Emotion is the dream every woman imagines, they will desire it, those studious girls.

In the circumstance gestures. Talk round the daily table. Later on. We are leaving, Danièle Judith Claire Dérive and I for the sea, to find Florence Dérive and Oriana in the big house, on an island, south of Cape Cod. There were superhighways, forest, scents, fields; we advanced over the continent toward the sea and we looked straight ahead of us. The highways took on the colour of the woods and cities we passed through. The highways made loops on the horizon and sometimes we had the impression we were not moving forward. Each of us took turns relaying the other on the way to the sea. The highway was shadow and light towards the end of the voyage, at twilight when we had left it for the slower roads which wound their way to the sea. Arriv-ing at Woods Hole we had seen the boat we had to take to the island floating in front of us like a hanging light. We got out of the car to breathe in the sea, literally which presented itself to us under the senseless eyes of a group of tourists (in the masc.). We moved ahead toward the island without having to dream it. The illusion was great of breaking mist, winds and glaciers. The sea is grey and slow around the boat. We looked eagerly at all the forms the sky fabricates in front of us and we rubbed shoulders with each other as though inscriptions made to endure in space. Our surroundings were three dimensions our bodies experienced clairvoyantly to the full extent of our memories. Seeking the personal chemical formula, we looked at the sea and the island growing larger in the distance. We saw pink smoke in the incendiary sky. The island was in front of us, concrete like a milky goat announcing liberty. The sky was growing red around the island and our eyes tried in the obscure clarity to watch the sea and the island at the same time. We were advancing toward the island when light flashed across the bridge. We all turned in-stinctively toward the Polaroid a man held in his hands. Then lightning shot through the sky and the rain surprised us like a familiar substance. The wind rose and the island welcomed us at the same time as Florence and Oriana in their raincoats. The dock smells good of wood when we walk on it. The road was a canvas, as Oriana said, that we had to follow and complete in the destiny of our bodies sculpted in our sleep by the fatigue of the journey. The road hugged the sea which fishermen coveted, sitting in front of their fishing huts. The road was black without being night. Florence Dérive talks about villages as we pass them. Our shoulders were touching in the dark moving when the lights of a large house were visible and the car stops. The next day, I looked at the sea without having read the day before. There were boats in the distance but I concentrate on the sea, eyes slow. Claire Dérive in a kimono brings me a cup of coffee and I look at the sea in a senseless way as if for a first time, situated at the origin and very limit of my life. I saw the sea and I called it tenderly while the drizzle shivering on our limbs alternates our vision of the world. Then we are five at sunrise madly to see the sea, atonally pronouncing complete sentences, abstract ones linking life and speech in the horizontal hour. The day promised to be sunny behind what seemed to be an island in the distance but who knows perhaps the mainland. A dawn mist left us in doubt facing this territory emerging with the day. At breakfast, there was fruit, cereal, bread, eggs and coffee. We were seated around the table and Claire Dérive said that to see us all together again meeting at the seaside, was a sign. Even though she asserted that the word abstraction slipped its way somewhere into her thought, she admitted for the moment that it was difficult to establish a direct link between the fact of being five women on the island and the very idea of what could be an ab-straction. Oriana then began to talk about time and the weather all the while searching for the words in French to say how she imagined it. She said that she did not understand why, each time certain women got together, in films for example, time seemed to stop around them after having frozen them or changed them into pillars of salt, loaded (with) symbols. After Danièle Judith had interrupted her to say matriarchy, Oriana continued her de-scription of time and chose to say that there was no interest in imagining the eternal: "On the contrary it would be our loss to forget the hours." I wanted to say that ecstasy is a reality in itself which makes time eternal. Claire Dérive affirmed that we must not confound time out of mind, patriarchal time and ecstasy because from this confusion were born women suspended and immobile in space. A few words of Florence give the impression of a family narrative involving her and Claire, but Claire Dérive pretended to have heard nothing and chain-linking