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

  My very first public performance in church, at age five, was to be a duet, “Fairest Lord Jesus,” with another girl from the choir. The church was filled with at least a hundred congregants, and all eyes were on us. I wasn’t nervous or self-conscious—after all, I had years of experience under my belt. I was excited—this was to be my first “real,” nonfamily, audience! But my little singing partner was petrified, and when we reached the second stanza she flubbed a line.

  “No, no!” I corrected her loudly, bringing the performance to a halt. Everyone was silent as the pianist tried to get us back on track, playing the same bars over and over as the choirmaster motioned from the sidelines to keep going. But my public scolding completely paralyzed my singing partner, who stood frozen at the altar. My parents, front row center pew, were horrified at what I’d done, I’m sure.

  As a consummate professional, I knew the show had to go on; I continued the duet as a solo. And even though they could not clap in church, I could see my audience was pleased.

  Soon, I was also able to transplant my budding acting skills into a role that served God and was therefore approved by my parents. The Sunday school teacher had noted my can-do spirit in that duet fiasco and began assigning me roles in the Sunday school pageants. My debut role was as a lead angel, but, being every bit as driven and ambitious as my father, by Christmastime I had petitioned for, and won, the coveted role of the Virgin Mary in the Nativity play.

  I committed to it with all the fervor and passion in my young heart, knowing that, in the Greatest Story Ever Told, this would be my greatest part of all time. Never mind Eliza Doolittle and Maria von Trapp—I now had the responsibility of playing the Mother of God, for heaven’s sake! I had arrived! I practiced casting my gaze downward modestly in front of the bathroom mirror, and our show a few weeks later was a huge success. The pastor himself took me aside afterward and told me that, even with my slight Cockney accent, he had never seen a more convincing Mary.

  EVERYTHING WAS GOING well for me, and that’s why what happened next was so disturbing. My parents had gone out on a rare “date” one Friday night and left Rob and me in the care of Paige, the babysitter, a bookish teenager from our church. She arrived just as we finished dinner, so she knew I’d been fed. But as soon as Mom and Dad were out the door I made a beeline for the kitchen. Paige was playing with Rob in the other room as I opened the fridge door and stood in the light’s harsh glare. There it was, on the top shelf, like a siren singing an irresistible song—a jar of green olives stuffed with red pimientos. I wasn’t hungry; I’d just eaten a big dinner and my tummy was as stuffed as those olives. But for some reason, as soon as Mom and Dad left the house, I had an uncontrollable urge to eat as many of them as I could.

  I’d been a good girl and done what everyone wanted, hadn’t I? I deserved it. I stood in the open doorway and ate the entire jar with my fingers, then tipped the glass to my lips to drink the juice.

  “Debbie!” Paige was at the kitchen door, in a panic. “Do your parents let you drink olive juice like that?”

  “Yup!”

  It wasn’t really a lie. My parents had never told me not to drink olive juice like that. I didn’t think I was doing anything bad. But by the time my parents got home I was already in big trouble. Like Violet in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, who turns blue from the blueberry pie gum, I was as green as the olives.

  When Dad drove Paige home she ratted me out, describing my spectacular act of gluttony to him. Meanwhile, back in my bedroom, Mom had shoved the family’s silver barf bowl in front of me. By the time Dad returned, I was heaving olives and pimentos into the polished dish. Eating and drinking a jar of olives clearly wasn’t the smartest thing to do, and I was learning this lesson the hard way. Unfortunately, Dad didn’t think it was hard enough. He burst into the house fuming and came into the bedroom as I was mid-hurl.

  “Did you tell Paige we allow you to drink olive juice?”

  “Yeah,” I said, weakly, vomit dripping from my mouth.

  “You lied.”

  “Yeah,” I repeated, gagging.

  “You lied to someone . . . from our church!” Dad continued, stepping closer to me. For the first time in my life I was afraid of what he might do to me.

  “I’m sorry,” I squeaked.

  “Never mind sorry. You are going to get a spanking, because we don’t lie in this family.”

