Small Sacrifices (16 page)

"harsh," and "dominating." In her opinion, her father was all three. She hoped Steve would be different.

When Steve finished his Navy tour, and was living in Chandler, a Phoenix suburb forty-five minutes from the Frederickson home, he and Diane were together constantly--or as constantly as they could be under Wes's surveillance. Wes waited for Diane after work to see that she went straight home.

Diane felt pressed to make a decision: "I thought Steve might be a miniature of my dad; I didn't know he'd be an equal. But I couldn't make it on my own, and I wanted children.

"It came down to whether I wanted to keep on scratching my face or marry Steve--even if he was evil."

* * *

It apparently never occurred to Diane that she could have left home, supported herself, and escaped any man's thumb. She was very intelligent. But she was afraid. The only role model Diane had was Willadene, and Willadene had shown her, unknowingly, that a woman could not survive without a man.

A few months after Diane turned eighteen, she didn't come home from a date one night. If her folks didn't want her to marry Steve, she would live with him.

Livid, Wes showed up with his shotgun and told Steve to '

either marry his daughter or to bring her back home. Steve said he'd be glad to marry Diane.

Willadene nervously tried to prepare Diane for marriage.

"She told me men could be hard to live with, that they had lots of little quirks. Steve probably would be different after, she said. I realized some of the problems she had with my father. It was the closest talk we ever had."

There was no birds-and-bees lecture as such. Willadene handed Diane a box of birth control pills and let it go at that. The couple was married a week later--November 13, 1973--by a Justice of the Peace. Steve Downs was much more than a bridegroom; he was Diane's ticket out.

Diane says that Steve changed the day of the wedding. "Steve was always on his best behavior. He does the thing that most people do when they're dating, and that's put their best foot forward. They're nice; they're punctual. They're everything they're supposed to be. And then you marry them, and it's 'Hey, Diane-Can you let yourself in? I have to run down and look at a car.' " , One of the reasons Diane had married Steve was to have|||

someone to love and adore her; she found almost at once that she was going to be alone most of the time. ;She

got herself a puppy.

Two weeks after their wedding, Steve told Diane that he had a date with another girl. He reasoned that he had to keep it because he'd asked the girl out a month before. He asked Diane to press his pants for the date. She did.

The bride waited into the wee hours for her groom to return to their apartment.

"He came home at 3:00 a.m., and said his car had broken wwn. But his white pants were still clean."

"I loved Steve. He didn't love me. For two and a

half years, we had dated, and I grew to love him and

he said he loved me. Whether he did or did not, I do

not know--but I believed him .. . It was during the

next year that I learned not to give too much of your

heart to grown-ups. .."

--Diane Downs in an interview with Anne Bradley, KEZI, December, 1983

In letters and interviews, Diane often refers to other adults as

"grown-ups" and to herself as "just a little girl." Yet, she and Steve were the same age.

Perhaps suffocated by Diane's need for constant affirmation, or simply because he was an immature eighteen-year-old, Steve Downs preferred the company of his buddies to his wife; he was obsessed with hotrod cars.

And, less intensely, with other women.

From the night Steve came home from his date with another girl with pristinely white trousers, Diane realized she had made a mistake. Clearly, Steve didn't love her any more than her father had. And Steve's interest in her, like her father's, seemed purely sexual. He had changed his mind about children; he wanted to wait a few years before starting a family.

Years!

y, Diane made a decision. She needed Steve to carry out her plan, and then she would never need him much again. If Steve wasn't going to love her--and only her--she would have to find

., '-,-7 »W. another

way. rYsife^

She would grow her own source of love.

Diane craved love so that her ambition paled beside her

emptiness. First she would have a baby, and then she would become a doctor.

Without telling Steve, she threw away the birth control pills that Willadene had pressed upon her. She hugged her secret close; let him run around with his hotrod buddies and his girls. Her baby would love her.

With a better love than Steve's. "Pure love." A baby would be another person, but it would also be an extension of herself, a part of Elizabeth Diane Frederickson Downs.

