Pulling the door to the World’s Fair Diner & Donut Shop against the wind was like opening an industrial refrigerator door sealed by its rubber strips. Even layers of clothing couldn’t protect Paula from the frigid air blasting off the lake or the snow swirling around the building like a Tastee-Freeze commercial. The temperature had dropped twenty degrees between the beginning and end of her shift.
She knocked the remaining snow from her boots. Against the whiteness of the outside, the warm interior seemed drab as grease streaks on a wall.
The lone patron sat at a far table, gazing at her with wondrous interest. After five years with the Chicago Police Department, she was used to people staring at a woman in a cop’s uniform. After what happened today, she was pretty sure she wasn’t going to make it to six. She wished the clock hanging on the wall above the solitary patron was counting the days until her last day at work, instead of the minutes to 11:00 p.m.
She figured getting along with a bunch of men would be a cinch, having grown up with four brothers, two of them already on the force. She’d been hell bent on becoming a cop after she first saw her oldest brother show up at the house in uniform. She was sixteen at the time. Her brothers’ objections couldn’t dissuade her. Only her mother favored her chosen career path to law enforcement.
“Kabelevsky women break the mold,” she’d said, proudly.
She didn’t mind her initial assignments, mostly clerical, then juvenile and family services, but the attitudes of her fellow officers frustrated her at first, then demoralized her. If she complained about how they treated her, she’d be branded a whiner seeking special treatment. If she filed a grievance, she’d be ostracized.
Veterans harassed new male recruits, too. They were the butt of the senior officers’ practical jokes, some of which were anything but pranks, good fun in the spirit of camaraderie. That’s what the superiors called it if anyone complained. Sometimes new recruits were downright terrorized. But when it was all over, the men were considered part of the team. Ritualistic initiation would end. Not so for Paula. She never could figure out whether having two brothers on the force made things worse or better.
Occasionally, she’d be directed out as part of a larger detail when the situation wasn’t deemed too dangerous, like crowd control during events in Washington Park. So she primarily did deskwork until another woman cop was assigned to her precinct. None of the men wanted a woman for a partner.
Male cops had a spacious locker room to change in, clean up, and hang out. No such space existed for a woman officer. She and her partner changed in the women’s rest room, alongside the primping prostitutes, hysterical housewives, female district attorneys, and female felons taking a potty break once their paperwork was completed.
Earlier in the day, she and her new partner were called on an assignment described as a crazy guy making threats to his neighbors. Paula was excited. They’d be handling this one on their own, and she’d be the senior officer on the call.
When they knocked on the door at the designated address, an elderly man, butt naked from the waist down, greeted them in a thin white undershirt, corrugations stretched over his bulging midsection. Attempting to appear unfazed, the two officers questioned him, talked to the neighbor who had filed the complaint, wrote up a report, and returned to the precinct.
The desk sergeant looked bored when Paula handed him the paperwork. He looked at the address and chuckled. “So you ladies finally met Mr. Thomas. Was he at least wearing shoes this time?”
“Shit!” Paula muttered. “I need to wise up, don’t I?”
The desk sargeant shook his head and shrugged. “Maybe you need to toughen up first.”
Toughen up. Shit. When were these assholes going to grow up? Hopefully, before she gave up.
Elias Haddad’s day had been worse. He’d taken a call from his dispatcher for a pickup in Plainfield, the next town over, a guy heading to the train station in Joliet. It was a rush job. The customer needed to catch the last train into Chicago. He found the address, parked out front of the house, honked his horn, and waited. It was policy not to get out of the car to knock on doors after dark. Minutes passed and Elias wondered whether the guy truly was in a hurry.
He had been on shift twelve hours. He began to nod off, but a car pulling up next to startled him. His window was already partly rolled down, easier to regulate the heat in the car. The window of the other car was rolled down to reveal a driver with a sidekick in the passenger seat.
“You got a reason for being here?” The tone was menacing. Elias didn’t understand.
“Please. Say again.”
I said, “You got a good reason to be loitering in this neighborhood?”
“To be here?” He used his hand to point downward with his index finger.
“What, you deaf? If you don’t live here, you don’t belong here, pal.”
“Am taxi. Waiting. On customer.”
“You’ve been waiting ten minutes. Don’t you think your customer would have been here by now?”
Elias didn’t respond. He didn’t want to drive back to Joliet without a fare.
“Now, look, Mohamed, you hustle your ass on outta here. We got strict laws in this town against loitering, vagrant vehicles, and breaking curfew.”
Elias didn’t understand most of what was said, but he did understand the meaning of the pistol the driver of the other car now brandished.
“Yes sir! Am to leave.”
His arms shook on the steering wheel all the way back to Joliet. The night grew darker and darker as he replayed the scene in his head. He had never seen a gun before in real life.