  I had never been spanked before; I’d never needed one. Perhaps I should have quoted my alter ego, Eliza: “I’m a good girl, I am.” My father took another step toward me, and my mother put her hand on his arm.

  “Bob, she’s sick, she’s learned her lesson and she said she’s sorry. That’s enough. Let it go.” My father hesitated.

  “This won’t happen again, right, Debbie?” Mom asked.

  I nodded, and Mom ushered Dad out of the room. He didn’t say another word to me. Mom stayed up with me for the next few hours—emptying the silver barf bowl, bringing me water, and putting cool compresses on my forehead.

  Eating the olives and lying about it to Paige was a bad thing, I got that. But what had really set my father off was that his good little church daughter had lied to someone from church. I had embarrassed and disgraced him, and, along with being prideful, that was the worst thing you could do.

  “Debbie,” my mother asked again, trying to soothe the both of us, “do you promise not to lie like that again? We don’t want your father to be angry.”

  I nodded.

  But there was something else going on with me, something much more troubling than lying, something my parents were completely missing.

  I had just experienced my very first out-of-control food binge with no idea where it came from or what it meant. And I had a horrible sense of dread that I had opened a dangerous door somewhere deep inside of me that could not be shut.

  ( 2 )

  Jesus Loves Me

  FOR MY ENTIRE childhood, my mother was on a diet.

  Some days she ate hard-boiled eggs and tomatoes. Other days it was cottage cheese and grapefruit with Melba toast. At least once a month she’d go on a water-only fast for a day or two, or spend a week whipping up odd-looking pink shakes. One time the lid flew off the blender and the pink stuff spewed out like it was projectile-vomiting Pepto-Bismol.

  When she wasn’t weighing, measuring, or blending her food, she was “sweating off” the calories. This was the sixties, and women weren’t flocking to the local Pilates studios in their lululemon yoga pants yet. Housewives stretched and crunched using broomsticks while watching Jack LaLanne on TV, or they devised their own homemade methods. My mother was a firm believer that fat drained from the body out of the pores via sweat, so she took every opportunity she could to work one up.

  In the summer she’d put on her bathing suit and mow the lawn, then get down on all fours and pull weeds until she was dripping and aching. Then she’d come inside, turn off the fans (no air-conditioning for us back then), and clean the house in the stifling humidity while the rest of us nearly passed out.

  “Oh, Debbie, I’ve got to get this weight off me,” she’d say, catching a glimpse of her bathing-beauty figure in the hall mirror as she went up and down the stairs.

  My mother was by no means overweight. True, she wasn’t the skinny-minny type like the supermodel Twiggy, who was all the rage at the time. Mom had a voluptuous and curvy figure that, a decade earlier, when the blonde in style was Marilyn, most women would’ve killed for. I’m sure my father appreciated it back then, but apparently she’d put on a few pounds after having kids, and so she was in a constant battle to take them off to please him. My dad was on her case about it from the moment they got married. We didn’t want her to get as big as Grandma Voigt, did we?

  Grandma Voigt was a stout size 18 for most of her life, but Dad didn’t inherit her fleshy genes, and neither did my two lanky brothers. All three of them could wolf down two helpings of Mom’s meatloaf and potatoes and never gain an ounce.

  For Mom, though (a
nd, later, for me), Dad was on constant diet patrol. I had a nickname for him by the time I got to my teens: the Food Marshal. He’d limit the junk food that entered the house, and if he ever caught Mom sneaking a bite of her favorite peanut-caramel candy bar, PayDay, which she kept hidden in her purse, he’d say with much concern in his voice, “Joy, honey. Do you really think you need that?”

  Mom would shake her head no, then wrap it up and put it back in her purse, smacking her lips.

  AS FOR ME, with the exception of my inexplicable and shocking olive-juice bender—which would come back to haunt me as an adult in the form of too many dirty martinis—I was a normal kid who ate normal portions of regular kid food—toast with melted cheese for breakfast, a tuna sandwich for lunch (with Mom’s love notes tucked in). I didn’t place any special importance on food. I could be a picky eater, so sometimes I was even ordered to finish my dinner, especially on Friday fish nights.