A month later Diane woke up vomiting. She would prove to be the most fecund of women. With Diane, the thought became the deed when it came to conceiving. She viewed this first pregnancy, and all the pregnancies that followed as near-immaculate conceptions. The male furnished viable semen; that was all. She gave life itself. During the months of her first pregnancy in 1974, Diane says that she was "in love" with the fetus she carried in her womb. Not that she loved her baby, but that she was in love. Perhaps she was. She had discovered a magical thing she could do to feel whole and serene for the first time in her life.

Pregnancy not only became her, it gave Diane a reason for being. ,;:

Steve didn't even notice the first soft swelling of her abdomen. When he did notice, he wasn't happy. His childhood had

been scarred by the struggles his parents had trying--and often failing--to provide for their large family. Only eighteen, he was ,^,,.,, afraid he wouldn't be able to support a baby. As Diane's due date Jl| grew closer, Steve changed his mind. "It was exciting," he remembers.

"I began to like the thought of having a baby." Steve might also have been more accepting of a baby because it looked as if he had a shot at fame and decent money for a ohange. Diane had always been the one with the ambition, but Ais time the spotlight was on Steve. He had just signed to appear '"a Gillette razor blade commercial. A scout had noticed his tan chiseled features, the insouciant maleness. Steve Downs, wrapped in a towel, might just be a natural for the subliminal seduction of a 'having ad.

Just one ad at first--but the Marlboro Man had to start with J_one ad. Steve was jubilant.

| The young Downs family moved to a farm and Steve stayed 108 ANN RULE

home more. He was in and out of work, picking up jobs here and there while he waited for filming to start. When Steve had no job he sent Diane to her parents. Diane considered it "shipping her off," and she resented it.

For a time, Steve couldn't work. A car he was fixing exploded and he was critically burned before he could be dragged

free. He was hospitalized. The near-tragic fire didn't kill Steve Downs, but it changed his life. The Gillette commercial producers couldn't wait for his blisters and scars to heal up, and there was no guarantee that they would heal entirely. They found themselves another young, good-looking unknown, and Steve's modeling aspirations ended.

Modeling had held out the promise of a measure of fame and financial security. Modeling could have led anywhere--TV, movies. And it was a hell of a lot more exciting than eight hours of hard, physical labor day-in and day-out. Now that was all gone. As long as Steve was in the hospital, the marriage was uncharacteristically stable. Diane hovered beside his bed, tender

and concerned. For Diane, an injured Steve may have been the perfect husband. He was too weak to boss her around, and he certainly couldn't get out of bed to chase other women. He appreciated her concern, and his attention was focused entirely on her.

When Steve's burns healed enough for him to leave the

hospital, he and Diane moved in with Wes and Willadene until he could work again. The marriage slipped back a number of notches. Steve's roving eye returned, according to Diane, along with his health. It didn't really matter; she had her baby to look forward to.

Diane's recollection of Christie's birth is as syrupy as an oldfashioned valentine.

"My goal had been reached," she wrote a decade later. "I finally found true love and peace with another human being: my daughter! . . . While Christie grew inside of me, I knew for the first time in my life what love really was. . . . That was the first time in my life that I was needed . . . really needed. I finally had a reason to exist and I was happy--truly happy. . . . The happiness I felt when my child moved inside of me was intoxicating. It never stopped. And, after my child was born, I was even happier. . Because now I wasn't the only one in love. Christie too loved me. When I would peer into her crib, she would reach for me and grin.

She was so excited to see me; she would kick her little feet so hard it would shake the whole crib. ... I loved her!" Christie's birth did nothing to solidify the marriage. The more piane loved Christie, the more she found Steve's love vile. When Diane describes Steve, he sounds like a Wes Frederickson clone. "Steve had no patience. Crying made him angry. If I laughed, he thought I was tormenting him."

