1.

There are few things more annoying than hanging up frame samples at the end of the day. Well, I suppose I can come up with some: listening to a friend complain about how her new diet causes breath like a camel's; filling a Laundromat washing machine with clothes and detergent, only to learn that it's broken; dropping blush on a tiled bathroom floor and watching it crack into a dozen pieces. But at six o'clock on a Tuesday, I am having a difficult time imagining any of these fates, because I am singularly focused on placing every one of these samples on tiny, spindly pegs. Chrome samples to the left, brass ones to the right. Wood ones on the opposite side, from stark and spare to ostentatious and ornate, marching from left to right across the seafoam green wall.

"Iley, those don't look very tidy," brays Andrew, my manager. He is on his way out the door, and is sporting a lumpy, Members Only-style jacket the color of desiccated dog shit.

"You don't look very tidy," I mutter under my breath as I accidentally drop a gray-speckled sample to the floor.

"What?" he asks sharply, folding his arms in front of his chest and squishing his vinyl lunch sack under his left armpit. I pick up the sample, reach over the counter, and haphazardly hook it over an empty peg, so it sits between a glossy, gray sample and a matte, green-speckled sample. "That one doesn't go there," he says, shaking his head and looking at me with mild disgust. "God, Iley, take some pride in what you're doing here."

He reaches over and straightens a few of the more crooked samples that I've been hurriedly throwing on the wall during the last fifteen minutes. One of them, a pale yellow number with fake gold engraved curlicues, falls off the wall the moment he touches it and lands silently on the tan carpet. "This one wasn't even hung properly," he complains. In the time it takes him to bend at the waist, groan as though he's giving birth, and pick up the sample, I've decided that I've finally had enough of this place.

"You know what?" I ask loudly, slamming down a metal frame in an eye-popping shade of tangerine. The tinny, hollow sound of metal hitting the countertop sends a little shiver up my spine and makes Andrew shake his head quickly and involuntarily, not unlike a retriever fresh from the swimming pool. "I don't like this job. And I don't need this job!" I holler.

"Oh, yeah?" he asks, snickering.

"Yeah!" I spit, feeling the heat rise in my face. "I quit!" I storm out from behind the counter, miraculously sidestep a pile of framed prints leaning against the wall, and stand face to face with him. "Effective right now." I falter for a minute, then yank from the wall a thin, nut-brown wood sample that features inlaid, primitive-looking line drawings. Since I began working here six months ago, I've always thought the sample bore a striking resemblance to a boomerang, and had to repeatedly resist the temptation to throw it across the store to see if it would come back to me. I hold it in my hands for a second as Andrew studies me with lips pursed, then hurl it as hard as I can. It does not return.

In the twenty minutes it takes me to ride my bike from the frame shop to my apartment, I morph cleanly and effortlessly from hero to goat. Those first few pumps of the pedals were infused with the kind of surging power that can only come from telling off an incompetent boss and striding out with one's head held high. But soon my legs grew tired, my feet weary, as reality sunk in and I was faced with the prospect of finding another job that might tether me oh-so-tenuously to my life's calling once again.

I'm panting hard as I lock my bike and make my way up the sagging porch steps to my apartment, which is really the first floor of a two-family house. Here in Brighton, home to noisy immigrant families, Boston University students slumming in off-campus digs, and single people in their late twenties and early thirties who have not yet found their way, the multi-family house is the prevalent style of architecture. From the exterior, these places are reminiscent enough of homes that immigrants, Boston University students, and single people may have spent some formative years in and left behind. But the interiors, all diced up into apartments via hasty retrofitting with cheap appliances, cabinetry lacking in ninety-degree angles, and plumbing of questionable quality, are a bittersweet reminder that you're definitely not home.

I pause with my hand on the doorknob. I can hear Gary moving inside the apartment and I know that he's hovering. Waiting with ears pricked, taking fast but measured breaths as I turn the key. I open the door and he greets me with reproachful eyes; he can't have intuited that I've quit The Framery, can he?

