, so while the caretaking fell to the babysitters. They fed the girls when they were hungry, comforted them when they were upset, became integral to their lives, and then after a couple of months they usually left. It walloped Joe each.

Time to have all these women come and go and choose to go.

It kind of felt as though, you know, they were hired to be our friend, and then we were just too much, or there was something that was too much to even make money worth being our friend.

I just really felt like I had no one.

But then came someone, neither Becky nor Joke and a recall where Leticia came from. She just showed up one day as glamorous as a movie star. Joe, ten years old at the time, was dazzled.

She was everything that I kind of wished I was in a teenage girl. Her hair was straight and I wanted to straighten my hair and long nails, and I bit my nails. She wore spaghetti straps, and she was like a grown up popular girl.

And what set her apart was how she made the girls feel like they were friends. She brought them to her home to meet her mom. She took them to the beach and to the mall and taught them how to apply lip gloss. Letitia seemed impossibly cool. Becky and Joe remember her showing up late one time and explaining that she just crashed into a cop car. The girls were in awe. Even her music was cool. There was one song in particular that she loved to play, that.

Aliyah song are you that somebody with the baby sample in it?

You know that like dirty so here we go? You know that song?

Yeah?

I don't know it. I make a mental note to sign up for Spotify to listen to the song, just as soon as I figure out how to connect to the hotel Wi Fi.

Letitia choreographed this dance for us.

Just like this weird thing that we would like do with our hands.

In the car we were seated. Me and Becky still remember it and we can do it like on.

Cue, driving in the car listening to that song and doing that dance, feeling cool and close to both of them. Kind of felt like I was like riding along with like two older, cooler girls. I always idolized my sister, yeah, a lot.

So she was like your older sister's older sister kind of.

Yeah.

Letitia would just like lie on Joe's bed with her like kind of like on her stomach like pillow, talking sharing secrets or something. I think that Letitia genuinely, like really loved my sister.

Letitia made them feel like she'd be sticking around, but in the end, she only stayed a couple months, and of all the departures of all their babysitters, Letitia's was the most brutally abrupt. The last day Becky and Joe ever saw Letitia, they were all hanging out in the kitchen, and when thinking about what drove Letitia away, this is the moment Joe always returns to. It was after school and Letitia was making her a smoothie.

I accidentally I knocked over the smoothie. I was just so excitable around her and she kind of dropped her knees and I tried to help her pick it up, and she seemed pissed, and she was like, it's okay, I got it.

For the rest of the day, Letitia seemed distant. The next afternoon, as always, Becky and Joe waited for Letitia to pick them up outside their elementary school.

We just didn't see her car and we were waiting.

She was sometimes late.

You were like, oh, it's okay, Like five minutes, she's just really late.

Five minutes turned to ten, turned to half an hour. Joe took a seat on the grass, and then so did Becky. Other cars came and went an hour, an hour and a half. As the school emptied out, it took on a far away, ghostly quality.

I remember the light changing, also Becky's face changing and looking more to me. Becky's face to me was a huge emotional compass because she was so much younger than me.

Joe's first impulse in scary, uncharted situations was to reassure herself by reassuring her sister. She'd explain to Becky what was going on or tell her things would be okay. But sitting on the front lawn of their empty school. As night approached, Joe wasn't sure things would be okay. I imagine there was nothing more to do than hold her little sister's hand.

Two or three hours went by, and we were like sitting on the grass, like both of us just crying. Then like it really setting in that like she's not coming. I remember thinking too, like maybe she died. I think I knew by her not coming to pick us up, that like she was gone, like she was not going to be in our life anymore.

And she wasn't. After waiting several hours, the girls phoned their mom, who instructed them to walk to a nearby friend's house. Maybe in the end, Letitia hadn't loved them, maybe it was just a job. Letitia was gone without explanation, but Joe knew it had to be because of that smoothie. Whatever the case, By the very next day, Letitia had been replaced Becky and Joe's mom had worked to get back to.

