Small Sacrifices (15 page)

at 5:45. "He would turn the TV off and say 'It's family time' . . ." Diane dreaded dusk and her sure progression of terror as the sun went down and her mother left the house. She wore her shirt and jeans to bed and lay rigid, listening and waiting. She slept fitfully, if at all. Long after the other kids stopped giggling and went to sleep, Diane stared wide-eyed into the dark, her ears tuned for the faintest footfall. What was happening to her didn't seem like love, and she balked at being expected to display

"love" when she felt only revulsion.

She never cried or fought; it never occurred to her that she could. "He was the authority figure. I couldn't resist him. I couldn't tell. I would just blank out. It just didn't exist. / didn't exist. It's like a nightmare--not real."

Near dawn, in spite of herself, Diane usually fell asleep to awaken to bright light. Willadene slept in, and Wes woke the youngsters by flipping lightswitches and turning radios up fw blast. How Diane hated him. But she hated herself more. Despite her revulsion, the incestuous fondling evoked an instinctual pl^, sure response. It felt good, even though it was wrong. She could

not separate sex from terror and power . . . and pleasure, and she could not understand the sensations she felt.

At the end of a year, she sank into an almost clinical depression. Her life was dichotomized; during the day at school she was supposed to dress and behave like a child. At night, she was caught in aberrant sexual games, expected to respond as a mature woman would.

"There was no place for me in this life. I had no one to talk to to relate to, or who cared about me. There was no need to be here."

Diane cut her wrists when she was thirteen. "I didn't tell anyone about cutting my wrists--really just my left wrist--but my dad knows everything. I don't like to inflict pain on myself--I'm a chicken--and I had only scratches on my left wrist. My dad didn't ask about it. I didn't tell my mom, but she guessed. Nobody talked about it."

Nobody talked about it.

Diane's acting out was smoothed over, but secrets festered. The situation in 1968 had incendiary potential. Diane finally became physically ill from lack of sleep, and Wes took her to the family doctor.

She was evasive when the doctor questioned her. She was

only tired, she said; she was having trouble sleeping. An odd symptom for a twelve-year-old, but the doctor didn't investigate further, i;

Afterward, Wes headed out into the shimmering hot Arizona desert. Diane knew it would be one of their rides.

"My dad told me to take off my shirt. He told me that my bra was really just like a bathing suit top."

She needed a bra now; she could no longer bind her burgeoning breasts with undershirts. Diane shook her head. Her father insisted. Trembling, she took her blouse off.

Then he told her to remove her bra.

She began to scream. Hysterical, with no one but the Saguarro ^acti to hear her, she screamed louder and louder. He was killing

ner. She screamed that at him, but he just kept driving, further ^d further away from town. Diane grabbed at the door handle "nd managed to get it open, prepared to jump. Sh ^er Chef's hand reached across and pulled the door shut. e "^rd it latch and saw him push the lock button down. p Neither Diane nor Wes was aware of the Arizona Highway ^olman who was just behind them, alert to the activity in

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Wes's car. He pulled up and signaled Wes over. The trooper looked directly at Diane and asked her what was wrong. She avoided his penetrating stare, buttoning her shirt quickly.

"I couldn't tell him. I had to shield myself--and my mom and my brothers and sisters. If my dad went to jail, we'd have no food or house. I told the cop that I'd been to the doctor's and I had a shot, and that's why I was crying. I told him that we had company at home, and that I wasn't supposed to cry in front of other people--so my dad took me for a ride."

"Are you sure?" The trooper's eyes bored into her. "You can tell me if you're in trouble."

She only shook her head, and repeated her lie. She couldn't tell him the truth. The officer drew Wes aside. Diane couldn't hear what he was saying, but his gestures were emphatic. Her father seemed uncharacteristically cowed. They drove home in silence.

The sexual abuse stopped as abruptly as it began. Whatever the trooper told Wes was apparently effective. The officer didn't write up the incident and when Oregon detectives tried to find him fifteen years later, they found that the trooper had been dead for years.

