Read Doc: The Rape of the Town of Lovell for Free Online Page A

Instead, she smiled, kept up her good works, and held her shame inside.
    She didn't know how to turn Uncle Bob away. He was pleasant about his persistence, teasing and cajoling but never brutal. If he wasn't pestering her, he was pestering her siblings, sometimes in front of one another. By the time the children united against him, Meg had developed a pronounced aversion to sex and a morbid fear of rape. For most of her years in high school, she refused to go out alone at night. She wasn't positive what a rapist did, but she knew it would be torture.
    Confused about sex, she didn't read any sinister significance into her painful GAA physical. Dr. Story was as unassailable in his lofty position as the Lovell stake president. Nor did she make any retroactive connections in college when she visited a Utah doctor for a pelvic examination. Meg asked him, "Are there different instruments that you use? My doctor back home said that I was so small that he could never give me an exam."
    The gynecologist shook his head and went to work. There was a twinge of pain, and in about two minutes the exam was over. Meg asked, "Any problems?"
    He said, "Did you feel the instrument?"
    "No."
    "You don't have any problems."
    "DOC"
    Meg felt self-conscious as she raised herself off the table, "Well," she said, "I was just under the impression that I was too small, because my other doctor said he couldn't give me a pelvic."
    The Utah doctor didn't comment. Apparently doctors never discussed doctors. It was no big deal to Meg.
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    MINDA McARTHUR BRINKERHOFF
    "Do you know the middle-child syndrome?" she asked, her words flying out at a disk jockey's speed. "I was fifth out of nine—the syndrome is you don't get enough attention." She talked right through a deep breath. "Gosh, I would never go back to being a kid again." She sounded as though she expected to be interrupted any second. Like most of the McArthurs, she had a rich full voice. At the evening meetings of the Mormons' Mutual Improvement Association, "the Mutual," she rippled the curtains with her vibrato:
    Genealogy, I am doing it.
    My gen-e-a-lo-gy!
    And the reason why I am doing it
    Is very very plain to see.
    I will write my book of re-mem-ber-ance.
    I'll write my his-to-reeeee. . . .
    Minda was as tall as her mother, with slender legs that turned shapely in heels and a willowy figure that she bemoaned. Her curly
    dark-blond hair hung long in back. She had the widest eyes in the family, a firm chin, a straight nose that tilted up at the end—and a tendency to slouch. "All my life I heard, 'Stand up straight,' and Mom would push my shoulders back. She used to get so mad. I wore a shoulder brace in my freshman and sophomore years, but no one could see it. I didn't like to stand straight because it looked as though I was pushing out something I didn't have."
    When Minda discussed her childhood, she made it sound like a painful sequence of hardships and tragedies, mostly involving livestock. "I was the best milker, but I forgot to milk one night and the next morning, Oh, shoot! Their udders were painful and swollen! . . . My sister Michele slept on our goose and killed it. . . . My dad stepped backward and broke his pet goose's neck. We didn't have too much luck with geese. ... A heifer knocked me off the fence onto the cement 'cause I got too close to her calf. Gol, we had the meanest bulls. It was a challenge to get across the pasture to the canal."
    She remembered the way the pigs squealed when she held them down for her dad's knife. "They ate each other's bags when Dad threw 'em," she said, giggling and turning red. "Honest Injun! They fought over 'em and gobbled 'em down. Uggggh! Double uggggh!"
    When she was in junior high, a dog maimed the chickens, "so we had to have a big chicken kill. We'd run 'em to Dad and he'd step on their heads, hang 'em up on the fence and let 'em drain. Then we'd run 'em to Mom and she'd dip 'em in the boiling water and we'd pluck the feathers." She laughed