When he calmed down, surprisingly, he was overcome by a ravenous appetite. He usually didn’t need anything to eat at the end of his shift, but sometimes only had a craving for something sweet, so he often stopped in at World’s Fair before returning home. A sweet at the end of the night was a habit he associated with his mother. Before she died giving birth to another sibling, she used to bring the kids a small bowl of yogurt mixed with a healthy drizzle of honey before they went to bed.
Sitting in his booth, a lumpy vinyl-covered bench seat, much like the front of his taxi, powdered sugar spreading beyond the napkin onto the table, and into his lap, Elias started into one of his frequent rituals, to think through, to listen in his head, to concentrate on the music he heard those days traveling with his father, the classical music from Europe so rarely played or heard in his country. It was like meditation. He hoped it would calm him down after his ordeal, in between bites of his donuts.
Then the policewoman walked in.
One bite into his second, apple spice donut, he stopped chewing and slowly did a double-take toward her, as she kicked the thick snow off her boots. He’d never seen a woman wearing the familiar dark blue uniform, the silver five-pointed star of a badge, the gun resting in her holster, the thick leather backing on the pad of paper attached to the other side of her hips, the flat-topped cap with the shining black bill, the checkered insignia of the Chicago police. It all made up for her unimposing height.
Paula always swelled with pride when gawkers stared at her. It made up for the validation she couldn’t get from inside the force.
“How’s it goin’, Irv,” she said, when he came from behind the glass. “I’ll have four glazed and an éclair tonight. Take a few home to my mom.”
“Were the streets safe tonight?” Irv inquired.
“Well, if you call being asked to investigate a complaint of a half-naked crazy roaming a neighborhood safe….”
“I won’t ask,” Irv said in his eastern European accent.
“Yeah. Don’t.”
Paula wished there were other patrons in the joint so she wouldn’t have to keep noticing the man in the far corner staring at her. This was going beyond admiration. She waited for the order that would give sweet respite after the prank they’d endured hours earlier. She thought she might have to engage this dope in a staring contest or pull rank on him and play officer.
Irv handed her the bag of donuts with a soda in a paper cup. She thanked him, reached into her pocket for some bills. Irv, as usual, waved her off. She turned around and walked towards the door, then stopped, turned around, and took a few steps towards the man in the booth.
“Yes, I really am a police officer,” she said, leaning towards Elias. “I promise. Can you please stop staring?”
She turned again towards the door. She could see in the big mirror facing her she was still being watched. This time the man was smiling, as if he’d discovered something wonderful.
“I can still see you staring,” she said, as if they were playing a game. After she left, Elias asked Irv in his fractured English whether the police lady would come in again.
“Don’t waste your time,” was his reply, less fractured by a different native language, the edges of his syllables rounded from more time in the country. Elias looked crushed. Irv spoke again. “She comes often when her shift is over, around this time.”
Elias credited mind-music for bringing the good fortune of this woman into his presence. The music had not only warded off the bad feelings from the earlier situation when he was threatened with a gun, but gave him a beautiful woman to think about. It was like saying a prayer and having it answered.
Elias wondered what he could wear to make himself more presentable the next time he would see this policewoman, something he was certain would happen. It wasn’t a question of if, but when. He knew this in his heart.
He had asked his dispatcher how he should introduce himself to an American woman. Did the fact she wore a police uniform make a difference? The dispatcher laughed and said if he knew the answer to such questions, would he be dispatching gypsy taxi drivers like him who could barely speak English? No, he’d be a Don Juan, or at least a well-paid therapist.
“What is this, therapist?” Elias wondered.
A television in the dispatcher’s office showed three young men with black hair playing guitars and singing. Ignoring Elias, he pointed to it, calling it rock and roll.
“Now there’s an idea. Learn to play a guitar and grow your hair long. That’ll attract her.”
Elias had only seen one or two television sets before he left for America, usually in a large official government facility. He wasn’t accustomed to watching television, but lively characters amused him, such as the crazy woman named Lucy, or the fat funny guy named Jackie.
Then there was that show with all the people wearing big wide-brimmed hats riding horses. At first, Elias couldn’t understand why the shows depicted Americans riding horses when he saw no one riding horses anywhere in the Chicago area.
After a few weeks in America, he grew lonely for books in his native language. Mind-music only lasted so long. He sent word back to his family to please put as many books in a box as they could and send to him.
When they arrived, by way of Father Moody, he was surprised the box was opened, but figured the post office in this country was like the post office back home. Everything was inspected. When he carted his books to the room at the rooming house, he looked through them and found a magazine with some works of a poet he had come to admire. The poet’s name was Ali Ahmad Sa’id.