Diane detested her father still, but she bided her time. She held tightly to two primary goals--to run away from home to a safe, free, haven with someone who would love her more than anything else in the world. And to become a doctor, and live in a huge house.

Diane's goals weren't so different from those of other teenage girls. But the intensity other need was; her hunger for perfect love and success was voracious.

She did not feel worthy of love. If she didn't like herself---and she didn't--how could anyone else like her? She felt unattractive

and insecure. She had no dates in junior high school, only unrequited crushes.

When Diane was fourteen, Wes and Willadene paid for a

charm school course. She learned to pluck her eyebrows and apply make-up. She still felt ugly--as if what she and her father had done in the night marked her face. In reality, she was very pretty.

Some of the boys at church showed an interest in her, but Diane distrusted their intentions. "Any rejection was self-imposed,'

she admits. "I was kind of a wallflower who was off the wall by then, but I still couldn't bloom."

Diane yearned to be noticed. And almost overnight, a profound change came over her. Where she had been silent, she

became a compulsive talker--as if a flood had suddenly burst from a barren plain. This was the beginning of the streams, torrents, gushers of wordswordswords that were forever after an integral part of Diane.

From the moment she woke, she told anyone who would

listen about her dreams. When her listener turned away, she found someone else. She jabbered and chattered. Her new volubility drove away as many--more--potential friends than the glum silence of her childhood.

With Wes Frederickson, Diane remained the listener.

"We were robots as kids. We were told what to do and expected to do it."

She was not allowed to cry. When she'd told the trooper that, she told truth. Instead she laughed, even when it was inappropriate. That certain peculiarity of response would stay with Diane. She had no sense of how she appeared to others. She bounced from elation to depression to bravado to scorn, her emotions sailing as free as a runaway kite and no better grounded. Through it all, her mask was in place. The laughing mask or the smirking mask; if she had any tears, they were quickly hidden behind it.

Diane was not popular, but she still made good grades.

She found animals more trustworthy than humans. She had

all manner of pets: dogs, cats, turtles--even butterflies. When she was fifteen, the Fredericksons acquired their first horse, Blaze. After that, there was Dutch, a big buckskin.

"My horse [Dutch] was freedom, power, a friend--someone 1 could talk to who wouldn't talk back. He didn't like men either. 1 was the only one who could make him do anything. He gave me power. He was something I could be part of that no one else could."

i Diane still sought love--unconditional love--and now she

| added power--unconditional power. She did not realize that the two were incompatible.

^lane Frederickson met Steve Downs when she was fifteen. Steve as seven months older; both of them juniors at Moon Valley ^gh School in Phoenix. Technically, Steve was still an adoles-^nt boy--not one of the "men" Diane hated so. Yet Steve

^ns walked with a swagger, the pugnacious air so many short 102 ANN RULE

muscular men affect. Even at sixteen there was a sensuality about Steve that made women glance twice at him--older women, younger women. Five feet eight, thick-chested, broad-shouldered, Steve Downs was handsome. Not pretty-boy handsome, but ruggedhandsome and Indian-tan, with a mat of curly dark hair on his

chest. In the eighties, Steve would be described instantly for his similarity to Don Johnson of "Miami Vice." The sexually dangerous man. The barn-burner. The man who could steal virgin daughters away with a glance. In the seventies, he was simply a

tremendously sexy boy/man. Naturally, he alarmed Wes and Willadene; he was too adult in some ways, too wild and immature in others. They urged Diane to date other boys.

Of course Diane dated no one but Steve. Knowing he set

Wes's teeth on edge only made him more desirable. He was the first male who had ever made Diane believe that she was pretty. She was dazzled that anyone should find her so. And Steve lived just across the street, always there for her.

Diane could feel the power in Steve, just as she felt it with Dutch. If she could make Steve love her, she might somehow harness that strength.

Steve was everything Diane wanted then.

"He came to see me. He would support me. He beat people up over me! He made me feel like I was important. ... He had long hair, and he never wore a shirt and he was rebellious.

