The Privacy of Windows

Lisa was alone in the darkened space of her home office. It was evening and the window let the last bits of orange sun seep sharply through the curtains and onto her face. The blaze of the computer screen and the dull evening sun flooded into the etched lines of her skin and gave her a sort of ghostly appearance.

She had been sitting there for some time, checking her students’ emails and grading their papers. They chose English as their majors and wanted to talk about Virginia Woolf and the methods of the picaresque novel. They were so young, and Lisa, nearing fifty, felt this urgently.

She clicked away at her computer, and then stopped to turn and look at the window. She lived on a small suburban street. All the houses were covered with shades of tan stucco, topped by deep gray roofs. The lawns were manicured, and the fees paid to the Homeowner’s Association made people feel safe. It was a neighborhood where the houses were so close together that when Debra called to say that Tim Gregory, their neighbor, had been caught watching Janey O’Brien through her bedroom window, an awful quiet settled over the whole street.

Lisa stood and walked to the window. The sun had set, and she lifted her hands to pull the laced curtain back. She had always found Tim attractive. Who wouldn’t? He was a good-looking man, who worked as a pediatrician at the local hospital. He had a smile that was instantly memorable, and was the kind of man who made Lisa quiet in his presence; not because she had nothing to say to him, but because she never wanted to say the wrong thing. It was the same Tim who showed her the right way to plant her sweetspire shrubs along the walkway that summer, who had lived next to her for such a long time now. How old was Janey? Nine or ten?

They had lived next to the Gregorys since Sarah was young. Sarah was gone now, had left for San Diego State a month before. There were still boxes of her things scattered around. Lisa pressed her hand against the window. It was cold. She shuddered. Had there been a time when he watched Sarah?

An upstairs bedroom light flashed on at the Gregory’s. She stood next to the window, in the dark, watching a shadow move.

There was a time when Lisa could feel the warmth of loneliness in her bones—on the soft flesh of her thighs. It had been after David died of a second heart attack. Sarah had been sixteen, and Lisa resolved to be both her mother and father, as impossible as it was. The two of them held onto David for so long, keeping his ties and shirts lined up in the closets. And even when they finally donated his clothes, they held onto him without saying it. But in the back of Lisa’s mind, Sarah would leave someday, and then what? Lisa knew.

She would be alone.

Her friends had encouraged her to date, but Lisa always thought of Sarah. How sensitive the girl was, like soft clay, so easily altered—how much Sarah cried when Lisa finally threw away David’s old wallet—how much she held Sarah. And then later, there were the arguments.

“But I want to go to school here. I want to stay with you.”

“You can’t stay with me forever.”

“But I’ll be all alone.”

She was such a sensitive girl.

“You’ll make friends.”

In the end, Sarah left for San Diego. It was a seven-hour drive from San Jose, and Lisa denied for so long that she wanted Sarah gone. The truth was, she wanted Sarah to be far away. It was the strangest of things. Lisa wanted to be alone. She thought she could learn to love someone again without waves of guilt pressing into her every time she saw Sarah. Was she a terrible mother for wanting these things? Hadn’t it been long enough? Lisa didn’t want to hurt Sarah, but she didn’t deserve to be alone.

That night, Lisa couldn’t sleep. It was nearly midnight, and the October air was warm and dry. She kept flipping her pillows until finally, she sat up in the darkness. She sat like this for some time, letting her feet dangle over the bed so that the tips of her toes felt the wooden floor. She took breaths, so quiet she could barely hear them, feeling calmly aware of her own existence. Not that she had never felt it before, but it seemed inescapable, alone amidst the dark, a warm heaviness of silence surrounding her—she laughed, for no other reason than she was wonderfully comfortable in that silence.

She slipped her feet inside a pair of slippers, and dragged herself to the window. She had left it open a crack, and felt the hot air against her skin. She pulled the curtains back gently, curtains she and Sarah had sewn one summer. Lisa saw now, the places where all the stitching was off, where the ends of the curtains hung unevenly.

She looked out and saw the scattered streetlights create an orange glow. The silhouettes of palm trees stood in the distance. The kids from across the street had left their bikes laying in the grass. And then she felt the pull, the urge really, to walk to the window on the other side of her room, the window which looked directly at the Gregory’s home.

She pulled back the curtain carefully, as if she were afraid someone might see her. But who would see her? The lights were off at the Gregory’s.

There was an alteration, a shift; the home did not feel as private as it had before. Everywhere along the street, windows were turning into holes in white walls. Something had been ruptured, broken in a way that could not be put into words. Everywhere along the street, the holes opened up like mouths waiting to feed. Lisa felt it—a feeling of anxious paranoia.