"Well, well, look who's here," I say as I set my bag down on a low table that's buckling under the weight of magazines and newspapers. Gary lunges forward and nuzzles my crotch, nearly knocking me into the doorjamb. For an Airedale terrier, he's especially outsized in body shape and personality, and the small apartment frequently fails to restrain either one. "OK, OK, we're going out," I say, and his eyes instantly light up. He sits still just long enough for me to clip on his red, twill collar printed with glow-in-the-dark bones, and we begin walking around the block. By the time we reach the deli, he's peed six times and hasn't offered any compelling arguments about why I should have stayed on at the frame shop.

"You see," I say, resting my hand on my hip as Gary sniffs an overstuffed garbage can with interest, "it's not like I was going to be making any contacts there or anything. It was a nowhere road." He gives the garbage can a nudge so firm that the precarious pile of rubbish on top starts to quiver and ejects a mini soda can and a piece of bologna onto the ground. Gary is on the bologna so fast that it disappears between his gums before I can even grab his muzzle. His interest in the Red Bull is minimal, which is probably best for all involved. "Besides, this will free me up to find something that suits me better. Something where I can use my camera at the very least, right?" I ask as we begin heading back to the apartment. Gary wisely chooses not to answer.

When we arrive home, Erin is crouched on the porch steps with a cigarette in one hand and the Boston Herald splayed out in front of her. It's mid-April, still just a bit too brisk to dally outdoors in the New England night, but obviously she couldn't wait to read the police blotter. Erin claims to hate the Herald lately, and I don't blame her. Its new format features the brand of screaming, insane headlines and blunt graphic design enjoyed by papers like the Weekly World News. Exclamations like BETTER RED THAN TED (in reference to a conservative Southern senator who claimed that one of Ted Kennedy's bills was a thinly veiled Commie plot) and ONE IF BY LAND, TWO IF BY FLEA (a sensitive lead-in to a story about a mysterious flea infestation at a posh, downtown hotel) routinely march across the front page, making me twitter and feel depressed all at once. But Erin doesn't worry about such things; she steals the paper from her workplace for one feature and one feature only.

"'Officer Hit in the Face with Carrot,'" she begins, enunciating every syllable as though she's reading news to a national audience. She stops reading and turns to face me. "You want?" she asks, shaking her pack of Marlboros.

"Oh, God, yes," I say hungrily as I unclip Gary from his leash and send him inside with an affectionate pat on his fuzzy rear end. I can hear him sloppily lapping up water from his dish in the kitchen as I light the cigarette and inhale deeply. Ride my bike some, smoke some. People often express shock at how someone could do both, i.e., treating one's heart and lungs like the miracle they are and caring for them with lots of cycling, while simultaneously treating one's heart and lungs like a huge filthy ashtray to be blackened and weakened with chemicals. I tell these people that it's simple: I like to bike and I like to smoke. If that doesn't work, explaining that it's none of their damn business tends to set things straight.

"'Officer John Banton of Watertown was crossing the intersection of Galen and Main Streets when something struck him on the left side of the face,'" Erin continues. "'It appeared that a carrot had been thrown from a passing school bus en route to a Watertown elementary school. Banton suffered no injuries from the vegetable, which hit his left cheek and then fell to the ground. No one was apprehended, and the event was later logged as 'Attack With Foodstuffs' at the Watertown police station.' Ahhh," she says, satisfied with today's entry. "Attack with foodstuffs, it sounds like such wholesome fun, doesn't it?" She stretches her arms out wide, shakes her wavy red hair, and stubs her cigarette out on the step. "I notice that Gary looks troubled today. What's on his mind?"

