Call Me Debbie: True Confessions of a Down-to-Earth Diva

by Deborah Voigt

  That’s when my music teacher, Mr. Fichtner, suggested his wife, Pat, as a singing coach. She was a former opera singer and taught classical vocal technique. It was “an operatic approach,” he explained—not like the pop music I was fond of, but it would be good for me.

  Opera? Never heard it. Wasn’t that old people’s music? But Mrs. Fichtner taught within walking distance of my high school and charged only a quarter of Seth’s fee, so I signed up.

  During our first warm-up, I discovered my vocal range was two and a half octaves, which was quite good. (Mariah Carey claims to have three or three and a half). Mrs. Fichtner started me off with the beginner’s “bible” of classic Italian art songs, Twenty-Four Italian Songs and Arias of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries for Medium High Voice.

  Soon enough I saw my first opera, with Grandma Voigt as my date. She knew I’d been studying classical music—“Much more dignified than Broadway show tunes,” she said—and thought it was high time we heard some. At the San Diego Opera we saw Prokofiev’s The Love of Three Oranges, a very random choice for one’s first opera and one that is rarely staged. The cast didn’t have any famous singers, and I don’t remember being moved by the story or acting. Grandma, too, was a bit confused and didn’t know what to make of it. But the beautiful stage in front of us, the majestic way the curtain rose, and the power and passion of the singing overwhelmed me.

  AT FIFTEEN, I wasn’t officially allowed to date yet.

  “You can date when you’re sixteen and not one day before that,” my parents informed me. As if something magical and miraculous would happen to me the night before my sixteenth birthday that would make me mature and wise enough to venture into the dating world. I’d go to bed and wake up with the ability to tell the good boys from the bad ones.

  That, I already knew how to do. The trick was convincing oneself to want to date the good boys, and not the bad ones—I still haven’t mastered that one. A few months later, my parents chucked their rule when the preacher’s son, Randy, came to call. Naturally, they adored and trusted him and their trust was well placed. He was a good and respectful kid—too good and respectful for my taste, it turned out. Randy was one year older than me, but even less experienced. On the advice of his church buddies, we drove up into the hills on Skyline Drive where all the teenagers parked. The trick, his friends instructed, was to tear down the road when you saw a patrolling cop car approach, which they did on the hour, and then return ten minutes later.

  Randy had a car with a flat console between the two front seats and once parked, I hopped over the console to try some French kissing and nearly scared poor Randy to death.

  “If I wanted to kiss your tongue”—he pulled away, in disgust—“I would have kissed your tongue!”

  If Randy was too slow, my next beau was too fast. I still wasn’t officially dating age, and Richard was two years older than me, but he was on the football team and told me he’d noticed me in the halls wearing my silky blue dress with the elastic top—how could I say no to a man with such an eye for detail? Apparently, I could. If my parents were worried I was going to be taken advantage of, I wish they’d seen how I handled Richard. He was the kind of guy who knew exactly where to park and always kissed with his tongue. Making out one night on Skyline Drive, he kept slipping his hands under my T-shirt and inside my bra. Believe it or not, I still considered myself a good Christian girl and I had my boundaries.

  “No, Richard—no! I don’t want to do that. I told you, I’m not ready!” I pushed him away. “Why do you keep insisting?”

  “After the games, all the guys in the locker room talk about what they did with their girlfriends the night before,” he said, “and I never have anything to say!”

  I made him drive me home and I dumped him along the way.

  THEN CAME JOHN. I’d noticed him at the public library, where he worked in the audiovisual department with a friend of mine and I had a major crush on him. He was tall with long, dark hair, and handsome. He loved to sing, like me, and was into jazz, another genre I knew nothing about. He was also twenty-one and had no idea how young I was. A few weeks before my sixteenth birthday, we were both at my friend’s house for a swim (by now, I’d succumbed to the bathing suit pressures of my new environment. I couldn’t get away with wearing a cover-up for the rest of my life while living in California).

  John sat at the edge of the pool, watching me as I lingered in the shallow end, still shy and keeping submerged. He gave me an intense look from the pool’s edge like no guy had ever given me before, so I paddled closer.

  “So, when can we go out on a date?” he asked.

  “Well . . . my parents won’t let me date until I’m sixteen.”

  He looked momentarily surprised, but that didn’t stop him.

  “Well, when are you going to be sixteen?”

  “In two weeks.”

  “Okay, then. Two weeks it is.”

  On the morning of my sixteenth birthday, when my mother asked me if I’d like anything special for my birthday dinner that night, I nonchalantly broke the news.

  “Ma, I can’t. I have a date!”

  I lied and told my parents John was twenty, thinking he’d sound safer if he was under legal drinking age. I’m sure they were still freaked out. What would a twenty-year-old want with their barely sixteen-year-old daughter? Well, they knew exactly what—but what could they say? They hadn’t given me a ruling on the age of my date. John picked me up that night with a wrapped birthday present tucked under his arm and took me out to dinner.

  We spent the next few months making out in his blue, two-door secondhand Monte Carlo, and I was crazy about him. With John, I broke from the confines of my strict childhood for good.

  He’d take me into bars and order me colorful, frothy girl drinks that tasted like fruit punch but were loaded with gin. And after my years of being held under lock and key by the Food Marshal, John offered this starving girl a banquet, and I devoured it all. We were regulars at Shakey’s Pizza, where we’d have seconds and thirds at their all-you-can-eat buffet and wash it down with cheap, warm beer. Ours was a young love of appetites. After years of pent-up desire and denial, John was my portal to all the pleasures of the senses.

  Almost all. After months of making out, I still insisted on saving myself for marriage. It drove John so crazy that one rare night when my parents and brothers were all out of the house, he drove over, parked his car on the street behind ours, and climbed over our neighbor’s fence to get to me. It was very Romeo and Juliet. We always had an incredibly hot time together, but still I refused to “do it.”

  Until the day came when I changed my mind.

  I’d kept in touch with my junior high buddy Sue since I left Illinois, and we updated each other about our various shenanigans with constant letters. She was the first person I consulted about my monumental decision:

  Dear Sue,

  I’m pretty sure I’ve made the decision to DO IT with John. . . .

  WITH ALL THIS drama going on in my life, I didn’t notice what was going on with my mother.

  First, there was the sudden departure of our poodle, Fluffy. We’d brought her with us from Illinois, and she was more mine than anyone’s—she often slept in my bed with me. But she was a mean dog, the kind who’d growl if you nudged her with your foot. And she also was epileptic, and she’d have seizures on occasion. I loved her, but I was never home, and my mother was having a tough time taking care of her.

  One day I came home from school and Fluffy was nowhere to be found. I checked inside my closet, where we kept her bed, but it was gone. I found my mother in the backyard, watering the flowers.

  “Mom, where’s Fluffy? I can’t find her!”

  “Well, honey,” she said, as she kept watch on the water, “I decided Fluffy needed a new home. You kids don’t pay any attention to her, so I found a home for her with a woman and her young daughter out in the country where she can run and have fun. She’s gone to live with this lady.”


  I was stunned. I couldn’t believe she’d gotten rid of the dog without talking to any of us first. I burst into tears, and when my brothers got home from school, I dropped the bomb: “Mommy gave Fluffy away!” Soon we were all crying, and my mother felt terrible.

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

  Dear Debbie, Rob, and Kevin—

  I wanted to let you know that I love my new home. The little girl here is so nice to me. We play all the time and I love running free in the country.

  Love,

  Fluffy

  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.

  ( 5 )

  Wild Things

  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.