I'll Be Gone in the Dark(41)
No, it was Debbi who was, in the parlance of Klein Bottle, “at risk.” The story rarely ends well for the beautiful teenage runaway. This time it did.
Not being home saved Debbi Domingo’s life.
CHERI KNEW THAT HER DIFFICULTIES WITH DEBBI WERE JUST A rough spot, a bump in the road, and they would patch things up eventually. They’d laugh about it when Debbi had a teenager of her own. But in the meantime, she needed solutions. She was an office manager everyone described as a “mother hen,” who, it seemed, could neither mother nor manage her own daughter.
“How do you do it?” Cheri asked her best friend, Ellen,* as they sat in Ellen’s Jacuzzi in the backyard drinking wine. Ellen had three foster girls, all teenagers, living with her and her husband. Girls born drug-addicted. Abandoned on doorsteps. Cheri marveled at how well behaved they were.
“Discipline,” Ellen said.
The way Ellen saw it, Cheri’s attempt at disciplining Debbi had come too late. She’d been too permissive. Ellen demanded to know where her girls were at all times. The girls knew that if they cut class, either Ellen or her husband, Hank, would show up at school wearing a placard identifying themselves as the truant’s babysitter. The risk of social mortification kept them in line.
Cheri, on the other hand, had given Debbi a long leash. She was patient when Debbi broke curfew or didn’t check in. Cheri was by nature an optimistic, level-headed person; she believed Debbi was engaging in typical teenage behavior and was reluctant to bring the hammer down. The phase would pass, she said. Cheri was just nineteen when Debbi was born, and in happier times, when mother and daughter tried on clothes together at the mall or had lunch at their favorite restaurant, Pancho Villa, they delighted when strangers took them for sisters. They’d giggle at the assumption. The strangers would realize their mistake. Of course these two weren’t sisters. They were friends.
Which is why, in the months of escalating tension when Debbi would scream, “I don’t care about your rules! You’re ruining my life!” Cheri’s reply, while true, had a meek, uncertain tenor to it: “But I’m the mom.”
The starting pistol that began the collision course was the divorce. Cheryl Grace Smith met Roger Dean Domingo, an electronics technician in the coast guard two years her senior, when she was in high school. They married shortly after Cheri turned
eighteen, on September 19, 1964, in San Diego. Debbi was born the following August. Almost exactly a year later, a son, David, arrived. Roger left the coast guard and became a Methodist minister, then a middle-school teacher. In 1975 the family moved to Santa Barbara.
Debbi remembers the first twelve years of her life in a warm amber light. Cheri doling out home-baked sugar cookies. Picnic lunches at Nojoqui Falls Park. She loved having young parents, the kind who didn’t watch you from the park bench but hoisted you onto the monkey bars and scrambled up the rocks after you at the beach. Cheri and Roger were physically fit people raised in the sun, and their demeanor showed it. “I didn’t know what cynicism was until I hit junior high,” Debbi says.
A strain developed between Cheri and Roger somewhere along the line. There exists a 1,157-page Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Department report, much of it dedicated to the details of Cheri’s life; on page 130, Roger is questioned about their marriage, in particular their social life in Santa Barbara. He recalls outdoor picnics. They liked to visit Solvang, he says, a quaint Danish-themed village nearby. Midinterview he switches pronouns from “we” to “she.” Cheri liked to dance. She liked to “party.” It’s unclear if the quotations are Roger’s or the interviewer’s. But they hang there accusingly. Cheri wasn’t a drug abuser or hard drinker; the word “party” likely reveals more about inclination. Roger was content with a wicker basket and a blanket on the grass; at some point Cheri wanted more. They separated in December 1976.
Roger moved back to San Diego, and Debbi and David split their time between the two cities. Debbi recognized an opportunity in the family splinter. She began playing her parents against each other. She tested limits. Ignored house rules. At the slightest hint of pushback she’d pack her bag and announce she was going to live with the other parent. She ping-ponged this way for several years, shuttling back and forth between San Diego and Santa
Barbara, switching schools at least a half-dozen times, sometimes midyear. By July 1981, her once good grades had taken a dive. She was hung up on an older boyfriend in San Diego whom Cheri and Roger, who rarely were in accord on anything, agreed was bad news.
A defiant teenager in full rebellious bloom can rattle the most stable of families, so it didn’t help matters that Cheri’s life was in flux and under stress too. In June, with the economy tanking, she and Ellen were laid off from their jobs at Trimm Industries, a small firm that manufactured computer furniture. Cheri spearheaded their search for new employment by renting an IBM Selectric typewriter and polishing their résumés. Then, on top of everything else, she decided to move.
For several years, Cheri and the kids, when they weren’t in San Diego with their dad, lived in a rented guesthouse in Montecito. But in May Cheri’s father’s cousin, known to the family as Aunt Barbara, called to say she was putting her house in Goleta on the market and moving to Fresno. Aunt Barbara didn’t want the house to be empty while it was for sale. Would Cheri and the kids like to house-sit?