A Mishap at the Swimming Pool
The human psyche is delicate. Years of self-knowledge, insight, careful decision-making, and discipline are required to achieve a course in life that has some degree of stability while following a trajectory that adheres vaguely to the values and aspirations of the individual. It’s hard work. Any equilibrium gained is to be cherished for the duration the voyager is able to sustain it. It takes so little to disrupt it. Something bonkers happened yesterday that certainly disturbed mine.
I had had my swim and just finished changing in one of the cramped individual cubicles provided to veil the process when, on opening the door, I was confronted by a man hovering outside. He hesitated, or so it seemed, and I certainly did. My first thought was he was waiting to use the cubicle, but that was nonsense. A line of identical cubicles stood ready for him to use. He had no reason on earth to use mine, especially when it meant having to wait for me to exit in order to gain access to it.
After that momentary pause, any notion that he might have been waiting for the cubicle was dispelled. He had been waiting for me. And he was in a rage.
“Put your shoes on the floor!” he upbraided me. “When you dress, put your shoes on the floor!”
From his attire — oversized fluorescent yellow t-shirt, shorts, flip-flops, a scrap of thin cotton scarf encircling his neck1— I gathered that he worked there. Nevertheless, I was dumbfounded. That he was outraged I could see, but only began to understand why as he continued to scold me:
“I had to clean up all the black marks you left with your shoes right here! I had to get special cleaning fluid to get those marks off! When you go in there you are to put your shoes on the floor!”
“Well, okay,” I mumbled, mildly flabbergasted by his accusation.
After my swim, I did put my shoes on the ledge in the cubicle. I also set my backpack on it, from which I pulled out my street clothes and into which I packed in my damp swimming things. And yes, I fit one foot, then the other — that was normal, surely — into its shoe where it sat on the ledge. Then ready for the bike ride home, I would exit the cubicle, today to find this angry man of thick, gray, slightly wavy hair; leathery, drawn face; and bleak gray eyes bearing down on me.
“Are you sure you have the right person?” I asked, overcoming my astonishment.
“It’s you! You!”
“But look,” I said, backing into the perfectly clean cubicle I had just tried to quit. “There are no black marks here.” The ledge was perfectly clean and white.
“This was last week! Last week!” he ranted, jabbing a finger towards the floor, as if last week was in the basement.
“You’re sure you mean me?” I asked.
I cast my mind back. Had it rained last week? Had I tracked mud into the dressing area and made everything filthy? If so, I certainly would have been aware of it. But he said I had left black marks, not from mud or dirt, cinders or tar, but from my shoes. And had my sin been tracking in dirt, cinders, or tar, I would have tracked it, not just in the cubicle, but all over the place. That was not his complaint.
“You’re sure you mean me?” I asked again.
“It was in there! right in there!” he fumed, now jabbing his finger past me to point into the cubicle I had not yet been able to fully exit, as if that were proof of my guilt.
Except I didn’t always use that cubicle. No one ever used the same cubicle. My stepping out of a cubicle that had been left in an untidy state the week before in no way implicated me in creating that mess. But he was very sure. And very angry. At me.
I took stock of the situation. Had I offended by leaving black marks from my shoes on the sitting ledge of the cubicle — of which I was by no means convinced — I certainly wanted to assure him that I regretted causing the swimming establishment and him personally inconvenience and that I would be careful not to do it again. That acknowledgment from me was, I felt, an essential part of the exchange. However, as I began to impart this, he turned and walked away.
“Hey!” I called after him, feeling this affront keenly. “Excuse me! Excuse me! Hey!” By this time, I was calling very loudly because he continued pacing down the long aisle between lockers and cubicles as if he heard absolutely nothing, pushed his way through the glass doors into the swimming hall, continued across the hall with the same dogged pace (that bright yellow shirt made him easy to track), through the doors of the mighty swimming hall, and out onto the grassy sunning area beyond. Of all his rough words and caustic address, it was this rude behavior that I found telling. No simple correction of a trivial fault requires an abuse of common curtesy.
How could I, after 30 years of frequenting that pool, suddenly leave nearly indelible black marks on a cubicle sitting ledge that would drive this man beyond all endurance?
