The Days of Peeping Tom

I wouldn’t have said anything. If my daughter was the tallest girl in 10^th grade and wore a metal back-brace down the length of her back, I doubt I’d be broadcasting to the whole neighborhood that she had a peeping tom. I mean, you’re just opening yourself up for some blow back. 

Even my mom, who is extra nice, told me about her exchange with a touch of meanness. She said, “I saw Mrs. Blankenship at S&S and she told me that Margaret has a peeping tom.  That make any sense to you?”

“She wouldn’t be my first choice.” I replied.

Margaret Blankenship, her know-it-all mom, ophthalmologist dad, and older sister Jan lived next door.

We moved here in 10^th grade. My mom transferred north with the phone company to get away from the rat race, a term she used to describe Los Angeles. We sold my grandma’s duplex and had enough to get a house with a pool that was better than what we thought we’d get.

Two months after we moved in, Margaret showed up to school with a shiny steel back brace that disappeared mysteriously into her blouse, ending somewhere near the small of her back. I have no idea how things worked down there, the way it anchors to her torso I mean, but it must be something substantial because the brace hardly sways up top where it supports her head with two little rubber head rests, one behind each ear. 

That first day when she showed up, tilting out the back of her dad’s Crown Victoria, holding a little suitcase, (she couldn’t wear a backpack for obvious reasons), I remember feeling a little sad for her, and a little afraid to get near her too. I was new at school, and I had my own issues to sort through.

To make matters worse, unbelievably, Margaret got a full set of teeth braces the same week. Kelly McMaster, who sat at the back of Algebra I with me, said he heard there were magnets in Margaret’s headrests that kept her head centered with the magnetic force generated by all that metal in her mouth. I knew he was bullshitting me, but she did move her whole body to glance sideways, like an old man changing lanes.

Jan Blankenship, Margaret’s sister, told me once what the brace was doing, but I don’t exactly remember. There was something going on with her spine curving in all directions. I imagined that her vertebrae stacked wiggly and loose like a thumb puppet that collapses when you press the button.

Margaret’s dad is my mom’s eye doctor. I went with her to his office one time. It was in a business park north of town. The waiting room had a picture window facing Mount Shasta with a skinny Formica table under it holding 4 different binoculars and 1 monocular, each with little rabbit’s foot like chain connected to a brass tag which read: BLANKENSHIP OPHTHALMOLOGY “TRY ME!” 

I figured it was a sales play, that whoever made the prescription eyeglass lenses probably also made the optics in the spyglasses. My mom said Dr. Blankenship was a birdwatcher, so it could’ve been either, or both. I sampled all of them, peering a full 100 miles north to Shasta’s pointy snow cap. It was better than thumbing through old Newsweeks.

The week before the peeping tom incident Kelly McMaster and I were walking home from school past the leather goods section of Collier Hardware’s store window, and he says, “I think it’s leather with adjustable straps.”

This was in reference to our ongoing speculation about Margaret’s brace, specifically, the hidden support that held the parallel chrome bars sprouting from the collar of her blouse. I guessed it was fiberglass and Kelly shoved his hand into my gut. “Twenty bucks? I’m going to ask her.” 

“That’s not cool. You can’t ask her,” I said.

“I’ll ask what’s her name, the sister.”

“Jan. No.”

“She lives next door, why don’t you just peak in her window around bedtime?”

“Why don’t you?”

“She’s your neighbor.”

“Exactly. It’s higher risk for me. You should do it.”

“Let’s flip on it.”

He pulled out a quarter. We did the flip. More on that later.

My mom used to get on me. She’d see me ride my bike past Margaret and Mrs. Blankenship unloading groceries and I’d blow them off like I had something urgent I needed to do in the house. I’d speed up my approach and then dismount, letting my bike crash into the front lawn, or maybe into the row of rose bushes along the walk. I’d run past her and through the front door, but she’d always would follow me in and grill me about being friendlier to the neighbors.

“Can’t you just say hi?”

“Yeah right! And then what?”

“What is that supposed to mean? Just be civilized. You are so weird sometimes!”

“I’m weird?”

“Who are you?” Mom replied. It was her stock response when I was being a dick.

I used to hear Margaret play piano over the fence from an open window in their living room, maybe 15 feet away from my bedroom. She nearly always played classical music, stuff I’d heard before but couldn’t name. In the 11^th grade though, her last year in the brace, she graduated to Elton John and Fleetwood Mac and other music I knew for real.

It was around this time, maybe 6 months after the peeping tom incident, that my mom came into the family room with tears in her eyes and said, “Come here.” She walked me back to the open window under my bed and we laid there, looking up at the ceiling and listening to Margaret play Songbird by Fleetwood Mac. 

For the first time, I heard a voice with the piano. It was gentle and sad, a little airy, a lot like Christine McVie. 