The problem was solved the way our parents looked at it, which was, you know, they're okay, they have supervision.

But I was just so heartbroken.

Even all these years later, when Joe talks about it, it's in the language of a first breakup. Letitia's disappearance even comes up in therapy with each new relationships, biggest fear is that the person she's with might suddenly disappear, just like Leticia did. Since that family dinner, Becky hasn't been able to forget the sadness on her sister's face, But whenever Becky prods her about it, Joe brushes it

I want to talk to her.

Becky doesn't know where Leticia came from or where she might have gone. She's not even sure of Leticia's last name, which is why Becky has chosen to wade into that swamp of collective memory known as the family storage Unit.

I feel like.

There's only so much time I can spend in here, just like because I know how many rats.

Are in here.

The storage unit isn't lit, and Becky forgot her flashlight at home, so she uses the light on her phone to scope out the room. Inside her boxes piled atop each other, containing years and years worth of old school assignments, VHS tapes, and birthday cards from barely remembered family friends you.

Just made up in here that's like twenty years old.

She's here to find Joe's childhood address book. When Joe was a kid, the way that some people might collect autographs, she collected addresses, so every time she met someone new, Joe would scrawl their address into a little book with a hologram dog on the cover. Becky is hoping the book contains Letitia's full name and an address, any clues to help agin the search everyway. While digging around in the dim light, Becky finds one of Joe's old journals

The summer twenty first, two thousand.

Dear we Both, Joe named her diary Webo, after the robot in flubber.

Bush is our new president they told us about a week ago. Anyways, I have a totally new crush. It's Justin Timberly. He is so hot.

I love him.

She declares on December twenty third, nineteen ninety nine, that her relationship with Leonardo DiCaprio is over.

She says, ps.

Leo is over too. He is a part in my French gay Lord.

It is the new Jojo and I'm a single exclamation point.

With Leo and Justin, Joe created a fantasy of the perfect boyfriend, and as Becky reads further, she wonders if with Letitia, Joe had created a fantasy of the perfect mom, a mother who would always be around for her.

Dear Weebo, mom is going away tomorrow. I can't believe it.

Again.

For four days, which is usually extended to six days, she never thinks about time with her family. I love her so much, and she's mostly away from me. Work, work, work, And every Saturday night she goes out with my dad. I just spend the scraps of time with her that I have.

Fuck so sad.

Alone in the dim light of the storage unit, Becky puts the journal down and continues her search, but after digging around for a couple hours, she gives up. She can't find the address book. It seemed like the storage unit had been a dead end, but a few days later, Becky phones with some good news. She'd taken Joe's journal home to keep searching for clues, and she found some.

There are a.

Couple entries that mentioned Leticia, and the.

First mention of Leticia is from the day she showed up, which was also the day the previous babysitter left.

Dear wee Bo. Today I found out some bad news. Sylvia is leaving. I'm trying not to make a big deal about it because I don't want to make Sylvia feel guilty. The new babysitter is Letitia. She's really nice and she's nineteen years old. August third, nineteen ninety eight. Letitia and I have found one thing in common. We're planning a Leo Knight. We both love Leonardo DiCaprio, love Joe.

And what else do you have?

There there's September sixth, nineteen ninety eight. Dear wee bo, Today Letitia's coming to babysit. I love Letitia. She's the best. She's one of those babysitters that actually does stuff with you, like For one, she will take you to the pier. Two she goes on the rides. A lot of my old babysitters weaseled themselves off the rides, but not Letitia. She rocks. She's coming at one.

But only a few weeks later, Letitia was gone, and for Joe her disappearance was so painful that it led into the departures of the babysitters that followed.

Dear wee bo, a'sln and Hillary are leaving. I don't want them to go, while at least they told us, unlike Letitia, we need to find a babysitter that will actually stay. I gotta go to school. I love you, Joey.

And then, in a diary entry written months after Letitia's disappearance, Becky discovers proof that her sister's heartbreak went beyond merely writing about Leticia. She was also writing to Letitia. The substance of Joe's letters was always the same, I miss you and I'm sorry.

