Salt Water Read Free

she bent, knelt, lay on her side or stomach, I studied her studying the grass. She kept pulling her robe together, tucking it between her legs, tightening the belt, pushing up the sleeves. She was so graceful and efficient she could have been dancing.
    “These are exercises in composition,” she said. “If you can make a picture of grass you can make a picture of anything.”
    “Do you sell your pictures?”
    “Sometimes.”
    “Will you sell these?”
    “If I like them, and somebody else likes them. Let me see that foot!”
    She took my foot in her hand like a dog’s paw. “You have good feet. I’ll show you how I want you to place your foot. There by the grass. It’s really a very nice, innocent foot, uncorrupted by shoes.”
    She put me next to a clump of grass and took pictures from many angles. When she finished the roll she put in another.
    “I will give you a lesson.” She handed me the camera. “Look through the viewfinder! Look at me! Look at the clouds! Look at the sand! No, you’re looking at me. The format is two by three. Do you know what that means? Two high and three wide, like a movie. Imagine you’re watching a movie. Stop looking at me! That’s it. Turn the camera! That’s a vertical format, three high and two wide, the portrait format. Are you following me?”
    I nodded, still looking at her through the viewfinder.
    “Put the camera down! These grass groups have five, ten, fifteen blades each. They describe the paths of fireworks in the sky. Do you see that? Even though the blades are curved, together they fill a square. But your camera format is rectangular. I want you to compose these square-filling things inside the camera’s rectangle. You can use one bunch or more than one. You can use some of the blades in one bunch or all of them. You can use a bunch and its shadow or the shadow alone. Say something so I know you’re following me!”
    I was listening, but also I was looking at her so intently that I had nothing to say.
    “I understand you.”
    She studied me for a second. “All right, you have to work fast, without thinking. You mustn’t think. That’s the worst thing. The eye doesn’t think, it looks. But you can’t just go click, click. The camera must be connected to something inside you, the way the eye is. All right, the camera is focused from here to here.” She held her hands two feet apart. “Keep the camera that far from the grass. You wind the film like this. You take the picture by pushing this. Hold the camera still. You’re taking still pictures.” She handed me the camera. “Okay, make it see!”
    I turned and took pictures of her, up and down, all sides, north, east, south, west, each picture a piece of her. She didn’t move, except near the end of the roll she pushed a bent leg out from her robe in the classic bathing beauty pose.
    I handed her the camera.
    “Misha, you weren’t photographing me, you were caressing me. Now go home! I’ll show you the pictures tomorrow.”
    She was smiling. She liked me.

3
The Mertzes
    FATHER CAME BACK from town that afternoon, and next morning we walked to the bay—Bone Point is about a mile across—to see how the Angela had weathered the storm. She’s a twenty-four-foot day sailer, with a four-and-a-half-foot keel, a main and a jib sail, and a cuddy cabin that two people can sit in hunched over, or lie down in if, as Father said, they’re very friendly. She was riding low. The tarp had loosened and let in rain. We bailed her out and aired the sails and while we were at it took her around the Point to the ocean.
    The water was like a green bath with a shivering surface. The wind was cool, the sky pale blue, a few cloud puffssped along. The sandbar had left no trace. We dropped an-chor to twelve feet where we figured it had been.
    “Full fathom two,” Father said. “Who’s that?” He pointed to shore.
    Zina and Sonya were swimming out toward us.
    “Zina Mertz.”
    “How can you tell?”
    “That’s her