When it was over, mom put her hand on my knee and sat up.  She wiped her eyes with the thumb and index finger of her other hand and whispered, “Is that her? Is that Margaret?”

I shrugged like I didn’t know. It was the first time I’d ever heard her voice.

The next day at school, me and Margaret talked for the first time. I saw her standing with PeeDeePee at the library entrance. He was the only guy I’d ever seen Margaret talk to. I didn’t have any classes with him, so I never knew for sure whether his name was the hyphenate, Phillip Darren-Paul, or the bolder, Phillip Darren Paul, which, if you ask me, is begging for trouble, which he got in spades, usually in the form of a loud “PeeDeePee!” shouted from the back of a classroom any time his name was called for early out to get on the band bus before Friday away games. 

It was always the same, the vice principal would move down list of the band students over the PA, fifteen minutes before the bus had to leave. He’d say: “…Brian Murphy…Phillip Darren Paul…” a couple kids at the back would yell, “PeeDeePee!”, the class would erupt in laughter, and the teacher would shush us, or some, like Mr. Henry, would laugh along. 

I pretended to have some business in the library that day, so I shot past Margaret and PeeDeePee, and then held the swinging door open like I was stopping for a quick chat.

“You made my mom cry,” I said.

Margaret looked at me, confused. Her eyes were wide set, almond shaped, brown, with yellow edges to them.

“We heard you play Songbird. That was you, right?”

“That was me.”

“You can sing!”

“Thanks,” she replied.  “You can talk!,” she said, addressing the elephant in the room, the fact that I’d never given her more than a nod in 2 years. She smiled, which showed me that she had a sense of humor.

“Yeah, I talk, … sorry.”  I said… like a dumbass. 

She shrugged, “That’s okay,” letting me off the hook. “My dad says, you can’t learn anything while you’re talking.”

“My mom says the same thing!” 

“So…,” Margaret looked me in the eye, “you probably know more than all the big talkers.”

“Yeah… I guess.” I said, “maybe.”

She nodded…and…that was it.

“Thanks for the compliment, Donny," she said.

“No sweat,” I said.  

I nodded, “Hey PeeDeePee!”

He nodded back, “Hey, Shoe!”

I should explain. My last name is Shumaker. It’s pronounced like it rhymes with Shoe Locker, which makes it even more uncool. Through the first half of 11^th grade, I lobbied really hard to get my friends to call me Shoe. To me, Shoe had the feel of someone who could shred moguls, use a stick shift, someone girls would want to make out with in public. 

My friends weren't going for it. They'd say something like, “Fuck you. You can’t give yourself a nickname! It doesn’t work that way, dumbass.” Even so, I’d push back and say something like, “Fuck you. Just try it. What do you care?” 

This kept on for months until PeeDeePee overheard me and my friends in the lunchroom, and as fate would have it, became the only person in the entire school who referred to me as Shoe. This was, of course, worse than nobody calling me Shoe.

The summer between 11^th and 12^th grade we discovered beer and tubing. Me and some buddies got a few six packs from Rice Bowl, a Chinese restaurant with a cooler by the register. They had a booming business selling beer to high schoolers who looked a little older. 

Brad Williams had a serious mustache, so he’d make the buy, and then we’d load into Randy Farmer’s dad’s pickup and head down to the Sacramento River with our inner tubes. 

We’d tie the beer off to one of the tubes and float the river, cracking them along the way. This one time, while we launched from Scotty’s landing, Margaret’s sister, Jan and one of her college friends showed up and pushed off at the same time.

Since we started together, and since the river had only one speed, we were stuck with them for a good two hours. I decided to be civilized, so I offered Jan and her friend some beer along the way. 

They were actually, pretty cool, not stuck up like I expected. 8 miles in, after we’d all caught a buzz, Jan asks me if I had heard about her sister’s peeping tom incident from the year before.

I said I had, and she said, “I have a theory about that.” 

She told me that she thought that Margaret made the whole thing up. This is not an idea that had ever occurred to me. “Why would she do that?”, I asked.

“I think she felt invisible and wanted a little attention,” she said.

I’m 41 now. Separated. My daughter’s in 8^th grade at Chico Junior High. I drive for Sierra Nevada Bottling, delivering cases of beer to the bars and stores in town, even the Rice Bowl, which stopped selling to minors after ABC busted them.

I have never told anyone what really happened, but it’s been so long now that I might as well come clean about the peeping tom incident.

After Kelly and I flipped the quarter, I lost. At least I thought I did at the time.

So, that night I snuck into Margaret’s yard over the fence near our apricot tree and the Blankenship’s air conditioning unit. I got all the way to a spot under her window, wedged between a bush and the scratchy stucco wall when all the sudden the pool light comes on, the back screen door flies open, and the Blankenship's Yorky, Bosco, makes a B-line directly to me. He’s got me cold. 