I wrote a letter to Letitia. It says I still love you, and today I got a letter in the mail, but it turned out to be an advertisement. I really want to track her down.

All told, Joe wrote Letitia about a half a dozen letters. Letitia ever responded, and now twenty years later, it's Becky who wants to track her down. According to Joe's diary, Letitia was nineteen and attending a nearby college when she became their babysitter, so present day, Letitia would now be forty years old and possibly an alumna of the local college. Armed with this, I start dialing Letitia's by the dozens.

Until Yeah, I just received a call from this number.

Oh hi, yeah, I was looking for Letitia.

What what is this called? Pertaining too well?

I uh.

While strong at the dialing part, my weakness has always been the part that comes immediately after. There's a couple of people who wanted to reconnect. She was a part of their past. Is this the right phone number?

Or sorry?

Who would that be? Who would that be?

She was their babysitter in the late nineties.

Oh okay, that's interesting. Okay, I will pass the message along.

That's great. So this this, this is Letitia's number.

No, it's not, it's my number.

At any rate, if you're in touch with her or what have you, you know, she.

Could give me a call.

Yeah, okay, okay, thank you, bye bye. Was the hedgy owl man going to deliver my message to Letitia? Or was he merely some basement apartment bachelor taking a break from opening cans of chili to have a little fun at my expense Because I have no other leads. I wait, and then one afternoon a week later, I get a call back. So once again I unholster my trustee dialing finger and get ready to deliver some news. Hey, Joe, Hey, Becky. Hi, So I have some news to share. I found Leticia.

Holy s what the fuck?

Holy shit balls?

After the break, the holiest shitball of all Letitia.

Nice to see.

We've arranged meat at a place near Letitia's house to talk about what happened that day long ago. It turns out that Letitia still lives in the same neighborhood where she used to babysit Becky and Joe. The sisters are the first to arrive, so it's just supposed to be coming soon. Do you want to sit there?

Sure?

And because I thought I.

Would sit here, And after detailing my elaborate seating chart, I offer refreshments. I have some water and glasses for the water. We fall into a nervous quiet. Joe swimming in decades old emotions seems especially unsettled.

When you said you found her, I was like, wait, I don't know this person at all. It's so like the last time I saw her was the last time I saw her, Like, it's so weird.

Like And then we wait and wait and wait. Becky and Joe sit on the couch, side by side, listening to the cars pass by. Five minutes turns to ten minutes, ten to fifteen, until finally a knock at the door.

Hello.

Letitia has a warm smile and blonde highlights in her hair.

Oh, it's nice to meet you.

Come on in, Joe are here. Oh great.

Before the last time I saw you, you were just kids.

As per my seating arrangement, Becky and Joe are on the couch. Leticia sits down on the chair opposite them, So I maybe we can. I don't know how to to start exactly, but maybe maybe what with all my planning out the seating arrangement, which so far seems to be working like a charm, I hadn't come up with a plan for how to actually begin a babysitter baby sadded, reunion. So I figure we should begin at the beginning with how Letitia came to be hired in the first place.

So I think I.

Found a posting maybe on Craigslist. I want to say I did. I interviewed with your mom.

You know, but didn't come up in the interview, Letitia says, is how big the job would be. It wasn't just looking after Becky and Joe. She also had to do the cooking and house cleaning. Letitia was barely out of high school and clearly in over her head. It was the beginning of a tumultuous period in her life.

When I started to work with you girls, it was like I was going through like a breakup and like just my whole world kind of felt like it was just you know, unraveling, you know, it was just like it was overwhelming. I remember it being so difficult for me to get out of my car and like walk across the street because I felt so uncomfortable under the glare of like the people just looking at me crossing the street. I don't know, I felt very like vulnerable in the world.