She hadn’t decided whether she believed any of it. The news interviewed some neighbors, and most seemed to be on Tim’s side. Everybody liked Tim, they said.

She saw a sudden movement from the downstairs window of the Gregory home. Or had she? Did someone pull a curtain back? Was he watching?

What would it feel like to have him watch her? It was a strange thought, but one that excited her. She was older, but she felt as if she still retained some of the beauty she’d held in her youth. Did he only like young girls? She felt wrong for wanting him to want to watch her too.

She looked closer, but the lights were off, and she couldn’t be sure she saw anything at all. She stood in front of the window in her robe. If he had been watching, he would have seen her pull the string on her robe, only slightly, but just enough to expose her breast. Then, after a moment, she grew embarrassed, and hurriedly pulled her robe closed. She stepped away from the window, and pressed her back against the wall. Her breathing was rapid. Had anyone seen her? She could not say for sure but it was the uncertainty, the possibility of knowing she had been seen which excited her.

Before Sarah had left, Lisa spent long nights on the computer. It started with one online dating website. She knew Sarah would be leaving soon. That was all—a single dating service. She remembered feeling a sort of excitement when she first filled out the profile—question after question, and there was the matter of her profile photo. How exactly should it be taken? And at what angle? Lisa had propped up the tripod, and took dozens of photos until she liked one enough to use. Her smile seemed inviting yet mysterious, and she pretended she meant it that way. It was all so personal. In some way, that was why she liked it.

Lisa would wait until Sarah was asleep to spend several hours answering her inbox messages, waiting for instant chats. It was all so easy from behind a computer. It gave her a sense of power. She couldn’t help but like the attention. She told her coworkers she was finally planning on meeting someone she met online, and they told her to be careful, to meet in a public place. She tried—Lisa sat in a coffee shop, waiting, buying coffee after coffee, but he never showed up. She wondered if he’d come and seen her sitting at the table alone. She wondered if she looked much different in person. She hadn’t arranged a meeting with anyone since.

Her students made it look so easy. How easily they exchanged their phone numbers with each other after class, in the hallways. They posted their statuses online, where they were, what they were doing—their entire lives documented in a separate reality. Lisa couldn’t quite figure out how to connect the two.

That summer, she had begun teaching Delillo’s “Videotape” as part of a literary analysis course. The students seemed to love the strangeness of the story—a man shot in the head by the Texas Highway Killer is captured on film, and the narrator, along with countless others, although disturbed by the footage, cannot help but watch it repeatedly. Lisa stared at her class, asking why with her eyes. The students sat quietly until a young girl, her face lit up by her laptop, making her appear soft and angelic, said something like, “We are fascinated by what disturbs us.”

It was now nearing five in the morning, and Lisa could see the dull glow of dawn from behind the curtain in her home office. She had been checking her profiles, message after message, answering them in the sort of playful tone she was familiar with. Sarah was gone, and yet Lisa still felt uneasy, like she might be caught somehow.

It was Saturday, and Lisa had nowhere to be. She thought of maybe going down to the farmer’s market. She could get some fresh flowers for the house. The Gregorys usually hosted a neighborhood barbecue party. That was supposed to be coming up, but of course, Lisa hadn’t heard anything. They didn’t send out invitations like they did last summer—not that anyone would show up now.

Lisa sat back in the computer chair. Had she ever noticed Tim Gregory act oddly around the children? She didn’t want to wonder these things but her mind kept wandering, had been wandering all throughout the night. She hadn’t slept, her mind scanning neighborhood memories—hadn’t she seem Tim staring at Janey during last year’s barbecue party? Now that she thought of it, yes, she had—and a twinge of guilt flushed across her stomach. But…no, it had been a quick and subtle glance, one that hadn’t seemed inappropriate. He hadn’t been leering at Janey in a strange way. He had simply been watching her...

Lisa turned off her computer and sighed. She thought she heard the familiar sound of the front porch swing, and she felt uneasy, clutching her shawl at the neck. She clumsily walked to the door, and switched on the light, but there was nobody there. There was nothing except the porch swing swaying softly in the night, empty and alone. She walked back upstairs to her bedroom where she fell asleep.

It was nearly noon when she woke up. She made coffee and sipped it, peeking through the blinds, feeling the dust on her fingertips. How long has it been since she cleaned? There was a local news channel van sitting on the corner. No kids were playing outside.

For the first time, Lisa couldn’t stand the silence.

She called Sarah.

“A bunch of us are going rock climbing,” Sarah said.

“Oh,” said Lisa. “That’s great.”

There was a long pause.

“Sarah?”