The dog was literally in the bush with me, snarling and barking and jumping forward and backward in little mock attacks. It happened so fast that I lost my balance and fell backward from my haunches with a big crunch. Bosco got me by the cuff of my jeans and was trying to pull me out from under the bush when I heard Margaret yell, “Bosco! Come! Bosco!” 

Bosco reluctantly let go and went to her. Then, I heard the screen door open, and then Bosco’s little footsteps transition from the concrete to the linoleum, and then one last bark and the screen door shut, and then … silence. 

I stopped breathing. My heart pounded. My left hand, the one supporting most of my weight, rested on a big dirt clod and was bleeding from a thorn I picked up from the bush, but I dared not move.

I heard Margaret’s footsteps move from the house, across the patio to the edge of the pool where I could see her through the branches. She was looking exactly my direction.

Then she moved out of view, and I heard the scrape of a lawn chair. She sat down, and did nothing, she just looked right at me, at the bush I was hiding in anyway. 

The she removed her shoes and socks really slow and set them to the side of the chair. 

I heard her mother scream, “Margaret!” from the kitchen, and Margaret screamed back, “I’m doing my exercises, mom!”

Margaret stood and unbuttoned her pants. She dropped them to her ankles and stepped over them. She unbuttoned her blouse and slid it off her shoulders onto the ground. She unbuckled the leather waist corset, and I heard the clink as she set the brace onto the concrete pool deck. Then her bra fell onto the brace. Then her panties.

She entered the water at the steps in full view, illuminated by the blue pool light, refracting across every inch of her long figure. Past the steps she began to move her fingertips slowly, rhythmically back and forth across the surface of the water, standing on her tippy toes stepping slowly toward the deep end.

Her exercises lasted about 15 minutes. She did some side strokes reaching for the far end of the pool, she scissor kicked while holding the coping. She stood in the shallow end, lifting her leg as far up as she could manage, keeping her back straight, all the while looking back and forth between the sky and the bush I was crouching behind. 

Then she walked up the stairs, wrapped herself in a towel and she was gone with her brace and her pile of clothes through the screen door and into the house.

Later that week I drilled a hole in the fence near the back corner of my yard behind our tool shed, a perfect view of the steps through the Blankenship’s pyracantha branches.

There I perched each night at 8:15 waiting for her. She didn’t show for 3 days, but then I saw the leaves of their Mulberry tree glow blue with the light of pool, and I heard the scrape of the screen door and I watched her routine once again.

I came to learn that exercises were Mondays and Thursdays just after sunset. Her routine became mine.

Two months in, as I squeezed behind our hedge and into the space behind the shed,  I found something that changed everything. A monocular was hanging from a string leading up and over the fence to a nail on the Blankenship side. It had a brass tag on a chain that read: BLANKENSHIP OPHTHALMOLOGY “TRY ME!” 

And so went my sophomore and junior years, every Monday and every Thursday, behind the shed. These were my days of peeping tom; ignoring Margaret by day, and studying her by night, in 5x magnification, watching her body change into something only she and I knew could possibly exist.

As time passed, her confidence grew. The routine evolved. It became slower, less hurried, more free. Some exercises moved outside the pool now, on a lounge chair or bent over the edge of the pool.

It’s like she knew she'd be invisible again tomorrow, in the halls at school and the shops downtown, behind the books she read in the lunchroom while others made the noises of friendship and foolery, she'd again be ignored, so she savored this time.

And so did I. As I pressed my monocular to the fence I dreamed of a world where nothing mattered. Where no one was too tall, or short, or broken, or afraid. A world where we were, all of us, so completely invisible that we could just be ourselves.

I never paid Kelly the twenty bucks. I never told him the support was leather, that Margaret was a real girl. A beautiful pale naked girl, submerging, soundless, in slow steps, deep into my dreams.

But then, one day, it just ended.

On April 16^th, 1992, the monocular disappeared, along with the brace, which was two weeks after her teeth were free, and white, and straight.

I’d still see Margaret at school still, but she was visible now. No longer mine.

My last encounter with Margaret happened in one of the bars on my route, although I was there as a patron that day.

Margaret walked in with two girlfriends. I recognized her from KHSL TV channel 10, where she is the Weather Girl. 

Hop Monkey has a circular bar and Margaret and her friends set up shop directly across from me. They were laughing and carrying on. One of them said that her daughter’s friend called her husband a DILF. Margaret cracked up and said, “Oh my god! Brad?”

I was keeping my head low, avoiding eye contact, but I could tell they were, all three of them, way out of my league.

I downed my lager and pushed off. 

I got about halfway to the door when I heard Margaret yell, “Shoe!”

I kept walking, ignoring her, like back in the day … the Days of Peeping Tom.