Doc: The Rape of the Town of Lovell (10 page)

He continued to give her pelvic examinations, and she continued to attend in body only. A friend sitting in the waiting room asked her, "Why do his pelvics take so danged long?"

She thought, What a silly question. "Because he's thorough," she answered.

When others complained about waiting, Arden smiled and said, "This doctor's worth waiting for."

She talked him up wherever she went, even in places like the nearby oil towns Byron and Cowley, the Yellowstone jumping-off town of Cody, and the Big Horn county seat of Basin. She brought him dozens of new patients, including Dean's parents and her own. Once she even considered using him as a family counselor, but the Lord intervened to change her mind. A succession of female problems had diminished her sex drive, and she prayed for a way to be a better partner for the husband she loved. But . . . Heavenly Father was silent.

She thought, If He won't give me an answer, why can't I talk to my family doctor? She was dressing to go to the clinic when a voice spoke in her head: "Do not discuss anything with Dr. Story! He is a man of the world. He doesn't believe the same as you do. Everything will work out.
Don't discuss anything personal with him!"

She thought, Why, Dr. Story loves us! We've entrusted our lives to him. He's performed surgery on every member of the family. He's keeping Dean alive.

But her "burnings in the bosom" were always on target, and as far as she was concerned, they came straight from Father in Heaven. She told Minda, "Honey, whatever you do, never discuss your private life with Dr. Story."

"DOC"

Minda said, "It's too late, Mother. That's one of the first things he asks. He already knows all about me and Scott."

"Well, don't discuss it anymore." She described the message and the voice, and Minda nodded. Arden told herself it was nice that her family understood her spirituality. Not every family would.

7

MEG ANDERSON

The psychopath hits upon conduct and creates situations so bizarre, so untimely, and so preposterous that their motivation appears inscrutable. Many of his exploits seem directly calculated to place him in a disgraceful or ignominious position.

—Hervey Cleckley, M.D.,
The Mask of Sanity

Meg thought, All those years looking for the right man, and he was under my nose the whole time!

She'd fallen in love with the straightest arrow in Lovell, the town milkman, Dan Anderson. She'd known him ever since the second grade, and now he'd been to college for a year and intended to finish up in psychology and police science and become a thinking man's cop. His family dated back to the Utah Mormons who'd come to dig the canals—righteous strong-backed pioneers with names like Heber and Alma and Seth. He'd already been on his mission, two years of pounding on doors in darkest Texas. He made Meg laugh with his description of southern Baptists: "They'd open the door and say, 'Not interested.' Then they'd invite me in for dinner."

Meg dated him a few times on visits to Lovell, and it didn't take him long to confess that he'd loved her for years. She took a good look and realized that he'd grown into a prize catch. He'd always been shy and likable—she remembered that. He kept his hands to himself and didn't try to push through her front door at the end of a date. He seemed secure in his maleness and didn't need to keep proving it, unlike so many of the men she'd met in college. She couldn't imagine him in a police uniform, packing a gun, but that was his decision. She decided it was the influence of his mother, Lovell's longtime police dispatcher. Mrs. Anderson knew all the town secrets. But she also knew how to keep them.

One lonely night in Moab, Utah, where Meg was teaching English and speech, she came back to her apartment and made a longdistance call to Lovell. "Honey," she told Dan, "let's get married and have a family."

"Well, sure," he said in the soft voice that reminded her of her sick father. "That's all I ever wanted."

There was one obstacle. She was twenty-six, and her voluptuousness continued to make her a target of a certain type of man. "I fell back a few times," she confessed to Dan. "I'm a submissive person and these guys kept coming on to me. It's my own fault, -but it's long over now."

She explained that she'd moved to Moab from the college town of Logan to make a fresh start, thrown herself into LDS activities, and cried herself to sleep night after night. Sometimes guilt or shame would wake her up and she would grab her guitar for comfort; in troubled times, the McArthur clan had always fallen back on its music. But no matter how many hymns she sang, the message wouldn't stop playing in her mind: You've been with men. You're not worthy.
You're not worthy. . . .

Dan said he understood and loved her all the more. But she wasn't sure that the church would be as forgiving. It was even possible that she could be excommunicated. She couldn't marry a devout Saint under such a dark cloud.

She asked her ward bishop to convene a church court, and she bared her soul. When she was asked if she felt she could change her life, she answered in a steady voice, "I already have." The high priests wiped her record clean.

In the fall of 1981, she married Dan in a civil ceremony. He helped her to run a children's clothing store bought by her father and mother with money from selling off acreage. Most of the nine McArthur children had left Lovell or planned to—the historical pattern for the region's young people—and Meg suspected that her parents had invested in the store to keep her and Dan in town. That was fine with her; she'd never wanted to leave in the first place.

Soon afterward, Dean and Arden added the dry cleaners on Main Street to their business assets, and sister Minda was summoned home from Rock Springs to run it. The sweat-shop work was perfect for her. Meg remembered how the middle child had run the family tractor in hundred-degree weather and complained when their father made her stop.

Meg enjoyed having Scott and Minda around; the Andersons and the Brinkerhoffs met each other's needs. Scott had finished his two-year course in computer science and temporarily hired on as an oil company carpenter. Dan ran the Queen of the Valley Dairy and prepared to enroll at the community college in nearby Powell. Meg operated her store, Kids Are Special, and waited for a special kid of her own. After so much misery, her life as an Anderson seemed heavenly. Soon she was pregnant.

In his gentle way, Dan told her one night that he would be happier if Dr. Story didn't deliver their child. His family had broken with Story after he sent Dan's brother Jerry back into a high school football game with a damaged neck. These days the Andersons drove thirty miles to a doctor in Powell.

Meg told her mother, "I don't know what to do about a doctor."

