Frame of Reference

The picture that's worth a thousand memories

LAST YEAR, WHEN MY HUSBAND AND I MOVED BACK INTO THE HOUSE WE HAD GUTTED AND REMODELED, we pulled the spears from our martini olives, crossed them and made a solemn vow: No junk. Nothing would go back into the house that wasn't necessary and/or beautiful. That last phrase was his. "So I stay!" I said. "As long as you don't live in the basement," he said. The basement was a bit of a sticking point for us. He wanted nothing in it except the food bowls and litter boxes for our two cats. What he believes about basements is that they are spawning grounds. One day you put a few items down there -- two or three objects you might use someday or feel inexplicably fond of -- and then some kind of spontaneous procreation takes place, and the next thing you know, there's junk to the ceiling.

So, when I said I wanted to keep a particular framed photograph in the basement -- a large one, about 2-by-3 feet -- it didn't surprise me that he dismissed the idea out of hand. "You've hauled that thing around ever since I met you, and you don't even care about him anymore," he said. "Well, at least it isn't my piano," I snapped. This is the kind of demented shorthand you use when you've lived with someone for quite a while.

Now he was having distress-flashbacks to a few times when he'd nearly wrecked his back by moving my piano (which I rarely played) up and down various stairs over the years. I was sympathetic enough to let him have his moment. "I did sell it, finally," I said soothingly. "To that woman," he said. "With the daughter," I said. "But then we have . . ." he said, pointing at the big photo I'd propped against the basement wall by the cat bowls.

It's a black-and-white shot of me, in silhouette, walking at sunset along the Oregon coast. I have my hands in my jeans pockets and am wearing a turtleneck, and my hair floats out from my head in the coastal breeze. The setting sun has laid long silver streaks above the metallic water, and the sand of the beach is already dark. It's a serene picture, the kind you see in a newspaper on a slow news day, which was in fact where and when it appeared. The photographer, who worked for that newspaper, was my overriding interest at the time. (What my husband believes about ex-boyfriends is that they are ancient, burned-out stars whose pinpricks of light in the vast night are only illusions of blazing entities. Something like that.) But the photographer isn't why I keep the photograph.

"It makes me think of the possum," I said.

When that photo was taken in the 1970s, I was in my early 20s. I lived alone in a Portland apartment and worked such everchanging shifts at a news wire service that it's possible I never once, during that time, slept like a normal person. One sleepless night, I was reading Helter Skelter, the creepy-crawly account of the Charles Manson murder spree, and I heard a scraping sound -- a furtive scritch of a sound -- slide up the outside stairs that passed my curtained bedroom window. I froze. I flipped off the light. I crawled on my hands and knees into the kitchen, reached up to retrieve a butcher knife from a drawer and crouched by the phone in the dark, my heart rattling. There was a whispery shuffling on the little porch at the top of the stairs, where I happened to keep a bag of food for my cat. The shuffling stopped, and I heard the scritch again, and then it began to recede. It took everything I had to shift the curtain just enough to peer into the moonlit night. And there was a possum, dragging its naked, scraping tail down the last two steps. Rarely in my life have I felt so exhilaratingly unmurdered, so washed with reprieve.

So, why not put the photo on a wall upstairs so I can remember that little story every time I see it? Because it's in a terrible frame, which I can't replace because it is almost as important as the photo is. I talked my mother into buying that frame for me when I was still young and broke and thought the photo would look interesting on the wall of my next apartment. I guess I'd call it a cocktail party frame. There's a wide tuxedo-black mat around the photo, wildly overdramatic in effect, and then the frame itself, which is a very shiny something or other, a metallic-looking plastic, maybe. I probably thought it looked sleek and arty and sophisticated, qualities I badly wanted in myself at the time.

This, then, is why I still haul the photo around, though it's been many years since I wanted to hang it on a wall. The whole package -- the hopeful, silly frame around the silhouette of my solitary young self walking pensively along the edge of land at the edge of night -- opens the door to a blizzard of memories that survive, the way memories often do, in pungent, nonsensical shards.

They come flying at me: that possum; the sound of a teletype machine; the rhythmic roar of the Pacific during a storm; skiing through a blaze of snowlight on Mount Hood; my frantic windshield wipers in the predawn rain; typing furiously on deadline with the phones ringing; the cooked-cabbage smell of one apartment and the fresh-paint smell of another; the zing and zang of love dramas, real and imagined; the disproportioned semi-nude that hung over the bar where the reporters drank; Portland on the night everything turned to glittering ice; gulls on a bridge, and the bridge lifting for a cargo ship from Japan.

Oddly, what I like about the photo itself, or, rather, that person in the photo, are her shoulders. They look squared, straight and untentative. They look ready, or hoping to be ready, for whatever it is that might happen beyond the front edge of her adult life. They make me feel hopeful for that young woman, and very grateful that my hope hasn't, so far, been drastically misplaced. "Something about the shoulders, too," I said to my husband as I placed the photo more firmly against the basement wall. At that point, our older cat, Bluebelle, came down to the basement to check out her food situation. She moved carefully, as she always does, because she's pretty old and because a previous owner deprived her of her claws, making her feel, always, at a serious disadvantage in an existential sense.

She went to her bowl, looked over her shoulder at the photo I had placed nearby, then did a strange thing. She pawed the ground like a little stallion, referred to the photo again, and began to eat.

"It emboldens her," I said to my husband, knowing I had won.

"It's just one thing, at first," he said solemnly. "Then, well, I'll spare you the gruesome details."

Deirdre McNamer's most recent novel, Red Rover, was published this summer and will be out in paperback in August. She can be reached at 20071@washpost.com.