Steve Downs was only nineteen and was trying to support his young family. He had a job overseeing irrigation systems in the fields around Chandler, which required that he get up in the middle of the night to divert the waters' course from time to time. Diane complains that he forced her to get up and go with him

"just to be mean."

Steve's sins as a husband grew. Diane was annoyed because he wanted a hot supper ready at five. If he was late, he asked her to reheat it.

And he was jealous. "He'd make me get dressed up in nylons, high heels, dresses, and take me out. Then he'd get furious if someone looked at me or made comments. He'd choke me, shake me, throw me down—almost every day."

"Steve sent us to Flagstaff on the bus one time," Diane remembers. "He said he couldn't afford me anymore!" Despite all the verbal brickbats sailing around her head, Christie Ann was an easy-going, cheerful baby. She ate and slept well. Christie was exactly the sort of baby Diane had needed.

Diane worked part-time. She made $2.10 an hour at Lincoln Thrift, a Chandler savings and loan. Hardly enough to pay the sitter. All her real plans were on hold. Even having Christie didn't make her happy. She still longed for an education and a career. Diane went up to Phoenix one day and joined the Air Force. Christie was not quite six months old. Steve was left to take care

°f his infant daughter while her mother slept in a barracks full of other female recruits at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas.

Steve remains baffled by Diane's decision to become a career

^man in the Air Force.

Diane says that she had no choice. "I thought the Air Force

^ould be ... stable. It would be a good career for a single parent.

'-ouldn't take her with me to basic training; you can't take a

^"y in a duffel bag. I left Christie.

1 called him every other day to see about Christie. We didn't 110 ANN RULE

have a phone so I had to call at the neighbors. They said Steve left Christie home alone, locked in the house. Then I talked to him and he said she wouldn't eat--and that he'd dropped her on her head!"

Steve says Diane called him continually, yes, but that it was to beg him to get her out of the service. "She said if I didn't get her out, she was going to go AWOL. I called some major and explained that we had a baby at home."

Diane served only three weeks in the Air Force. Her discharge was not because of her family responsibilities, but because she had developed terrible blisters.

A few days after Diane came home, she and Steve were

wrestling, playfully, when she hit her head hard enough to sustain a concussion. It may have been mere coincidence that her blankingout returned now, just as she'd failed once more in her climb toward a white-collar career.

"I blacked out while I was driving and the doctor told me I should get off my birth control pills."

Diane spent much of 1975 in transit. She recalls that Steve would pack her and Christie off to Wes and Willadene--who sent them back with the message that she was Steve's responsibility. The picture she paints is of a young woman with no control over her own life. Either she was powerless over what happened to her, or--perhaps more revealing--she remembers that she was totally dependent on either her husband or her parents and that nobody wanted her. If Steve tugged on her leash, she stayed with him; if he shunted her off to her parents, she stayed there. Diane and Christie, heading somewhere they wouldn't be welcome, saw the world through smudged bus windows. They hurtled along Arizona highways, Diane carrying a diaper bag, Christie clutching her favorite doll. The waiting rooms of grubby bus stations became as familiar as home to them.

At this low point in Diane's life and in her marriage, she conceived another child.

"I began to dislike him [Steve] more and more. I could not support myself, let alone a child, so we stayed. But, because of the unhappiness that was starting to cover us, I needed to fight back. So ... I did the only thing I had ever known in my life to bring about happiness--I got pregnant. The Air Force had been

my last chance to get away from Steve. So I'd just get some

' ^'double love' and have two kids. Perhaps it seems juvenile or ^irresponsible, but it was (and still is) the only way I know to be

a

happy anc^ ^ee^ l0^^ I guess I was just trying to build a wall I of love that Steve couldn't break."

Diane conceived immediately. When she announced her pregnancy to Steve, he was appalled. Their financial situation was tenuous at best, and he found Diane the most capricious of mothers; now he felt she had tricked him into a second baby.

' As her due date neared, Steve softened a little, allegedly telling Diane that he might welcome a boy baby. He couldn't support more than two children and this was his last chance for a son.