Letitia began to overeat compulsively, and when she gained weight, it filled her with self hatred to Becky and Joe. So Letitia was the definition of cool, but in reality she was barely keeping it together. Even the inspiring story about crashing into a cop car was less a middle finger to the man and more symptom of being trapped in her own head.

I remember like breaking down in tears because for some reason I thought I was going to like go to jail or something because I hit a police officer.

When Letitia stopped getting her period, she knew something had to be really wrong. So finally she went to the doctor.

And it was the doctor who told me, you know, I think you're depressed. And suddenly when he said that, it was like, oh my god, yes, of course, like that's what's happening.

Eventually, Letitia would crawl out of that depression, but it would take her a decade to do it.

I mean, I wish I would have had the courage to come back and speak to you both in person. So I was really excited and happy to hear that you know, you guys had reached it out.

For Letitia, the day she didn't pick up the girls from school was just one more bad day and a long blur of bad days. But for Becky and Joe, it's the day they keep coming back to, one of the worst of their childhood. Even if Letitia was depressed, why did she have to abandon them without a word of warning? Didn't she care that they'd be left waiting all alone? Joe can't bring herself to raise the question, so Becky steps up and tries to explain the day for both of them.

We sat together on the grass, and I just remember like the last car, like and then sort of this panic setting in of.

Like we're alone, and like, yeah.

We waited a really long time, and I remember being worried that, like you were okay.

Becky looks over at Joe. Just like when they were kids, they study each other's faces, looking for direction, trying to figure out their next move.

Tentatively, Joe, Yeah, I mean that that is what happened.

But Letitia looks confused. She offers her version of the day. She'd been unable to get out of bed for most of the morning, telling herself that she had to go to work, and yet she couldn't possibly go to work. This was when she picked up the phone and dialed Becky and Joe's parents.

I called them and told them that I was going to be and this was before your school ended, that I was sick.

But I did call. Of course.

I called and told them, and this was before your school was out, that I'm sick, and I'm you know, I wasn't going.

To come in that day.

And that wasn't the day.

That was that day.

No one ever told us that at all. We really didn't know, we really and it's been I'm.

Thirty years old.

I mean like I've gone my whole life thinking.

That that was not a part of it.

The fact that you called that she.

Knew that you weren't coming is so absolutely bonkers to me. I think I felt at the time like it was it was me and Becky, like we were just too much.

Becky and Joe reach out for each other's hands.

As Joe continues, according to the I mean my mom was like, I don't know what happened, Like truly, that's what we thought happened.

We thought that you just disappeared.

Letitia tells them that she'd only meant to call in sick for one day, but that their mom had grown so upset that Leticia, in her fragile state, felt like she couldn't ever return, and so began Joe's letter writing campaign.

I after you left, wrote like countless letters to you, and I remember my mom had all the stamps.

And she would mail my letters.

Joe looks at Letitia again. She struggles to ask the thing she really wants to know, why didn't you ever respond to me? But before she has to come out and say it, Letitia jumps in, I.

Didn't get any letters. I never received any letters.

Joe takes in Letitia's words and speaks in a whisper.

That makes me so mad, Like it's just genuinely confusing, I mean anger, But like I'm.

Just like, why.

Why hadn't Becky and Joe's mom mailed the letters? And why hadn't she told the girls that Letitia had actually phoned that.

Day that that is not my memory of what happened.

I reach out to Becky and Joe's mom, Julia to ask her memory of the day is foggy, but she does not remember getting a call from Letitia.

As I remember it, I just got a call from someone at school saying nobody came to pick up your kids, and that felt like the worst thing I had ever done, in letting my kids down.

Julia also doesn't remember being given any letters to mail, regardless, she wouldn't have been mailing them in the first place. She says, Joe knew where the stamp drawer was. Julia remembers the time of Letitia's employment as one of worry and stress. She was producing about a half a dozen film projects at the time and was always exhausted. She kept long hours during the week, and on weekends she read the scripts that arrived at her doorstep in a huge pile.

I didn't feel I had to apologize to my girls for having a career, but I did see that they kind of resented it, and I could understand why because it did take me away from them.

