Christopher ª Herdt
PO Box 4501
Ann Arbor MI 48106
2000 words

Picture of Debbie

I am looking for a picture of my first girlfriend, Debbie.  It is a black and 
white photograph that was taken by my friend Scott for his photography class.  I 
need to find it.  She would never let me take her picture.  She said she didn't 
like the way I held the camera, that I would take too much.  I had to be content 
with Scott's picture.
	She is wearing a black jacket and black sunglasses and her hair is dyed 
black.  She looks a bit like Wynona Rider used to, only smaller and skinnier.  
She weighed about ninety pounds then.  I keep the picture in a white envelope 
with a single strand of her hair that I found on my pillow after the only time 
we'd had sex at my parents' house.  I also have a small scrap of paper that she 
gave me.  She drew a star, wrote her name, and her phone number.  I kept it 
against the wall by the weight of my crucifix when I had been seeing her.  I 
think it is in one of the dresser drawers.
	Most of my socks are wearing thin at the heels.  I suppose I should throw 
them away.  I don't need them, after all, I have newer socks.  But when all the 
new socks are dirty, it never hurts to have a threadbare pair to put on.  And 
besides, those old socks, I've probably walked miles in those.  Maybe they are 
the same socks I was wearing when I walked all over Madrid.  How could I throw 
away socks that had been with me to Madrid?
	The picture is not in the drawer with the socks.  There are no pictures at 
all in that drawer.  The bottom drawer has some strange things in it, circuit 
boards, baseball caps, old road maps.  Debbie first became interested in me 
because I had been drawing a map.  I was going to write a novel about an 
imaginary land, and I wanted to draw a map of it, so that I could better 
describe the terrain, and better imagine what sort of people lived there.  She 
drew for me a floorplan of a three-story house, a cylinder, for each floor was 
circular.  The top floor was some sort of swimming pool or hot tub.  I never 
told her that it was a bad idea to have a pool on the top floor.  She picked a 
place on the map I was drawing, next to a lake and away from the little towns, 
and said that's where the house would be, and we would live there together.  I 
still have the floorplans, but they aren't with the picture.
	Why am I saving these circuit boards and these baseball caps?  I failed 
miserably in every attempt to build a circuit, well, except for a simple LED 
with an on and off switch.  Seeing it just reminds me of how foolish I am, 
trying to build things that I know little to nothing about.  And yet every time 
I see it I try to build something new.  And when was the last time I wore a 
baseball cap?  It's been at least seven or eight years.  I just can't throw them 
out.
	I need to find this picture.  I've found pictures of every single one of 
my other ex-girlfriends.  The one that counted, anyway.  The ones that I loved.  
The picture of Kristin is somewhat sketchy...I took it years after we'd stopped 
dating.  I ran into her at a bowling alley and I happened to have a camera.  I 
told her that she had to let me take her picture.  She seemed a bit nervous 
about it, as if she were wondering why would I want a picture of her now?  But 
she let me take it.  There are dark shadows on her face from the poor lighting, 
and her sweater came out so dark you can hardly tell that it's green.  She looks 
older than when we'd dated, I suppose because she smoked so many Benson and 
Hedges.  Smoking ages people.  I probably wouldn't smoke now, five years later, 
if it hadn't been for Kristin.
	But I'm looking for the picture of Debbie.  She smoked too, but only after 
sex.  She held one up to my lips after our first time, and said, isn't this 
nice?  I didn't know if she meant the whole moment, or the taste of the 
cigarette, which I didn't care for, so I said nothing.  She's not smoking in the 
picture that I have of her, it's a very nice picture, she's holding her hands in 
front of her, like a schoolgirl.  She was a schoolgirl.  She's holding a little 
black box with a metal handle, almost like a lunchbox, that she used as a purse.  
She kept her cigarettes there, along with condoms and make-up.
	One of the things I'll do, when I find this picture, is try to see behind 
her sunglasses and look at her eyelashes.  My friend Scott told me that she wore 
false eyelashes.  I'd never looked close enough to notice.  I almost didn't 
believe him, as though he were trying to tell me something to put her down when 
I wanted her raised up.  What if she did wear false eyelashes?  Would I feel 
lied to?  Would that be the biggest lie I would take from her?
	The top drawer is where I keep most of my pictures.  Hundreds and hundreds 
of photographs, most of them still in the envelopes that I picked them up in 
from the developer's.  When I get them back, I look at them all very carefully, 
perhaps choose one or two for a photo album, and then put the rest in the top 
drawer of my dresser.  I don't need to look at them, really.  I just like to 
know that they're there.  These things really happened, they're documented.  I 
have factual evidence to back up my memories.  The picture of Debbie will not be 
in this drawer, I'm certain.  The picture is approximately five by seven inches, 
maybe five by eight, since Scott didn't always like to cut his photographs to 
any standard size.  It wouldn't fit in any of the envelopes, and I'd already 
checked my pile of eight by tens once.