This is code, of course. Erin is well aware that I converse with Gary on a regular basis, but as skilled a listener as he appears to be, we both acknowledge that a creature who once ate so many unguarded Snausages that he needed to be hospitalized isn't capable of too much introspection. I sigh and bite my thumbnail for a few seconds, then take a quick drag before answering. "Gary learned on our walk that I quit The Framery today."

"No kidding?" she asks, her eyebrows disappearing behind her bangs. "Well, you hated that gig. All those horrible frame samples." She looks hopeful as she scans my face for some sort of reaction. Suddenly I'm exhausted, and I put my head in my hands for a long minute.

"Yeah. That place wasn't for me," I finally say. So what place is? I ask myself silently, trying to ignore the thick, nervous feeling in my stomach, as though heavy cogs are grinding together and pulverizing my innards. "Anyway, one good thing did happen," I add. "Remember the boomerang sample?"

Erin¹s eyes grow wide. "No. Don't tell me that this whole time, it was really a boomerang."

I shake my head and laugh aloud at the memory of Andrew staring at me as the wood sample hit the back wall with a resounding click before landing on the carpet. It even left a small mark on the paint, which I found rather impressive. "No, it¹s not a boomerang. But I threw it like one, just in case."

Erin bursts out laughing and reaches over to give me a quick embrace. "Good for you, Iley," she says emphatically, squeezing my shoulders. At just that moment, an SUV with four baseball cap-wearing halfwits skids around the corner, and one yells out, "Dykes!" at the top of his lungs. The other three snort and hoot as though they've never heard such sidesplitting comedy. Erin and I stand up and she rolls her eyes as we walk into the apartment. "This neighborhood, I swear. Where are some foodstuffs when you really need them?" she asks.

Although Erin and I are certainly not dykes or lovers, we aren't exactly just roommates or friends, either. Our relationship falls into a different area, one marked by a level of comfort and understanding achieved through years of co-habitation. We met nearly seven years ago, when we both answered the same ad in Boston magazine. Seeking roommate, it read. Easygoing male musician with one cat looking to share giant Fenway-area apartment. No gender preference, smokers OK.

Robin, the easygoing male musician, set up back-to-back appointments for Erin and me, but I was running so late that he ended up showing us the apartment at the same time. For this she and I were both grateful. Robin was not the sexy bass player that we had each separately envisioned and planned to bed shortly after setting up the CD player and framed photos. Instead, he was a balding folk singer who wore his remaining fringe of hair long and ponytailed, twirling it as he spoke about the basement laundry room. He asked if we would like to hear some of his music, and before either of us could respond, the embroidered guitar strap was firmly around his neck and he was crooning a low, mournful tune about a lost love. The cat referenced in the ad was a piebald, scrawny thing that nearly caused me to wet my pants when it leaped from a chair and onto Robin's shoulder as he sang to us.

The last straw was the tour of the bathroom, which contained a large, wooden platform where the toilet seat should have been. Using a strangely reverential tone, Robin explained that squatting was actually much healthier than sitting upright, and that in most non-Western cultures, this in fact was the preferred way of relieving oneself. In the cracked vanity mirror, I watched Erin's mouth fall open, and it took all of my power to keep a straight face and tell Robin that although I just adored the apartment, I'd need to think about it. Erin wordlessly followed me out of the apartment and into the elevator, and once the squeaky door shut, we became hysterical with laughter.

After walking together for a few blocks, we became composed enough to begin asking one another questions about favorite neighborhoods and ideal price ranges for rent. I don't remember who suggested to whom that we become roommates, to forge ahead on our own and leave Robin and his squatting toilet out of the picture entirely, but it proved to be an excellent idea. Over the years, we've lived in Robin's neighborhood, in Harvard Square in Cambridge, and now in our little hovel in Brighton. Every few years, I prod myself into thinking I should move, perhaps find a little place to call my own. But in the end, I am made too nervous by the idea of paying all that rent, and more importantly, I don't see any reason not to continue living with Erin. Sure, if asked to leave, I certainly would ­ and for a time two summers ago, when Erin thought she'd be shacking up with her then-boyfriend who turned out to be hooked on Vicodin, I was leaving. But things fell through with Jake, they way they so often do when narcotics are involved. And so I stayed, our calm roommate rhythm continuing, like a low-key but content marriage, to this day.