"He was everything my parents didn't like. ... If their life was wrong, then what they hated should be better--so I chose Steve."

And Steve chose Diane.

Within months, they were sleeping together regularly. She was sixteen. She confided then in Steve; finally, she had someone to tell the secret of what her father had done to her. Steve had no idea how to respond, so he mumbled something and changed the subject.

"She told me when we were dating," Downs recalls. "She never got into graphic details, but she told me her dad was responsible."

Diane's intense physical affair with Steve Downs did not blunt her pursuit of excellence at Moon Valley High. Her intelligence was part of her armor against the world. Her name on the honor roll bolstered her still-fragile ego.

When Diane was seventeen, sudden, violent death threatened

,to snatch away everything she loved most. Wes's mother was

sixty, his father seventy-four, when they died together in a head-on collision caused by a drunk driver.

Next, Eric, Diane's beloved cocker spaniel, was crushed

beneath a tractor Steve was driving. Diane blamed Wes, not Steve, because her father had called the dog. Eric was paralyzed, and Wes dispatched it quickly with his shotgun while Diane K--amed.

"We had a nanny goat and her baby--Nanny and Betty. My er killed the baby and had the nanny goat slaughtered." Diane's pet cats contracted ringworm. Wes said the kids

would catch it. Diane begged him not to dispose of them, but one night as she was washing the dishes, she heard the shotgun's roar again. For the first time, her blanking out drew her in completely, [leaving no seam in the curtain.

"I blacked out. I remember the sound of the gun, and the next thing I knew I was in my room putting on a clean blouse. I guess I ran out when I heard the gun--they found me later, walking down the road. My foot was bleeding as if I'd kicked something. I had complete amnesia for an hour."

Diane lost Steve for a time too when she was seventeen; he joined the Navy in June of 1972.

Wes continued his lecturing. Diane had enjoyed playing the flute, but Wes didn't think she practiced enough.

"He lectured me on it for two hours. You'd get backed into a'

corner. He'd say, 'Look at me. Don't look at the table. Don't look at the ceiling.' He'd pressure me into scratching my own face ... I'd been rebelling since I was twelve, and all I could do was scratch my face."

Diane's face-scratching was the outward manifestation of her profound frustration and helplessness in her father's home, al-^ys under her father's will. Her rage toward him turned inward, and she raked her nails down her own face, leaving angry red

furrows. But it wasn't herself she wanted to hurt; it was Wes--if

|°nly she had the power to do it.

"My father said that I was possessed when I was spaced-out tor the first time. I was shouting at him. He usually hit me with a "^It, but not this time. I looked at him. I told him to leave me one-Maybe it surprised him. I guess my first anger backed him The daughter of an obeisant wife had never realized that a °oian might control a male; the best she had ever hoped for was

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to align herself with a strong male. Her father's confusion felt good.

It did not last. Diane still believed that a man was the only salvation for a woman. She wanted out other parents' home, and she vowed to grab the first chance that presented itself. When she graduated from Moon Valley a semester early

Diane found a gap in the fence around her. She was offered the chance to go to college--Bible College. She was to study to be a Christian missionary. From there, she thought she could switch to premed.

Diane lasted only two semesters at the Pacific Coast Baptist Bible College. But it was a revelation.

"I was popular for the first time in my life. In the first two weeks, I had a date with a strict student. He took me to a Valentine's Dance and kissed me. Well, he just went wild after that. He said it was my kiss that drove him wild. Other boys flocked around. Stories grew, and I finally did with a guy what

they said I did. Then another girl got in trouble. To save herself, she told on me. I was kicked out of school for promiscuity." Diane relates the story with a mocking smile.

Another version of her expulsion says that Diane and a male student desecrated the church altar itself by having sexual intercourse there--either as a lark or in a moment of unrestraine4

passion.

By August, Diane was home again in North Phoenix. She

took a job as a waitress for a month, and then found an office position. She was marking time until Steve came home.

Diane wondered sometimes if Steve might not be too dominating. Her most damning adjectives for males were "evil,"