Call Me Debbie: True Confessions of a Down-to-Earth Diva Read Free Page B

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 (and, 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