My Very Own Peeping Tom
By Sandra Oertell
One summer, while we were living in Iowa, it was hot and sticky, and I went to bed with the window and shade in my bedroom wide open. We didn’t have central air in those days. Our bed was almost as big as the bedroom, so I was only a couple feet from the screen when I laid down. Without my glasses, in the dark, I could see very little, but one night, when I was trying to flip my very pregnant body over to the other side, I thought I saw something in the window. I lumbered out of bed and stuck my nose right on the screen, and touched the nose of a man standing on the other side, peering in! Screeching, I pulled down the shade (yup…left the window wide open), and ran around the house, locking doors and pulling window shades down. I was so scared I didn’t know what to do. I tried calling my husband, who was a graduate student at Iowa State , and who often stayed very late at the labs to study. Then I called a friend of his at the dorms, and asked him to look for George and send him home.
He told me to call the cops, but I was afraid to do so…afraid to open the door when they came to the house, so I just sat in two year old Susan’s room, with her, waiting. The guy knew where to find George, so he showed up pretty fast…in fact, at the same time as the police, who had been called by a neighbor when he also saw the guy looking in my window.
From that moment till the first snowfall, in December, it was more like a Marx Brothers movie than real life around our place. We had numerous meetings with the plain clothes police, who hid in parked cars, our garage, and walked dogs all night long in the hopes of catching our peeping tom. He managed to visit several times a week without getting caught. Often he would watch my sleeping two year old, and I couldn’t decide which made him more of a pervert….watching a baby or watching a 6 month pregnant woman!
We tied cow bells on wires outside the windows…he stepped over them. We and the neighbors had walkie talkies, but somehow never caught him. I was told to be nonchalant when I knew he was watching me and to get someone’s attention as quietly as possible… which leads, naturally, to two funny stories.
One night I was taking a bath, when I heard “tom” drag our garbage can over to the bathroom window and climb on it to peek in at me basking like a beached whale in some bubbles. I casually reached over the side of the tub with the bar of soap, and tapped on the pipe under the sink, which I knew led to the basement. George was studying at his desk down in the basement you see. “tap, tap” I waited for him to come. Suddenly I hear “tap, tap tap” back. “TAP DITTY TAP TAP” I sent, frantically. And back came, loudly “TAP TAP” and up he came, laughing loudly, and thinking I was being really adorable for a change. “Tom” fell off the can and ran away before we could catch him.
When I was in my 8th month, I was set up as a decoy for a final effort at catching him. The window and shade were raised, and I lay there in all my hugeness, with George massaging my back or legs or something. Sure enough, the guy showed up, and George rolled off the bed to the floor, where he lay writhing into black turtleneck, black pants, black shoes and a stocking cap. All the time he was doing this, I was getting instructions….wait until he got out of the house, then stand up, yawn, lumber to the bathroom, flip on the light, flush the toilet, drop to my knees, crawl to the kitchen phone, call the cops. Off he slithered, with flashlight and a hunting knife. And I dutifully set about doing my part. Things went well, till I dropped to my knees. Then I got grounded on 8 months of baby. Somehow I made it to the kitchen…but guess what! The phone was placed high on the wall…higher than I could reach from the floor. I was stretching for the receiver when the phone rang. I leaped to my feet (a slight exaggeration) and grabbed the phone. This is what I heard: “Hello, Ma’am, I don’t want you to be scared, but this is your neighbor from down the street. I was walking my dog, when I saw a funny little man, dressed in black, wearing a stocking cap, skulking around your house, carrying a flashlight and a knife. I called the police, and they have arrived…the scuffle you are hearing is them apprehending your peeping tom.”
Sure enough, there came a knock at my door. When I opened it, the police had George well in hand. When asked if I knew him, I said simply that I had never seen him before in my life. How could I ever have married someone with no sense of humor at all?
Sandra Oertell is a writer from Nevada.