Call Me Debbie: True Confessions of a Down-to-Earth Diva (7 page)

Two weeks later, we got a postcard from Fluffy in the mail, in my mother’s handwriting:

At some point, my brothers and I came to believe that our mother did Fluffy in (
“done her in!”
as Eliza Doolittle would say). I mean, who’d take in an old, sick, mean dog?

It was all very strange. Something was going on in our house that I couldn’t put my finger on, but it felt like an unhinging. One morning soon after, as Dad left for work he told Mom to have the backyard brush area cut before he returned home. Our yard backed up to a ravine, and beyond our property line a thick row of brush grew wild and messed up the neat edge of our lawn. Dad hated that.

I was too busy sunbathing on the upper deck to help my mother, who was slaving away (burning a lot of calories!), using shovels, pruners, and other implements of garden torture to uproot that stubborn brush. Rob was trying to help her, but they were getting nowhere fast, and time was ticking away.

She never explained her thought process to me later, but I can imagine how it must have played out in her mind. She looked at her watch, saw how late it was, and panicked.

We don’t want him to be angry
, she would have thought. She would have looked around desperately, trying to come up with a solution
for the tight spot she was in, and saw the cans of gasoline in the garage. Suddenly, Mom was inspired with a brilliant idea.

I’ll burn it off!

Rob described later how she methodically sprinkled gas along the edge of our boundary line, told him to stand back against the house, and then dramatically tossed a match to it.

A few minutes later, from the deck, I smelled smoke. A minute after that, I heard the shrill sound of sirens getting louder, and closer. I jumped up and looked down to the yard and saw Rob running in and out of the house, carrying buckets.

And there was Mom, standing in the middle of the backyard in her bathing suit, holding her hose up high like a graceful statue in an ornate fountain, trying to douse the flames.

In front of her, our yard was ablaze.

SOON AFTER THE
grass-burning incident, I was worried my mother would hurt herself.

I woke up after midnight to the sound of sobbing coming from her room and rushed in. She was lying in bed, under the blankets, crying to my father over the phone and threatening to take pills. On the bedside table next to her was a bottle of sleeping medication.

After years of fighting and making up, Mom and Dad had finally decided to separate a few weeks earlier. Dad had moved to Newport Beach and Mom was distraught—and, from the looks of it, suicidal. I didn’t know all the details of why they split, and I didn’t want to. I assumed there were dalliances on Dad’s end and that everything had finally combusted, like Mom’s backyard inferno.

I’d never seen my mother so broken. I immediately dove into “caretaker” mode—something I was by now used to with Mom. I stayed calm, to the point of numbness, and carefully took the white princess phone from her hand.

“Dad, Mom is hysterical and there’s a bottle of sleeping pills on the nightstand.”

“Debbie, put your mother back on this phone.”

“No.”

I sat on the bed next to my mother and got it out of her, through
tears, that she hadn’t taken any pills, thank God. I slipped the bottle into my nightgown pocket and got back on the phone.

“I’m hanging up now, Dad. Mom’s had enough talking with you for tonight.”

He mumbled something about how he was not the only guilty party and that I should ask her about a few things, but I didn’t care to hear any more. I put the pretty phone back on the receiver to tend to Mom. She’d quieted down a bit, and I sat with her a while, until she fell asleep. As I watched her, I vowed to myself that I would never, ever,
ever
, be so crazy about a man that I’d be driven to this.

IRONICALLY, THOUGH, MOM
and Dad’s little drama made me cling to John even more. And their behavior inspired a sense of lawlessness in me.

With Dad out of the house, and clearly not following church rules, I let a wildness take over me and finally took the plunge with John. I didn’t want what Mom and Dad had in a relationship, but at the same time, with all that was going on, I held on to John like he was a life preserver in a raging storm at sea.