His father had encouraged him to read this poet because he was breaking all the rules. He said this poet recited a poem to the president of Syria and was able to attend school on scholarship, something his father hoped for Elias.
His brother once said the best way to seduce a girl was through poetry, and to make sure he wasn’t lying to get him in trouble, he validated this idea with his cousin, Suleima. It seemed like many years ago.
He selected some of his favorite lines and committed them to memory. He practiced reciting them in front of the mirror in the medicine cabinet door above his bathroom sink.
Two weeks later, Paula strode into World’s Fair Donuts to find the man once again seated in a booth in the back. She had thought about him from time to time. Even though she was used to being stared at, she could not remember when anyone had done so for so long, so inappropriately. If it was adoration, she could get used to that.
This time he did not stare at her. He walked directly toward her while she waited at the counter.
“Please, please, to sit with you. To sit with me?”
He brought his arms and palms to his chest cross-wise as if patting himself, a gesture of a hug.
“Sorry, my squad car’s getting cold.”
“For moment only.”
Paula looked at Irv, scrunched up her face, as if to ask, is this guy for real? But she found his modesty appealing, something unassuming in his accent, the way he approached her, the way he asked, with sincere intent, persuasive, not coercive. Rarely did a fella have the guts to talk to her when she was in uniform, unless it had to do with police business.
She sat down opposite him in the booth.
“Moment,” he said. He straightened up as if he was on stage and recited a passage from one of Sa’id’s poems.
She remained expressionless, hiding her thoughts. She had never heard anything like this. It wasn’t a language she recognized. Some of her relatives, her grandmother, still spoke Polish and she could identify Spanish, Italian, and she’d hear some Greek, but what this man was saying was like nothing in her experience. It sounded like someone chanting, like something ancient and sacred.
Then he translated from the Arabic.
When he finished, she was speechless. She tried to look through to the inside of him, an attempt to discern something.
“Where are you from?” she asked, puzzled.
“Syria.”
“Where’s that?”
He didn’t know how to answer. “Nearby to Turkey?”
“Oh, that tells me something,” she said sarcastically.
They both paused to take in the aroma of fresh baking donuts. Paula couldn’t sit idle with the seconds ticking by. She needed to do something, anything. She reached into the bag and pulled a donut out, bit into it. She kept her eyes on him as if he might try to escape.
“What is your name?”
“Elias. Haddad.”
She had heard the name Elias before, maybe from a movie or a book or something. But not Haddad.
She didn’t know what else to do so she thrust her arm across the table. “Good to meet with you. Officer Paula Kabalevsky.”
After she left, it didn’t occur to her to run through her usual mental police sketch about how old this Elias was, what he was doing here, where he lived, how he was clothed. Instead she skipped to questions like, what in the name of God would her family think, especially her brothers, if she brought this guy home? What would her partner think, the other officers in the precinct? She’d dated some, but most men ran the other way after they learned she was a cop.
His complete devotion to her the next time they ran into each other at World’s Fair kept her strangely riveted to that booth. Irv beamed from the kitchen, like he had something to do with getting them together. Paula’s partner was more direct, after she described Elias to her.
“That’s it. You two are getting hitched. I can tell.”
Elias followed her around like a puppy dog. He said little, and what little he did say was in his fractured English. His thick, evening beard was one of the many shades of dark in his complexion. He had a roasted look, like ground coffee, to his face, his eyebrows, his eyes. She wanted to peel back the darkness whisker by whisker, discover what was underneath.
Elias was the first man she’d encountered who desperately wanted to treat her like a woman. She’d be more than happy to treat him like a man.
Irv called it a World’s Fair courtship. Paula’s partner joked about it, once sticking her éclair into the hole of Paula’s glazed donut.
Elias promised to read poetry in Arabic to her every night of their lives.
The wait became unbearable. She cursed herself for still living at home with her mother. She tried unsuccessfully to scheme up a way to use her brother’s apartment.
A few weeks later, a rare break in the weather pushed the thermometer passed fifty degrees. That evening, she and Elias drove in her squad car to the end of a poorly lit warehouse parking lot tucked in behind a patch of woods off of the highway. He read more poetry to her while she stripped off her uniform, all of the official stuff that hung off of it. She freed him from his clothes. With the car’s heat turned up too high for what would come next, neither of them willing to disrupt the moment to reach up to the dashboard to dial it back, he pushed his heart and his soul into her, evacuating the months of loneliness and uncertainty that he had felt ever since he had been cut loose from Father Moody’s daily care.
Minutes of physical clarity ensued. They couldn’t see out of the windows when they collapsed into each other. They didn’t need to. They stared at each other, gasping and sharing what oxygen was left.
But what was staring at Paula from the mirror a month later was a policewoman with a gun attached to her waist and the beginnings of a child in her womb.