her sentences: "You remember the Trois femmes and all those from Willow Spring, you recall Pinky, Billy and Willie, Ila and Magdalena. Didn’t patriarchal time come to a stop around them merging them morbidly in madness, death and submission? The mother is everywhere when time stops, the mother full of secrets that cause anguish to girls left to themselves in the patriarchal ruins: cars, tires, elevators, subways, broken windows. The soul in ruin, the mind of man can no longer conceive itself differently except by projecting the loss of his deity onto the abstract bodies of a few women reunited in isolation, soul in ruins. There is lack of imag(in)ing in this which, although not ours, overwhelms us in the very exercise of our mental functions." The voice of Claire Dérive rose with passion in the great panelled room. With your eyes, you would have said she circulated concretely with her whole body casting the deciding vote between forms of the sacred and profane. For the first time, as this morning in front of the sea, I was not afraid to hear the words of another woman, esprit de corps conquering the horizon. The whole house, windows open, burst into sunshine. It is noon. The sea in front of us is at the acme of light. Danièle Judith, Oriana and I have taken the car to go to the village while Florence and Claire make their way to the beach. The road we couldn’t see the night before is lined with trees and very green foliage. At certain places, the trees cross branches above the road and we entered into shadow at the speed of light. Several curves. It is like this to the first village, slowing down, gardens, wild roses, billboards, lobsters, right to Oak Bluff. At the garage, we have to wait. Tires, rust, chrome. Two mechanics are stretched out working under a Cor-vette. There was a lot of noise. The radio was playing "Don’t Be Cruel." A man looking very proprietorial approaches us, looks at the flat tire, shrugs his shoulders while smiling like a politician: "It won’t be long, girls." I stared at him while he stated his price and Oriana agreed as in detective films, raids on bars, searches under warrant, interrogations at the station where they smile to the left and strike to the right. With heavy hammer blows one of the workers straightened out a dent in the fender of a Meteor, Florence and Claire were lo(u)nging on the sand looking ahead, embarrassed to find themselves alone after so many years. Then Florence starts talking about their mother and John. Claire was listening but gives the impression of hearing nothing assailed as she was by very real girlhood memories of two studious girls growing up in the streets and institutions of New York. Florence recounted how their mother was full of projects and for her one trip didn’t wait upon another so much pleasure did she take from life in the meetings and conferences that de-fend the rights of Man and freedom of speech. Claire shrugged her shoulders, would have wanted to smile, but her lips full of salt did not move like they did in dreams really. The two sisters were lo(u)nging, backs hard on the ground, while Florence re-turned to her girlhood and the time John pushed between them for a photograph, the day of his entrance into the world of men, day of his Bar Mitzvah. To take a picture: John’s marriage to Judith, the reception at Stanstead on the green lawn as in Blow Up, the chink of glasses raised while he placed his mouth on the bride’s lips and while Claire, in the company of two hippies who loaded the cameras again and again like lunatics, took endless photos arrogantly and insistently. Memories abound: a lot of the Hilton in the memory of the Dérive sisters. The tide was rising. Claire closed her eyes and cried as if Florence had uttered vulgarities. Now Florence was quiet and looked at the sea. In silence, the words d(i)e capitate(d) the cities, the milk of gardens, TO BE A GOOD GIRL, the grey cat of winter in Colorado, the lunar orb, the women of the Order of Good Housewives at a conference in the lobby of the Hilton in L.A. High tide. Ben’s Delicatessen. The cosmetic counter at Bloomingdale’s. Promise to be a good girl. The island reappeared. It’s the head of the cape said Claire looking at Florence at hair level, standing while returning to the house, a towel around her hips, shivering up the spine it’s clearly seen. We arrived from the village our arms loaded with food. No sooner said than done, Oriana and Danièle Judith made their way to the beach. Claire Dérive came to join me. She served herself a beer and sat on one of the stools with her elbows on the counter; silence, eyes certainly damp like the weather. I talked about the village and with the repeated gestures we make each day, as regular as clockwork, as complex as the thoughts which pass through us while the gestures and sometimes lapsus, the hand became fallible and it was necessary to lean or to stop, suspended, above reality and objects . . .