Free Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear by Katharine Weber Page B

races. I think all sorts of chlorinated thoughts and wonder if it would be possible to achieve with a camera the effect of looking up through water to the surface. I don’t mean that literally; I know that with the right equipment it is entirely possible to make underwater pictures. What I mean is that I want to figure out how to make pictures that have that sense of looking from the other side, from the other world. How do I generate that removed but not distant sense of being on the other side of the picture? Behind the mirror? How do I bring objects closer than they appear?
    I do the breaststroke and pass between the two worlds in synchrony with my breathing, and I think about Swiss nose clips on the bottom of the pool, and Swiss Band-Aids trapped in the filter trough at one end, and when I stop to wipe my fogged-over goggles, I hear a woman calling her child in asharp Swiss way that I shut out by going under, pushing off from the side with my hands straight out in front and gliding away, coming up through that mirrory surface and beginning my breaststroke again.
    I’ve discovered training paddles here, although they’re an American product. Yesterday, when I first glimpsed them, I thought I was seeing a man wearing Japanese sandals on his hands. You strap them on to your palms and it looks as though you’re holding giant blue plastic playing cards. When I put them on—I bought a pair this morning from the crosspatch woman who takes my three francs admission each day I come to the public pool—I wanted to wave my arms in big, exaggerated motions. I felt as though I could use them to signal a plane coming in for a landing. Swimming with them is wonderful; they’re fins for your hands and you can grab the water and push yourself along with a smug sense of efficiency.
    Anne took me here a few days ago, and I’ve been taking myself here every day since. It’s an easy tram ride or an energetic walk from the Vieille Ville down to the lake and on a bit, and I can get a sandwich lunch here, and I can take a shower, which is necessary because of the chlorine in the pool, and also a welcome opportunity because Anne has no shower, only a tublet with one of those telephone handheld showerheads, and she’s only got about five gallons of hot water at a time anyway. I’m beginning to think the Swiss are not as clean as they look.
    I lie on a chaise with my towel and book (I’m reading Anne’s copy of
Rebecca
—I keep wanting to sing “On the Road to Manderley”) and sunglasses, and when I get too hot, I swim, and then I come back and lie here some more. I’ve never spent time like this before. I’m alone so much, and my thoughts bounce around in my head, and I wonder if I look as though I’m thinking in English, and I imagine French thought balloons for everyone around me.
    I brought the Leica with me today, now that it has been satisfactorily and expensively repaired, though I’m worried about it disappearing when I swim, and about getting it wet. I have the camera stuffed into my bag, under a pile of things. I’ve taken one picture, of a woman looking at herself in a handheld mirror while she applied white ointment to her not unlarge nose. I don’t know why I’m so convinced that she was extremely satisfied by what she saw. As an American, I am perpetually fascinated by the sense of themselves that Swiss women have. Maybe I should include most of Europe; in my experience, women from most Western European countries walk, talk, and look at themselves in the mirror with an enormous amount of confidence that American women lack. Even the tiniest schoolgirls wear their little blue coats with a kind of authority and natural grace that’s breathtaking.
    Yesterday, I stopped in a boutique in the Vieille Ville, mostly because of a green-and-white-striped dress in the window that I thought I liked until I got up close to it and discovered that the green stripes were actually intertwined riding crops or something. Too