flea market funtimes

I discovered my winter wrap today at the flea market in the school playground in Park Slope, a black and white vintage swing coat in Shepherd’s Tartan, with three big black buttons the size of tea saucers. I also purchased a charcoal and pastel surrealist rendering of what appears to be either Mussolini, naked, or a crazed and disgruntled matador, also naked, and wearing an eye patch. I bought the portrait from a woman who couldn’t bear to see it go (I promised her, “I will display it prominently in my home”); the jacket came from another woman who had set up a cardtable along the wall of the school. We cultivated an amiable rapport while discussing another swing coat I own, a brilliant hot pink velvet number I bought for $6 at a Value Village in Phoenix, Arizona in 1996. As I bent over to fish my dollas from my gym bag, the woman who sold me the coat posed the question, “When is the baby due?”
The baby is due in nevuary.
“There is no baby,” I told her.
The baby does not exist.
The sunlight shifted; wind gusts kept track of the seconds as they trampled by and we looked at one another. “Oh.. the way you bent over… it looked like…” she stammered. Like I was pregnant? A logical conclusion, I suppose, because everyone in Park Slope is pregnant. No, seriously. I know the strollers trope is a Slope stereotype, but it’s fucking true. Whether they get pregnant there or the pregnant simply flock there is none of my business. All I know is, Maggie Gyllenhaal, the moment she knew she was carrying a fertilized zygote, purchased a brownstone just off the Q with her baby-daddy Peter Sarsgaard. Michelle Williams and Heath Ledger? Not pregnant. Boerum Hill.
Along with “poor,” one of the things that is not fun (or acceptable?) to be in New York is “fat.” I work out six or seven days a week, but I have a ponsa, as my abuela christened my round belly from the day I was born, and I will always have it. My modern dance instructor is constantly telling me “close your ribcage.” But I cannot close it, even when he tells me “press your belly button to your spine” and I do it. I do not have rock-hard abs, but I do have book-hard abs. And right now, for me, I would definitely rather be fat than pregnant.
The winter coat, by the by, is a class act.