Do you want to know what incest is? What it really is? No ...

are now in foster care.
I am five. The July sun shines on my shoulders. I am wearing a dress I have never
seen before, one I don't remember putting on. The door opens and a little girl runs to
me, her face delighted. I have never seen her before. I am completely terrified and try to
hide behind my astonished and irritated mother.
"But she's your best friend!" my mother says, and tells me that I played at the girl's
house just yesterday. I don't remember. When my mother tells me her name, I've never
heard it before.
Other children arrive. I remember some of them, but from long ago. They're older now.
They've grown. Some have lost their teeth.
I pretend that everything is all right.
At night I lie awake as I have for years, listening. I hear footsteps coming down the hall.
I hold my breath. I watch the edge of the door to my bedroom. I watch for the hand that
will push it open. If it is my mother's hand or my father's, I am all right. For now. If it is
the hand of the woman who lives with us and sticks things into me, I move out of my
body. I disappear into a painting on the wall, into my alarm clock with its rocking Gene
Autry figure, into imaginary landscapes. Usually I come back when the woman leaves.
But not always.
I am eight. I have spoken French from the time I was three. I attended a French kindergarten,
and now the Lycee Francais. I have just spent the summer in France. My
French is fluent when we leave Nice. Four days later, after my return to the woman who
hurts me, I can no longer understand or speak a single word of French. Sitting at my
gouged wooden desk, my classmates sniggering around me, I feel terrified and
ashamed, certain that what-ever is wrong is my fault.
She told me she would cut out my tongue. She told me I would forget. I remember how
tall she was, how she wore her hair pulled back with wisps breaking loose at the temples.
I knew then that I would never forget.
I am 40. There are things I have always remembered, things I have forgotten, things
that exist in shadows only, that slip away when I try to think about them. I
can'tremember all that she did that sent me "away." Nor do I know what I was doing
while I was "away." I only know that these episodes began with periods of abuse so
frightening, painful, and humiliating that I left my body and parts of my mind.
I rarely talk about what happened to me. I have never discussed the details with my
parents, my husband, or anyone else. When-ever I think of telling, she returns in my
dreams.
I dream that I am a child and she chases me with a sharp knife, catches me, and
gouges out my eyes. I dream that I have to protect little children at night, even though I
am alone and a child myself. I tuck in the other children and get into my bed. Her arm
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