  “Debbie, eat your fish sticks. Show me you’re a member of the Clean Plate Club,” Dad would say, when he saw me toying with my food.

  “But I’m not hungry.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Eat it all up anyway.”

  The cues I got about food confused me. My mother starved herself, but I was told to eat when I wasn’t hungry. But I shouldn’t eat too much, and it shouldn’t be the wrong, “bad” food—just the food that was sanctified by my parents. And still, not too much of it. It felt like my music rules: don’t be too exuberant or showy, and definitely not about the “wrong” type of music. If you crossed that blurry line, with either music or food, you were greedy, selfish, and undisciplined. Both were passions, appetites, I had to control.

  I was somewhat clear on the music rules—I should sing songs about God, for God, in front of God, and because of God. But I wasn’t so sure whom I ate for, or how to do it right: I ate too many olives, but not enough fish sticks. I got love notes with my tuna sandwiches, but a disapproving look when I reached for a third cookie. I wasn’t chubby, but neither was my mother. And yet she and Dad were continually worried about what she put into her mouth and how it ended up on her pretty, young body.

  I did my best to navigate my way around the powerful and dangerous world of food. The last thing I wanted was for my father to be angry at me, or to say to me the chastising words he said to my mother.

  THE FIRST TIME my weight became an issue was after I got home from a two-week vacation with Grandma Helen and Grandpa Henry Gruthusen, when I was about six years old. We’d spent two weeks by a lake in Ely, Minnesota, and, apparently, I’d returned home rounder than usual. I remember hopping onto my mother’s piano bench while my shocked parents led my grandparents into the kitchen for a private conversation. I could hear them, though.

  “What did you feed Debbie?” my mother asked. My father said something, too, and it sounded angry. Being of good German stock, my grandparents fed me the same food they loved to eat—bacon, sausages, and pancakes, which I happily wolfed down without the Food Marshal around. After dinner, Grandpa Gruthusen took my brother and me to the public sauna, and I was sure whatever “bad” food I had eaten was draining from my pores, just like it did for Mom. Apparently, it didn’t do the trick, and from that point on, my parents took even more interest in what I ate.

  I wanted to be good, but it wasn’t easy. I had diverted my interest in music to the church, and that had worked. Perhaps I needed supernatural distraction from food, too?

  My timing was perfect, because this was right around the time Dad introduced “devotional time” at home. Mom was expecting my baby brother Kevin, and it was time, Dad said, we all learned more about our faith as a family. I was glad for the extra reinforcement to keep me on the disciplined path and help me suppress any lurking food benders threatening to surface.

  Every night, after dinner, Dad would gather us all in the living room and read from the Bible. He’d tell us about David and Goliath and Noah and the Ark, and my brother and I were in awe and full of questions.

  “Dad, how did Noah find the kangaroos?” I asked. “And did the penguins walk all the way from the North Pole?”

  I was a precocious child, and Dad didn’t have all the answers. But I had faith in him that whatever he was telling me was the God’s honest truth.

  I WAS INSPIRED by my father’s religious example, and further motivated by a missionary who visited our church to talk about her work spreading the word of God in Kenya. After one Sunday sermon, she showed us slides of the village where she’d been stationed and pictures of the little African children she taught to love Jesus. I was amazed at this stranger’s boldness—that she’d choose to be single and venture out to preach God’s word by herself, so far from home; how unconventional, how melodramatic, how selfless, how . . . adventurous.

  She was the first grown-up woman I’d met who was different from my mother, except for my first-grade teacher, Mrs. Bieber, who was statuesque, divorced, and wore tight sweaters and colorful scarves wrapped around her hair. Both these women lived on their own terms, but this missionary used her teaching skills for God, just as I did my music. I was hooked. The next day at school I hatched a plan.

  “Meet me by the fence during recess,” I whispered to my classmates within earshot of my desk. “We’re gonna have Bible study.”

  I had no idea what religion my classmates were, if any at all—it was a public school, so for all I knew I was gathering a bunch of Jewish kids to convert to Christ. The bell rang and we met under the big oak tree; my followers sat cross-legged in a circle as I began my ministry.