Arden asked. "What's the matter with Dr. Story?"

"Well," she said, "Dan wants me to go to Dr. Haberland in Powell."

"You can't go to Powell," her mom said. "You need somebody here."

Meg hadn't forgotten Dr. Story's busy hands and painful precol-lege pelvic, but she was reluctant to disagree with her mother. Arden was still the little doctor's biggest advocate. And now that he was treating her father, Meg had begun to see him in a different light. Compared to what he was doing for the McArthurs, her own petty complaints about him were a joke. She was sure she'd overreacted to the pain of the pelvic. And the high school exams—well, maybe he was feeling her spleen or something when he put his hands down her pants. It was so easy to misunderstand a doctor, and so unfair.

So she resumed seeing him, and his pelvic exams hurt worse than ever. Dan would come home and see her sprawled on the sofa, barely able to move. "Oh," he would say. "You've been to Story." Sometimes the pain lasted three days.

Daniel Vincent Anderson arrived on July 3, 1982, but not before Dr. Story had made a radical incision extending through Meg's anal sphincter and part of her rectal wall, a forty-five-minute procedure requiring two hundred stitches.

She kept putting off her first postnatal examination because she was afraid it would hurt. Ever since the pregnancy, sex had been out of the question. Nine weeks after the birth, Dan's lightest touch made her jump. She decided to see if she'd been permanently damaged.

After an hour in the clinic's waiting room, she was prepped by the nurse and left naked under a sheet on the automatic table in Examining Room No. 2. Dr. Story arrived in his loose-fitting lab coat and his pleasant smile, told her how pretty she looked, and asked about her milk supply. She told him she thought she had a lump on one breast; he palpated her and told her she was normal.

She said, "I'm concerned about the way I'm healing. It hurts whenever Dan and I . . ." She let her voice trail off. "I never had an episiotomy before and I don't know how much soreness is okay."

He asked if she'd had the tightness problem before the birth, and she told him that it had always hurt at the start of intercourse— "but not like this."

He said, "You need to be dilated." She remembered that word from giving birth, when she'd needed to be "dilated" to ten centimeters before going to the delivery room. He said, "Let's take a look."

He adjusted the table so that her head was slightly raised, and turned on the water in the sink, an arm's length away. He always ran water during pelvic exams; she wondered what purpose it served, other than to dilute the sounds of Lawrence Welk and

Mantovani. Around the house, she'd been overexposed to her father's favorite singer, Johnny Cash, but the clinic's weary music made her yearn for a few bars of "A Boy Named Sue" or even the Lennon sisters.

Dr. Story pulled on a pair of latex gloves, squeezed some gel from the big white tube, and began probing her uterine walls with a finger. "Does this hurt?" he asked.

"Yes," she said.

He pushed harder. "Did that hurt?"

"Oh, yes. It did!"

He tried again. The pain jerked her upward in the stirrups. He stepped back, peeled off his gloves, and left the room without a word. Here we go again, Meg said to herself. Another two-part torture. The discomfort was always worse in the second half, when he stationed himself between her legs.

She glanced at the counter to check out the speculum. Maybe it was a size too big. She'd been shown one in Utah during a pelvic exam; it was shaped a little like a duck's bill. There was nothing on Dr. Story's counter but the open tube of gel. She assumed he'd taken the instrument with him.

She was damp with sweat by the time he returned. He didn't seem to be carrying anything but his clipboard. His white lab smock hung open an inch or two.

He rinsed his hands and stepped to the foot of the table. "Can you move down?" he asked. He helped her slide a little beyond the end, so that a few inches of her bottom jutted into space. She clenched her fists and thought, This
has
to be done. She couldn't put Dan off forever.

She wished she could ask why it hurt so much, but she didn't dare. It was her old submissiveness again. The doctor could have beaten her with a horsewhip and she would have thanked him and paid her bill.

As the pain began, she tensed and twitched and hoped he wouldn't take offense. Salty beads formed on her face and burned her blue-green eyes.

He asked if it hurt. When she answered yes, he said, "Well, we'll just keep trying." She still couldn't bring herself to protest.

Something popped out of her insides and something else slid in. His hips moved closer. She thought, This must be the dilation. "Does that hurt?" he asked.

"Yes, it hurts."

He asked her several more times and she kept saying yes. She counted the squares on the ceiling. "Does it still hurt?" he asked, shoving the thing in hard.

"Yes," she said. "It all feels the same." It hurt the way sex hurt at home, but worse. And it
felt
the way sex felt. She thought, If I wanted to endure this much pain, I could be having sex with Dan.
No! My word, what am I thinking? He's my doctor!

He probed around for five or ten more minutes, then asked, "Should I go any further?"

"It all feels the same," she repeated. An ugly feeling came over her. Something's wrong, she said to herself. Something's
wrong.
This feels too much like Dan.

She lifted her head to see. His head and shoulders were visible above the sheet that stretched across her raised knees. He was staring at her face.

"How's it feel?" he asked.

She bit her lip and repeated, "All the same."

The dilation went on forever. She didn't know whether she blacked out, but she heard him telling her to come back in two weeks. She looked up to see the tail of his white coat disappearing out the door. She had the feeling that she'd let him down.

As she dressed, she wondered if she had an abnormally low threshold of pain. Or was she just weak? No one else in the family complained about Dr. Story's exams. She wondered if she was just making something out of nothing again. She and Dan planned the traditional Mormon family; there were plenty of pelvic exams in her future. She couldn't turn every one into the last act of
Medea.

As she left the clinic, she looked at her watch. Her first postnatal visit had lasted three hours.

She tried to erase the scene from her mind. She told Dan that Dr. Story had dilated her so that they could start making love again, but she was still too sensitive. The subject was dropped.