Call Me Debbie: True Confessions of a Down-to-Earth Diva by Deborah Voigt Page B

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, throughtears, 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 complicatedand 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