Our first time together was on the living room floor at John’s parents’ house. It wasn’t exactly the fulfillment of all my youthful fantasies, and afterwards I felt guilty. It was the same tug of war I’d felt since childhood, between what I was taught was the right, good-girl thing to do and what I actually wanted to do. I knew sex before marriage was “wrong” according to church teaching. John was Christian, too—he had even started singing in the church choir with me. But he obviously didn’t think it was wrong. And neither of us intended to stop. In my teenage heart, I was in love with John and I wanted to explore it further. Those guilty feelings, I found, would quiet down with a handful of cookies or a burger and fries.

And, as I had been learning and observing throughout my entire childhood, relationships between men and women were complicated
and changeable. Six months after they split, Mom and Dad called a family meeting to tell us they were getting back together.

“Your mother and I have made amends,” my father explained to me, Rob, and Kevin as we sat like a row of ducks on the living room couch, “and we’re all going to try to be a family again.” This new trying included going to church together every Sunday as a family again.

As Dad spoke, I looked over at Mom, sitting a few feet away on the love seat. She was looking up at Dad adoringly, then turned and gave me a reassuring nod and smile.
Why is she putting up with this?
I asked myself.
How many times is she going to go through this?

After Dad returned home, he and Mom began noticing the steamed-up windows of John’s car parked in our driveway and they jumped into high alert, DEFCON 1 mode.

First, they tried to find out if we were actually having sex—they did everything except ask me directly. One weekend when my parents went out of town with my brothers for a family gathering, I invited John over. We pulled out the hide-a-bed downstairs in the family room and had ourselves a romantic weekend for two. Come Sunday night, it was time to shoo John away and wash the sheets before the sex marshals returned. As I was putting the sheets into the washing machine, I noticed something in one corner of the bottom sheet: a tiny, seemingly random, but very specific, black pen mark.

Ugh!!!!! Mother!!!

She knew that if John and I were having sex, we’d sleep there and that I’d wash the sheets afterward. The disappearing pen mark would be her proof! And now that I’d already stripped the bed, I had no idea which corner of the bed she had positioned the dot on. I was so ticked off, I was determined to outsmart her at her own game. I washed and dried the sheets, and put a pen mark on all four corners of the sheet so that whichever one she looked at, she’d see her dot and think, “Oh, I guess she’s not doing anything wrong.”
Of course, if she saw all four dots I’d be found out, but I took my chances. After they returned home, Mom never mentioned a thing so . . . chalk one up for the daughter.

Until . . . I woke up in the middle of the night a few weeks later to the shocking brightness of my bedroom light and Mom standing over my bed. In her hand she held a packet of birth-control pills she’d found in my drawers. I had no intention of ending up in the same situation my mother had found herself in at sixteen. I’d been taking them for a few months by the time Mom shoved the evidence in my face.

“What’s this, Debbie?”

Gulp.

“Oh, ummm . . . what, what? Oh,
that
,” I said, stalling, till I could think up a story. “Mom, it’s not mine. They belong to a girlfriend.”

“You swear?”

“Yes, Mom, I swear. I’m holding on to them for her so that her mother won’t find it.”

“But Debbie, I see a week of pills missing.”

“Yeah, well . . . that’s because . . . I’ve been taking a pill to her every day at school.”

I don’t know how I thought that up half asleep, but it was good enough that she accepted it—for the time being.

A few weeks later, she finally tried to talk to me about it. We were in the car, as usual, but this time I was driving. Mom and I had never talked about her getting pregnant before marrying my father after that day she scolded me for counting on my fingers. Now I could see she was trying to warn me, but without saying too much. I could see she was afraid that history might repeat itself with me, and it scared her. She wanted to caution me, but at the same time she didn’t want me to think of myself as an “accident.” It was quite the balancing act.

“You know, Debbie,” she began, “your father and I always
wanted you. From the moment we knew I was pregnant, there wasn’t a second we ever thought anything else but that we would have you and be married . . .”

“Mom,” I said, shaking my head. I was tired of secrets. “Nobody is pregnant and unmarried at sixteen in 1960 and
happy
about it. I’m sorry. I know that you and Dad love me, and that you did the absolute best that you could. But let’s be honest, you had to be scared shitless.”

