Miss Fortune by Lauren Weedman Read Free Book Online Page A

romantic that happenedto pretty girls on summer days in Brooklyn whose Love’s Baby Soft perfume made the construction workers fall off scaffolding to their deaths. In Indiana, boys would let girls know they thought they were pretty by driving by them and throwing a beer can at their heads, and that had never happened to me. The closest I’d come to being sexually harassed was at the Indy 500 racetrack when a man with the command SHOW ME YOUR TITS written across his T-shirt walked past me. It was so crowded I wasn’t even sure he was talking to me.
    The minute I set foot in the Buffet attic, Mert, the fifty-five-year-old Turkish busser, yelled my name. How he was able to see me at all through his butter-smeared glasses is a mystery.
    â€œIn my country you would be a movie star!” he shouts.
    Italian guests would look around trying to figure out whom on earth he could be referring to. Mert asked guests to take pictures of me and wrote down his family’s address on the place mats so they could send the photo directly to his family back in Turkey. “Just write a note—‘This beauty works with Mert. You see, he is okay.’”
    Emad, the headwaiter of the Breakfast Buffet (or head bin refiller, since most of the work in the Buffet involved keeping the
pannekoeken
piled high), looks like an Egyptian Burt Reynolds. Big, wide-open face. Black mustache. Emad had a never-ending look of alertness, which made him a good breakfast waiter. He’d seen me only during the daytime—and he still liked me.
    We came from different worlds. According to Yolanda, a stern waitress with no eyebrows and an accent that I’d thought for months was a speech impediment (turns out she was just Belgian), it was forbidden for us to be together. She didn’t actually say the words “It is forbidden.” It was more like, “Dey thmell dike hashish! Blah!”
    Emad made an effort to come down into the café at least oncea day to tell me, “I like you, Lauren, I really like you.” It made Yolanda furious. She furrowed her eyebrow ridge and told him to “go ayay! Doo can’t be dow here!” None of the pale, floppy Dutch depressives I worked with liked the dark Middle Eastern (and one Greek) boys of the Breakfast Buffet. That bothered me. “You guys are racist,” I’d say, and then quickly add, “Just kidding!” for job security.
    Emad was funny. He made jokes about being Muslim the same way I made jokes about being American. I ran around screaming, “Everything is just too
different
in Europe!” in a Texas accent and acted like I was going to eat a bowl of ketchup, while he threw napkins at the female kitchen staff and asked them to “Cover your face—stop tempting me!”
    The day he tied a tablecloth around my face I fell a little bit in love with him. Maybe it was the contrast between his humor and the café staff’s lack of it. The café staff aggressively fought against the idea of laughing. “Ja, you told a joke, so what? Big deal. Am I supposed to lose my mind now? Oh, ha-ha-ha. No, I’m not doing that. Sorry.”
    Emad cornered me after his shift one day. “I like you, Lauren, I really like you,” he said, and asked me on a date.
    Sure, it was his catchphrase. I’d overheard him saying it to an eighty-nine-year-old, limp-necked German woman, but nobody had told me they liked me, really liked me, in a long time. They’d told me I had the figure of a mole or that I needed to stop laughing so loudly. Mert had referred to me as a movie star, but movie stars are admired from afar. Being asked out on a date pulled me back into the world of hopeful romance and delusional dreams. He could be the one. What if he fell in love with me? (I never thought, “What if I fell in love with him?” because I was very polite and wanted him to go first.) Having a Dutch boyfriend was an item of exotic interest