Julia herself understands what it means to grow up with an absent mom. Her own mother was a New York talent agent who was always distracted with work and handed her off to a series of housekeepers.

And I had my own memories of what I resented, like my mother did not get up in the moment. She liked to sleep late, and so she didn't get up in the morning when my brother and I went to school, so our lunches were always made by the housekeeper.

I just remember.

Wishing that my mother had made my lunch herself. You know, when I became a mom, I think I hoped I would do better, But when I got there myself, I saw how hard it was.

But she was always sure to make the girl's lunches herself, taking care to drop a note in saying she was thinking of them, that she loved them. As for the other household chores, it seems like a lot of that fell to the young women she hired for Julia, being responsible for the cooking and cleaning while working a more than full time job was too hard, and it was made even harder by an agreement struck with her husband early on in their marriage.

My husband, I mean, it was clear he never wanted kids as much as I did, and I think he loved them once they got here, but it was my deal, and I was fully one hundred percent responsible for all child's care duties and everything, and that was something that was a bit of a problem in my marriage, you know, which ultimately ended in divorce.

Julia says that when she envisions Becky and Joe sitting on the school lawn embracing as the sky turned dark, she can't help but remember the day she sat her daughters down to tell them that she and their dad were divorcing. Becky was eighteen by then and Joe twenty two. Julia remembers them holding on to each other while she broke the news. Well, Julia thought, at least they've got each other, and I.

Felt like they're together, They're gonna be okay.

Yeah, you were ten.

I remember, because after hearing what their mom remembers, Becky and Joe say that there's probably no way to ever know for sure what happened. Back then. Julia was just trying to survive, and so was Leticia. They each remember things differently, and some things they don't remember at all.

I remember making a smoothie with you and spilling the blender and I thought that was the reason.

When Joe brings up the spilled smoothie, this painful regret she's carried with her well into adulthood, Latitia tells her that she has no recollection of any smoothies at all, and so Joe pulls out another pivotal memory.

I have a question, do you remember that Alia dance?

We're doing it?

Letitia shakes her head. She doesn't remember, but the sisters do. It's another moment that they still carry with them, that only they.

Share, Like I remember that.

That's so adorable.

Yeah, it was like.

The sisters mirror each other's hand movements, they fall into the dance automatically. They're enjoying themselves and each other.

And I just went again, that so funny.

In the Aliah song are you that somebody? Aliah poses a question, are you that somebody? Because of a hotel Wi Fi situation. I've yet to listen to the song, so I don't know whether Aliah ever gets her answer answer, But watching Becky and Joe, it's clear they've gotten their answer. Becky and Joe's somebody was neither babysitter nor parent. The one constant the sister's always had was each other.

I care a lot about my sister.

Yeah, and I mean we're closer now than I think ever.

And Becky's one of the closest people to me in my life and my hero.

Hello.

Yes, issue Okay.

Letitia gets a call from the hedgie man, who it turns out is also her husband. Their nineteen month old daughter is having a meltdown and their six year old daughter needs to be picked up from school, so Letitia has to rush off. They all make plans to get together soon, but for now, Letitia needs to take care of her daughters, and Becky and Joe for their part, head out together into a beautiful la afternoon, doing their best to keep taking care of each other. Now that the furnitures returning.

To its goodwill home, now that the last month's rent is scheming.

With the damage to pozzle, take this moment to dissolve.

If we meant it, if we tried. We felt around for far too from things that accidentally.

This episode of Heavyweight was produced by Khalila Holt and me Jonathan Goldstein, along with Stevie Lane Nba Parker. The show is edited by Jorha Special thanks to Emily Condon, Lulu Miller, Annah Sullivan Kate Parkinson, Morgan Matilde, Urfelino, and Jackie Cohen. Bobby Lord makes the episode with original music by Christine Fellows, John K. Sampson and Bobby Lord. Additional music credits can be found on our website, gimbletmedia dot