  “I have to tell you all,” I said, holding up my children’s Bible in one hand, “you are all going to the devil if you don’t become Christians right now.”

  “What?” asked one terrified pal.

  “You have to be born again!”

  “How do you do that?” asked another.

  “Well, Jesus died on the cross for our sins.”

  “What’s a sin?”

  Sigh. Didn’t they know anything?

  “It’s when you lie to your mommy, or . . . taking a cookie from the cookie jar when you’re not supposed to, or . . . drinking all the olive juice.”

  “The what?”

  “You’ll burn up in fire for all of eternity.”

  I’d heard the minister say words like this, and they seemed effective in church. My audience was rapt, and I emoted the scene beautifully. I even wore the perfect costume: my homespun, patriotic sundress with the red, white, and blue flowers on it that Mom made. I was so into my role, I’m surprised I didn’t think to take an offering—missed that opportunity.

  But try as I might, my passion didn’t sway my friends. They were not as committed as I. When Good Friday and Easter came around, I’d cry, thinking about what Jesus had done to save me. Such a sacrifice appealed to me on a dramatic, soul-searching level. So much so, that one day I took the leap.

  I had seen people become “born again” on Sundays when the minister called people forward as we all sang “Just As I Am.”

  “Is the Lord speaking to you?” he’d call out to the crowd, “do you feel a moving in your heart for something else? If so, come up!”

  Going up to the front and formally accepting Jesus as your savior was the first step to becoming a Christian in our faith. If I was serious about God, I had to do it.

  In Sunday school, soon after, as the class colored pictures of Mary and Joseph, I looked up at the portrait of Jesus on the wall. He was handsome, with long, blondish hair and electric-blue eyes. I couldn’t wait for the sermon call; the time was now. I sprung from my seat and strode down the aisle toward my teacher.

  “Mrs. Heggland, I want to accept Jesus as my savior!” I blurted out, breathless.

  She looked up at me over her bifocals—surprised at first, as if she wasn’t prepared for such a responsibility, and then very, very serious.

  “Debbie, are you saying you’d like the Holy Spirit to live in your heart?”

  I nodded. Yup.

  “Do yo
u understand that Jesus died for your sins?”

  I thought of my olive binge; what a thing to die for—but I was grateful. The other kids in class were now watching from their seats, transfixed at the scene being played out in their very own classroom. Some in the back strained to hear the dialogue, so I pumped up my volume. I clasped my hands together, as if in a prayer. And in a clear voice, from deep within my diaphragm, I projected:

  “Yes, I do. I understand that, Mrs. Heggland. Jesus died for my sins.”

  “Well, then, Debbie,” she said, looking very pleased, “sit down with me and let’s pray.”

  After class, she went to my parents in church and let them know of my Big Moment. Yes, I had done it all by myself, she bragged to them. Yes, yes, in front of the entire class! No, I wasn’t nervous at all, she added. I was a natural.

  In keeping with Dad’s and my new zeal, our family started attending sermons twice on Sundays. After the first sermon, we’d come home, lay our nice clothes on the bed so they wouldn’t get wrinkled, then hop in the station wagon to pick up a bucket of Brown’s Chicken in nearby Chicago. This was the big family treat of the week, and even Mom was permitted to splurge. Then it was back home, have a nap, put on our Sunday best again, and back to church for the five p.m. show.

  Now that I was getting older, I listened to the pastor’s words more intently.

  “You are all born sinners!” he’d yell, pointing to us from the pulpit. “You must repent!”

  He urged us to examine our actions and consciences and ask the Lord for forgiveness and strength to correct the wrongs we’d done. If we didn’t, we’d suffer those fires in hell forever. I was scared, and wondered: Was I a sinner? Did I deserve to be punished?

  Around the time Dad instituted devotional time, he also introduced spanking into my childhood curriculum. I was basically a good kid, but I got spanked anyway. I never knew when I was going to get it, because I was never sure when I’d done something bad. At any time he could approach me in my room and let me know I deserved a spanking.