Mom flinched at my language. I didn’t curse much, so she was surprised. And she knew I was right. She was scared shitless then, and she was scared shitless now—this time, for me.

My father wasn’t as subtle as my mother.

One night a few weeks later, I was late for my ten p.m. curfew. I was at John’s, of course; we were fooling around in his car in the driveway. My father knew where he lived, and at midnight we heard a loud knock on John’s car—on the steamed-up passenger side, where I was sitting—and there stood my dad. I rolled down the fogged window.

“Get in,” he said to me, motioning for me to get into the family car and come home with him.

The next morning, he had a serious meeting with John at a nearby restaurant.

“Are you aware that you are committing statutory rape?” he said to John. “Are you aware you are committing a crime with my daughter? Do you have real feelings for her? Does she mean more to you than just sex? You are not going to steal my daughter’s future away from her, do you understand?”

My poor father; he was just as afraid as my mother. They took away my driver’s license for a few months and grounded me and threatened me and pleaded with me, but there was no use. I was a crazy teenager who thought she was in love, and the more they tried to pull me away from him, the more I was desperate to see him. Until finally one morning, they gave in . . . or gave up.

Mom was driving me to school and, with a sigh, she said something to me I never thought I’d hear.

“Debbie, I think maybe it’s time for you to go on birth control—if you are not already.”

Clearly, my parents, at their wits’ end, must have decided that if they couldn’t stop me from sinning and save me from the fires of eternal, damning hell . . . they could stop me from making the same mistake they did.

I WAS SO
consumed with the drama of John that my schoolwork was suffering. I was even failing phys ed. How do you fail phys ed? You don’t show up. It was my last class of the day, and I hated it; I was uncomfortable moving around and showering in front of all the skinny girls. And John got off work right about that time. He’d gotten a new job driving tour groups around, and at some point he’d moved out of his parents’ house and gotten an apartment. He’d come pick me up with the bus before my last period and we’d take off.

I went to speak to the gym teacher and beg for leniency. We made a deal that in exchange for a passing grade, I would come in early every day for a semester and clean the locker rooms. Which is how I got my (thankfully temporary) nickname from her and the other kids in school—“Cinderella.”

But the problem was bigger than that, of course. One morning I was pulled out of class and told to report to the counselor’s office.

“You’re skipping classes, your grades are dropping, and . . . you’re gaining weight,” she said, looking at me from across her desk, truly worried. “What’s going on with you? Are you okay?”

I hadn’t expected her to be so compassionate and I choked on my answer. What was I supposed to tell her, the truth? That I felt myself getting obsessed and out of control, that my parents were having problems and I was worried about my mother, that I felt guilty about everything I did and I was destined for hell for all of eternity?

“Nothing’s going on,” I told her. “Nothing . . . nothing.”

She was right; I was packing on pounds like a snowball speeding downhill, gaining momentum and size as it barreled down.

In the year since John and I started dating, my weight had jumped from 155 to 175. Part of it was because I had turned sixteen and could now drive and had the freedom to get junk food on a whim, and eat as much as I wanted without anyone wagging a finger. It was easy to stop off at Burger King on the way home, scarf down a Whopper, fries, and shake as I zigzagged through the streets, then dispose of the crumpled wrapping-paper evidence. My part-time job at Del Taco that year didn’t help, either. I probably consumed a burrito for every five I rang up at the cash register.

My bad habits kept escalating—like a speeding car, I was a wreck waiting to happen—until one early evening I crashed in one grand, dramatic, symbolic collision.

My parents had sent me to pick up Rob at the movie theater and on the way I stopped in at Burger King for my usual driving meal. I was driving and eating, heading westward, with the setting sun in my eyes. I remember looking in the rearview mirror and seeing a motorcyclist behind me as I leaned over to take a sip of my chocolate shake, and then . . .

The rest was in slow motion. The cyclist flipped over the roof of the car and was knocked out cold. Then, a flash of images: people saying, “We’ve called for help” and someone getting me out of the car and sitting me down on the curb . . . fire trucks, ambulances, and then . . . the sight of my father standing above me.