The next morning finds me working in my rented darkroom space at the New England School of Photography and banging on the wall as I hear Rithy enter on the other side. "Yo, Rithy!" I shout, pausing as I grip my photograph between the rubber tongs, leaving it hovering between the developer and stop bath. "Is that you?"

"Yeah, it's me," he says in a gruff voice. "Joey." This is the name he chose for himself seven years ago, when he arrived from Thailand with his father, his uncle, and a few cheap, floral-print suitcases. They had come to join some entrepreneurial cousins who had launched a successful restaurant in Boston three years earlier and sent to their homeland for reinforcements when it came time to open a second restaurant. Twelve-year-old Rithy didn't know much about American culture, but he knew that if he ever hoped to fit in, he'd need a more suitable name. He selected Joey because whenever he sat in his family's tiny apartment and watched Friends, everyone always seemed to laugh and smile a lot whenever that character was onscreen. It wasn't until he gained a command of English that he realized with horror that Joey was a moron and that the cast and studio audience were laughing at Joey, but by then it was too late. I delight in calling him Rithy, partly because it annoys him, partly because I think it is a beautiful name, and partly because I can't stand Matt LeBlanc. "How's it going?" he asks.

"It's good," I say uncertainly as I peer at the black-and-white photo lying gently in the tray of fixer. Staring back at me is a silvery print of a sweet-cheeked cherub, who I discovered above an ornate Beacon Hill doorway quite by accident and shot in early-morning light last weekend. The mouth is parted just so, but there is a tiny glint of pure white plaster showing through the paint on the top lip, too bright and causing a distraction from the rest of the image. "You staying long?"

"No. Just bought some paper and wanted to drop it off. I need to go to the restaurant, so yankees can have enough pad thai to eat at dinner," he yells bitterly. Although poor Rithy is enrolled part-time at Wentworth Institute of Technology, it is implicitly understood that the bulk of his waking hours are to be spent washing vegetables, chopping peanuts, and boiling soft noodles. His family's restaurant has won Best Pad Thai four years running, and now he is a prisoner of peanut sauce. Photography is his only outlet, and he spends virtually all of his money on film, paper, and darkroom rental fees. His photographs are elaborately staged and lit affairs, mostly still lifes of objects found in nature. His images of irises in particular capture a clean, spare beauty that bodes very well for his artistic future. He once shyly showed me a collection of prints, shots of small, smooth stones he arranged in concentric circles on the grass, and it was so exquisite that I momentarily turned as green as the grass with envy. "Your fan working?" he asks.

"No," I say, squinting in the red light at the dust-coated vent on the far wall. Photo chemicals stink and require adequate ventilation, but because the New England School of Photography is one of the very few places left that rents darkroom space, beggars can't be choosy. Since the advent of digital photography, darkrooms have been quietly shuttering one by one as sales of Photoshop rise. I'm no Luddite, but no mouse and scanner can give me the feeling that standing silently in a darkroom does, breathlessly watching and waiting as the image appears like magic. I appreciate what digital photography can do, but digital photographs aren't mysterious, and they aren't romantic. Uploading pictures will never give me the fizzy tingle in my chest that this does. "Well, I guess no fan just means more brain cells down the drain," I add cheerily as I drop the cherub into the water bath for a little soak. Rithy doesn't reply, and a moment later, I hear him leave his darkroom space, muttering in Thai.

Laptop? Check. Cigarettes? Check. Scrap paper and pen? Check, check. Unmistakable feeling of weight on chest, the kind that accompanies a fruitless job search? Check. I give a dramatic sigh as I start up Erin's gleaming white iBook, by far the cleanest thing in our cluttered living room. Gary responds with a little sigh of his own, resting his head on his front paws and making me momentarily jealous of the simple life of a dog.