“What is it?”

“Do you remember any strange shadows moving around next door?”

“Shadows, why?”

“Nevermind.”

“Mom?”

“I miss you.”

There was another long pause. Lisa, not wanting to believe she was the type of mother who could think of nothing else to say to her daughter, said, “Wait,” when Sarah started to say goodbye. Lisa used to make Bill Clinton impersonations, and Sarah always laughed. Only, now, when Lisa did it over the phone, it sounded forced and rushed, and Sarah didn’t laugh. Sarah sighed. She was late and maybe they could talk again next week?

“Yeah, of course,” Lisa said.

Lisa hung up. She heard the far off hum of the highway. She never noticed the constant hum before. Now it filled the silence. It was deafening.

It was early afternoon when the doorbell rang. Lisa made her way to the front door. She had been watching the news all day, and still wore the clothes she slept in. She imagined it was probably one of the mothers who’d also been watching the news. The street was filled with houses, each barely restraining the excitement of a neighbor wanting to pretend that her need to gossip was simply the concern of a mother—it was all very scandalous. Janey’s mother reportedly had some hidden camera showing Tim looking into Janey’s bedroom window. It was all becoming very real. Lisa peered through the peephole, feeling a rush of warmth as it was not a mother standing on her front porch but Tim Gregory, with his hands inside his jean pockets.

Lisa took a step back. There was a small flutter in her chest. She stood there, not wanting to breathe heavily, not wanting Tim to know she was there. She waited. The neighbors, no doubt, would be watching.

It would be rude if she didn’t open the door.

He rang the doorbell again. Did he know she was home? Of course not; how could he know? She began to feel uneasy. Had he seen her last night through the window? Did others know?

It would be rude if she didn’t open the door. She looked through the peephole again. He hadn’t moved. She could feel her arm reaching out.

What would happen if people found out she’d exposed herself? She would tell them it was an accident. It was an accident, wasn’t it? No, she had meant to. She unlocked the top bolt. Lisa felt the cool brass doorknob in her hand, felt the warm California air as she opened the door.

“Why are the characters fascinated by the video clip,” Lisa had asked her students that past summer. She loved that they kept coming to her classes, yet she knew there was a space between her and them—a widening space in which her years advancing into old age were ever more apparent.

“It’s authentic,” a student said, “It’s real.”

Lisa felt it when she glanced in the mirror. No, that is not her face, but yes, of course, it is her face and she hated that she could feel it changing.

“Why,” she asked them, “Why is it real?”

The class sat still.

Lisa wanted to think she had learned to embrace this, the aging process, but most days she only felt increasing nostalgia for what was. Maybe that was what she wanted, a feeling of connection. How far would she have to go to get it?

Then, a girl in the back shifted in her chair and said, “They didn’t know they were being watched. That’s what makes it real.”

Lisa offered, but Tim didn’t want to come in. He laughed a little at first. Lisa didn’t laugh back. She went to say something but stopped. He was wearing jeans with white tennis shoes and a t-shirt from the hospital. He looked tired. Even so, Lisa still found him attractive.

“You’re not,” he asked her, “leaving any time soon?”

His voice was smooth and soft. He seemed sensitive and vulnerable.

She shook her head.

“I just don’t want my plants dying,” he whispered. “That’s all I wanted to ask.”

“Sure,” Lisa said. What had the news said earlier? Tim had been seen masturbating? Then, the thought flashed quickly in her mind. Would he masturbate to her?

“That’s all I wanted.”

“Sure,” Lisa said again.

“Maybe,” he sighed, “you could--”

“Of course.”

“My wife won’t.”

“Of course.”

There was a quiet moment between them—he smiled at her and didn’t look away—she met his eyes. It was as if there was some sort of understood thought. It was like a bridge connecting the two of them, connecting all the things they wanted to say, but couldn’t. A heaviness settled within her. Lisa wanted to believe that he knew, that he had seen her in the window last night. She smiled back at Tim. He could be so charming when he smiled.

The moment she broke eye contact, he turned, glancing over his shoulder, saying “goodbye” while he walked away, down the steps, to his own house, eleven long feet away.

That night, it was quiet. A crescent of moonlight glimmered through the windows. She heard a neighbor’s dog barking. The woofing was hollow and echoed between the houses. It cut through the night air for a long while before it stopped abruptly. Lisa felt a sort of relief, until the silence that followed unsettled her. She could feel it surrounding her, filling up the spaces of the house—filling up the rooms and corners. Everything was as it was, had always been, only now she felt more aware. She sensed something new, the unhurried mindfulness that someone was watching her. She left the curtains open and began to undress.