A MEMOIR by Karen Robertson
This is gonna sound crazy, but the first real twist in my life happened when I was three years old—an event that probably shaped who I am today.
My father had taken a job with the Bank of America in a little one-horse town named Wheatland in Northern California. He was a teller, and we were living hand-to-mouth in order to save money for a trip back to Missouri to visit family.
We rented the upstairs of an old country house near Camp Beale, California, miles from town. It was early afternoon, and my father had just gone back to work after lunch. The landlady was away for the day, so Mom and I went out on the big front porch to enjoy a carefree afternoon.
Mom was seated in a wicker chair writing letters to her folks back home while I romped back and forth in front of her. The owner’s old German shepherd dog slept quietly at the end of the porch. Seeing him, I rushed over, squatted down, and in a high-pitched-little girl voice shouted, “Hello, Doggy.” It startled the old pooch, and the results were horrific. He bared his sharp teeth, lunged into my face, ripped flesh, and opened my forehead into what was later called a crow’s foot design. Three gashes from the bridge of my nose, narrowly missing my eyes, ran up across my forehead leaving two large v-shaped flaps and a crow’s foot-shaped wound.
Terrified, my mother, covered in my blood, ran down the long tree-lined driveway to the road in an effort to flag down anyone headed for town. A serviceman from Camp Beale stopped, and she begged him to hurry to the bank and tell my father to come home quickly. Thankfully, the man followed through and delivered the message. I don’t know how long it took my dad to arrive, but I bet there was still dust in the air all the way from town. About twenty miles away, Marysville had a medical center, and we headed there.
With Mother holding a towel on my forehead, covering my eyes, we waited a long time to see a doctor. Thirty-three stitches later, Mother sent Dad out to the car to bring in clean clothes. He was so shaken by the event, he couldn’t remember where he parked the car. After searching frantically, for what seemed like an eternity, he had to accept the fact that our car wasn’t in the parking lot . . . it had been stolen.
We sat on the curb and waited until the doctor was finished with his rounds that night, and he took us home. I will never forget how Mom and I squatted on the steel floorboard where the backseat should have been. It was uncomfortable for both of us as we made the twenty-mile trip. One of my eyes was almost swollen shut and the other covered by a turban-type bandage, which encircled my head.
Our car was returned undamaged three days later, but I wasn’t so lucky.
The healing process didn’t go well for me. Skin died and rotted to the bandages producing a wretched stench. When I wrote my mother’s story in the last years of her life, she said, “At that time, I thought my world had come to an end.” Neighbor ladies kept making horrible comments to my mother about my scarred face until finally we had to move to give my mother peace.
Every night Mom would sit me on the kitchen counter and rub the scar with olive oil, making gentle circles as she counted to one hundred. I don’t know if that was prescribed as a treatment or an old remedy believed to aid the healing or lessen the scar. But I learned how to count to one hundred before I turned four years old.
As an adult, many years later, I purchased some olive oil to use for cooking. When I got my first whiff of it, suddenly I was seated on the kitchen counter with my mother rubbing my forehead lovingly as, I’m sure, her heart was breaking.
For years, I laid in bed while my parents entertained guests and heard them tell the horrifying story of my disastrous encounter with a dog. I think that event formed the way I felt about myself the rest of my life. It made me the center of attention; they were talking about me.
I loved to hear the details of the gory story and how the neighbors kept telling my mom how sad it was. Seems like it turned out okay for me. I was never afraid of dogs. I understood right from the get-go I had frightened the old shepherd, and it was not his fault. I never invaded another dog’s space with my face.
Every new acquaintance met me with, “Oh, what happened to you? Were you in a car accident?” And then I’d get to tell the story. In the sixth grade Freddy Del Dotto called me Scarface, and we both ended up in the principal’s office. Blows were not thrown, but I think I started it by telling him he had a lousy haircut.
I wouldn’t even think about the scar until someone mentioned it or I looked in the mirror. Mom and Dad took me to a doctor in San Francisco when I was about twelve to see about plastic surgery. A plastic surgeon would have to graft my forearm to my forehead, which would have been held it in place by a cast and a steel rod for several weeks. My parents opted against that plan, and I’m glad they did.
A photographer asked me to be his model when I was fifteen. But when I arrived all dressed up in my formal, he screwed up his face and said, “Oh, I’ll have to do something to cover up that scar.” That hurt! And I remember thinking, Hey, mister, that’s MY scar. Why would I cover it up? Besides, it’s too deep and make-up can’t cover it . . . maybe grout or plaster. It was way before PhotoShop!
Even into my twenties I remember the startled look and gasp when I’d come face-to-face with a stranger or a child who couldn’t overlook the obvious. I once overheard someone talking about me, and the other person said, “Do you mean the girl with the scar on her face?” The scar made me different, unique. I think aside from the scar I was fairly decent looking, and I never let it be anything to me but a great conversation starter. My parents never let me think it would handicap me in any way, and if anything, I developed an abundance of self-confidence.
But now, at an advanced age, nobody mentions it because it is located where most people my age have a collection of wrinkles right between their eyes. Who wants wrinkles? Nobody! I want to scream, it’s not a wrinkle, you fool, that’s my scar! Some people have terrible lives to cope with—awful parents, tragic diseases, homelessness, etcetera. I did not. I had wonderful parents and a very happy life . . . my scar and me.