Search jobs by keyword: photography, photo, studio. A whole lot of nothing appears on the screen ­ retail positions at the Walgreen's photo counter, a project management job at Polaroid, a dozen zippily worded ads for Photoshop wonks. I read each one anyway, which is to say I rest my gaze on the screen and use my index finger to scroll while my mind wanders.

Can I really keep doing this, I wonder as the list of benefits for the Polaroid job slides by. Do I really want to keep doing this? After graduating from Emerson College nearly nine years ago with a degree in photography and a portfolio bursting with arresting, black-and-white pictures, I was more than dismayed to learn that the world had not been impatiently waiting for me to arrive with my Nikon. Humbled, I took a job at the Brookline TAB, a free newspaper produced by a large chain that churns out identical weeklies for Boston-area cities and towns. It didn't take long for me to get my fill of photographing lame local events: gap-toothed Girl Scouts accepting awards, a dedication of shiny, new park benches in front of the library, the grand opening of a sub shop that was subsequently closed for spreading hepatitis B. Even as I was focusing my lens and yelling at the Girl Scouts to scrunch in tighter, I was plotting my escape.

It came in the form of a job in a swanky, Newbury Street photography gallery, where I was essentially a glorified salesgirl who was able to speak with some authority about photographic technique. It was dreadfully dull, with pompous customers who looked past their trendy eyewear and down their noses at me. I wasn't making enough money to buy the matte black wardrobe I needed to look the part, and my feet screamed by the end of each day. The job's only selling point was that I got to spend time with local photographers, some of whom were charming, rakishly handsome, and eccentric. One was so charming, rakishly handsome, and eccentric that he and I found ourselves in the back office during his show's opening, in a sloppy, grabby make-out session fueled by too much champagne. Although sales didn't suffer that night, the owner decided that this was not behavior befitting a gallery employee, and let me go. It hardly mattered to me; when the photographer hit it big in a New York show the following year, I recalled with fondness that his lips tasted of Clark's Teaberry gum, but couldn't bring to mind one memorable detail of my stint at the gallery.

Next came the freelance jobs, which are too tiresome to describe, then a period at a small camera shop in Harvard Square. This job suited me, despite the fact that no one who knows me well would ever use the words "Iley Gilbert" and "customer service" together in the same sentence. Still, I liked the clientele and relished the challenge of trying to talk men out of bigger and bigger telephoto lenses, explaining with a wink that just as with some other things, size isn't everything. It was a relaxed, run-down store, with a homespun atmosphere and no opportunities for make-out sessions to get me in trouble. It closed when the owner's wife had a stroke, and he sold the store for a tidy sum to help pay for her home health care. Eventually I found myself at the frame shop, with its attendant frame samples and boneheaded manager. The job made me feel as though I had been marooned on an island as I watched my aspirations slowly but surely drift away from me, the stiff current taking any hope of making it in the photography business and tossing it about, before swallowing it up.

I close the laptop with a snap and light a cigarette, watching the smoke curlicue into the air. Gary gives a little snuffle that makes me feel guilty. He turned six last month and got high marks at his trip to the vet's, except for his seasonal allergies and asthma. Erin and I dutifully dose him with doggie antihistamines when his breathing becomes too labored, but we both know that he might not need the pet pharmaceuticals if the air around here were less polluted. "Well, nothing here, friend," I tell him before leaning back in the chair and staring at the ceiling, as though the ideal job posting might be up there, in between the cracks and water stains. Tomorrow I'll call the temp agency; they're always glad to hear from me, because I'm too smart for the jobs they send me on. Then I realize that I can't tell whether or not I'm relieved that there were no photography jobs. This thought haunts me well into the evening and keeps me awake for the better part of the night.

Copyright ©2006, Eugénie Olson