Destination Maternity

Libra

You and all of your friends swear that you will never attempt impregnation because you love having/fucking a fit body. Little do you realize that as you age you'll go crazy and fall ill with baby fever.

Most Compatible: with Scorpio
Lucky Show: Death First @ Death By Audio

On Monday and Wednesday afternoons I hang out at the Williamsburg public library and help elementary school students with their homework. I point to words as the children read them and coach writing in full sentences and then I tutor math, hangover permitting. It's not so much fulfilling or rewarding as it is fun and good practice for motherhood. (Right?)

Like every girl, I enjoy wearing "baby doll" dresses - they puff after the bust with a floral or otherwise effeminate pattern and then end halfway between the crotch and the knee - best known for masking middle-region body fat. I found a red one with white flowers for $2 at a donation thrift store in the Quad Cities. The brand? Motherhood Maternity.

Most of the kids I tutor live and attend public school in Williamsburg, almost serving as little testaments against the paranoia of gentrification. Sometimes they ask me about hot spots in Williamsburg, like Sea and The Edge, and I try to answer their questions as I would for any miniature adults whom I don't know very well - dishonestly and with clean language - in hopes that they'll tell their parents how respectful and helpful I am. A few weeks ago I wore my red baby doll dress to the library.
"Is your dress from American Apparel?" a fourth-grade girl asked me, subtly calling me a hipster. She and a second-grade girl were doing their homework at my table.
"No," I said defensively, "it's a maternity dress. It's what people wear when they're pregnant."
The two girls gasped. "Are you pregnant?!" exclaimed the second grader.
"Noooo," I howled, shaking my palms in front of me as though trying to erase my unnecessary explanation of the clothes best suited for harboring a child. "I'm not pregnant. I don't even have a boyfriend."
"You don't need a boyfriend to be pregnant," the second grader sing-songed. At once it was all "too real-life" Brooklyn and, because I had no response, a clear case of being outwitted by a seven year old.

On Christmas eve my extended family and I went to Chapel Hill Mall in Tallmadge, Ohio. I generally freeze up at the whisper of "mall" but because I hadn't bought presents for anyone in my family except my dad, the heat was on. While scrambling between Victoria's Secret and Claire's Accessories and Lids and Jimmy Jazz I somehow found time to stop in Destination Maternity to pick out something special for yours truly. I found a few jersey cotton 2XL-pregnancy-shirts-to-become-baby-doll-dresses that I wanted to try on, and when I started walking toward the dressing room the one woman behind the register called after me: "There's a pad in the fitting room so you can see how the shirts'll look when you're further along." I pulled back the curtain to reveal a tan, strap-on stomach pillow in the shape of a pregnancy, and yelled, "Cool!" back to her.

I decided to buy one of the shirts - maroon with a weird, downward, crescent-shaped pinch under the bust, designed to follow the line between a swollen stomach and two drooping breasts - and whisked it to the register. It had come to my consciousness that I should limit the time I spend in Destination Maternity for fear of being spotted by other Stamatises and wrongfully alerting my boisterous aunts that I'm expecting a lovechild. The woman at the register asked if I had found everything I was looking for and I told her that I had and thanked her. She then asked for my name and zip code and phone number, and, unable to locate me in the Destination Maternity customer files, asked for my address. Then she followed it up with, "And when are you due?"
I paused to imagine a due date for my inconceivable child. "Uh... April?" April is the month I was due (born), so it was my fastest idea. I realized that April meant I was almost six-months pregnant; but then, considering how fat my stomach can look after a season of heavy drinking, maybe the prediction was wholly believable.

"All right then," chirped my cheery wet nurse (by which I mean that she was whetting my appetite for maternity wear). "I'm jus' gonna go ahead and get'ch'ya a $400 gift certificate for diapers and formula sent to your home, courtesy of Destination Maternity. I'm also gonna include this envelope of freebies - who doesn't love freebies when they're pregnant - a gift to you from Destination Maternity."

The thick plastic envelope she slipped into my shopping bag included a Colgate WISP single-use toothbrush-floss-and-under-gum-pick, a coupon for a dollar off a 16-pack of Colgate WISPs, a sample of Wet Ones, a sample of Preparation H Portable Wipes with witch hazel, a coupon for Huggies featuring the image of a postpartum woman in her cotton underwear (you can tell she recently gave birth by the weird bellybutton), a coupon toward the purchase of a thermometer that takes baby's temperature by swiping its head, an ad for twitter.com/babytips, and a pamphlet that I don't want to unfold because the cover reads, Discover The Power Of Your Newborn's Cord Blood.

I'm more excited for what coupons may come in the mail; I have a P.O. Box in Manhattan but it's very hard for me to remember its address off-hand [319 Lafayette St #191, 10012] so for Destination Maternity I recited the address of the building I live in, which doesn't have a mailbox. Any mail to 957 Broadway in the zip code 11221 is delivered to a 24-hour Korean-owned fancy-food bodega that I shop in daily. There are equally high chances that Mr. Kiwi, upon acceptance, will throw my diaper coupons away, pass them off to an actually-impregnated Korean in his life, or embarrass one of my male roommates by giving them a fuschia envelope that screams, "Find the perfect baby name!" as they do a little light shopping.