As I dried my hair I thought about the encounter. I was thoroughly dissatisfied with how I had been treated and not sure at all that he had reprimanded the right person. How could I, after 30 years of frequenting that pool and dressing area, suddenly leave nearly indelible black marks on a cubicle sitting ledge that would drive this man beyond all endurance? Had I left black marks, I certainly would have seen them myself and rubbed them away. I was very neat in every other respect. On the occasions when I clipped my toenails scrunched up on that sitting ledge, I was careful to sweep up all clippings and deposit them in one of the many waste bins in the hall. And in doing that, I had never seen any black marks left by my shoes.
I reflected further: He had been lurking outside my cubicle, which means he had spotted me, followed me, and waited for me to finish dressing in order to accost me as I exited. That thought spooked me a little. And he was sure, rock-solid sure, that it was I who had committed the offense. So why, after decades of frequenting this pool, did I not recall ever seeing him? And how could my shoes — shoes that were themselves decades old and had long ago lost any excess color they might have had — smear black all over the sitting ledges of countless dressing cubicles without my knowing it? Because if they smeared black on one ledge, surely they smeared black on them all. Yet they never smeared black on anything else. I had never seen black marks left by my shoes anywhere.
Another question that did not sit well: How could he possibly know where I put my shoes when I was in there? Did he bend down and peer under the cubicle panels to check where occupants put their shoes? Or did he back away to surveil the room at a judicious distance to spot which occupied cubicles showed no shoes on the floor— indicating in all certainty that they had been set on that ledge — in order to detect offenders? Were there other offenders? His fury gave me the impression that I was the only one.
What cast an otherworldly chill over the encounter was my otherwise exceedingly pleasant experience with the staff there all those years. The people were friendly, breezy, even, helpful, nice. And those spaces where I changed and swam had always felt like a haven of anonymity, safety, well-being.
A woman sweeping up stopped, I told her my dilemma, and she urged me to enter — in my street shoes — and report the incident to the Bademeister.
Before I left I was determined to speak to the man once again, but hesitated to enter the swimming hall in my street shoes. Perhaps I would be hauled away for that. A woman sweeping up stopped, I told her my dilemma, and she urged me to enter — in my street shoes — and report the incident to the Bademeister. At that moment, I glimpsed the bright yellow shirt of the man I sought, thanked her, pushed through the glass doors, and managed to arrest him in his pacing. But again to no avail. I began by saying that I understood his complaint—
“Then that’s an end to it.” He began to walk away.
“Hey, wait a minute!” I said. This time he paused. “Though I’m not convinced I did what you said I did.”
He looked at me in great surprise, but said nothing. Nor was I finished.
“But you could have been a little friendlier about it,” I told him.
“I was matter-of-fact,” he rebuffed brusquely.
“You could have been a little friendlier,” I repeated.
“I was matter-of-fact,” he responded, again brusquely, and paced away, probably brusquely, if it’s possible in flip-flops.
I stewed over the incident for the rest of the afternoon, in part because it amazed me that being accused of something trivial that I was pretty sure I had not done could so rattle me. And yet his irate accusation introduced into my day and my mind a mighty turbulence. For hours afterward, I was very careful not to react rashly to the rough world around me. I stopped patiently on my bike ride home as an insouciant UPS man on his ungainly UPS delivery bicycle cut me off on the bicycle path. I was oh so cautious when people jostled me in the grocery store. I held my temper on finding the bottle deposit machine out of order, meaning I would have to lug my empty bottles — along with groceries — back home again. I was careful to provide space for those in a greater hurry than I who whipped past me in the street. I reminded myself over and over not to take out on the world the minor blow I had just absorbed from one of its members. I managed quite well, though the feeling of having been bruised lingered and the sense of the world as slightly hostile did not leave me.
It was during those hours that I wondered what it must be like for someone who is, say, accused without evidence by an irascible authority of being a member of MS-13 and sent to a Salvadoran maximum security prison. Or overpowered by masked agents while tending the lawn of an IHOP, pepper-sprayed, and hauled away. How would someone cope with a mishap like that? For my part, I will try to evade the wrath of the irascible shoe patrol at my swimming pool for the next 30 years by setting my footwear conspicuously on the floor when changing in those dressing cubicles.
- Wearing scarves is one of the most obvious and consistent habits that, in my mind, distinguishes Europeans from Americans. While a standard part of dress for European men and women alike, scarves are never worn by American men (unless it’s a throat-cinching Roy Rogers bandana that doesn’t stay on for long), and occasionally by American women, who can’t help but feel uncomfortable about it. ↩︎