	Debbie is surrounded by trees in the picture, and the sun is shining 
directly on her face.  I imagine her squinting, even behind the sunglasses.  I 
wonder where the picture was taken.  Certainly not at her house, she only had 
one tree in her yard.  Whenever I am home to visit my parents, I always take the 
long way when I am leaving home and drive by her house.  She doesn't live there 
any more.  I don't even know if her parents still live there.  It is a white 
stucco house, on a corner, and it has a flat roof.  All the other houses in the 
neighborhood have slanted roofs.  But Debbie's house was different.
	It is entirely possible that the picture wasn't in the dresser at all.  
I'd already emptied ever box in the closet, checked the shoeboxes under the bed, 
and even looked in a few books that I thought I might have put it in, in between 
the pages, to mark some passage that reminded me of her.  My clock reads 5:30.  
It's twenty minutes fast, but that still means I've spent over six hours looking 
for this picture.
	If I find it, I will sit down on my bed and look at it for a while.  I'll 
turn on the light.  I'll rub the dust off with a cloth.  Can I see anything 
behind those dark lenses?
	I have other pictures of other girlfriends.  Most of them I have taken 
myself.  I took some for photography classes, and had to instruct them very 
carefully how to smile, or not to smile at all.  They would look at the camera 
but would see me, and every picture showed love.  I wasn't trying to show love.  
I wanted somber photographs for a class assignment.
	The picture of Debbie, my only picture of Debbie, was taken by my friend 
Scott.  It was taken before she'd met me.  It is not a picture of love.  I sit 
on my bed.  The search is fruitless.  I will have to spend another hour, at the 
very least, to put everything back that I turned over looking for the picture.  
I imagine the picture again.  Scott must have used a low f-stop, because the 
leaves in the background were out of focus.  And on a sunny day...why was he 
using a high shutter speed?  Unless he was using an extremely slow film.  No, I 
couldn't see her eyelashes.  The sunglasses were too dark.  I could barely make 
out her eyes.
	I remember when she and I had walked downtown, each with our cameras, on a 
photoshoot.  She would shoot street signs and storm sewer drains, and any shape 
or image that caught her eye.  I only wanted a picture of her.  No, she said.  
If you take a picture, I'll beat you up and pull the film out of your camera.  
Just one picture, I said.  No, she said.  Not even one.
	I should have taken one anyway.  I weighed sixty pounds more than she did 
and was about a foot taller.  I can't remember if she was wearing a necklace in 
the picture.  She was wearing a bracelet made of a bicycle chain, I knew, 
because she always wore that.  My mother called her a ragamuffin because of that 
bracelet.  But I couldn't remember if was wearing a necklace too.  I really wish 
I could find that picture.
	A week after the photoshoot, we were downtown again.  We sat down on the 
sidewalk in front of a furniture store, and as I watched people walk by, Debbie 
told me that things weren't clicking.  I can't see you anymore, she said.  I was 
upset.  I imagine I cried, but I don't remember.
	Maybe she wouldn't let me take her picture because she knew what I 
wouldn't see.  She didn't have her sunglasses that day to hide whatever the lens 
would find in her eyes.  I turn on the light next to my bed, as if I can see my 
memories more clearly.  I can see the picture of Debbie that I would have taken, 
the one I should have snapped despite her threats.  But I can't remember the 
eyes.  Was love there?
	I look at the rest of the picture of Debbie, the one I should have taken.  
There was a parking garage in the background, and the student book store.  We 
were standing in an alley.  There was a car parked on the street.  Debbie had 
her camera around her neck.  It was a color photograph, not that it made much 
difference with Debbie.  She was extremely pale, her hair was dyed black, and 
she always wore black and white.  She was wearing a white hooded sweatshirt that 
day, with her Olympus camera around her neck.  It was the same sweatshirt she 
had been wearing underneath her black jacket in the picture I was looking for, 
the one Scott had given too me.  I try to picture her eyes, her dark brown eyes, 
but I can't focus.
	But I can focus on something else.  Her eyelashes.  I can see them 
perfectly now, in this picture in my mind.  And there's no way Debbie's 
eyelashes were real.  Unnaturally long, too even, too black.  Not even mascara 
can do that.  This isn't the question I wanted answered.  And in my mind, 
logically, I know what I am thinking isn't true.  But if her eyelashes really 
were false, then what was true?
	I need to find the picture of first girlfriend Debbie.  My friend Scott 
gave it too me.  It's the only picture of her that I have.