The Fountain of the Transcendence of Arbitrary Labels
“But I want to help.”
Phil called out from below. “Are you crazy? This entire house is a construction zone and you’re pregnant for Chrissake. How irresponsible do you think we are?”
“I’m barely five weeks, Phil. Five weeks.”
There was a pause while Phil, who had never been around a pregnant woman, considered this. “Exactly!” he shouted and went back to work.
June felt a hand on her shoulder and turned around to see Yuri, wearing a summer dress and holding a small straw basket with pruning shears inside it. “Come on outside with me. The sun is up, the sky is blue.”
“It’s beautiful and so are you, dear Mommy” Danny finished, giving his mother the sort of slow and gentle shove a responsible person would use on a pregnant lady, toward the back door.
The morning was still cool enough for a sweater but the sun was bright enough to warm skin. “We’re out for dandelion flowers,” explained Yuri as they walked out to the almost-lawn, which had become a small front yard when Quinn and Sheila set up their tipi. “We’ll start here and then hit the neighbors’ lawns for more. Anything wild like daisies will also do.”
When they’d filled the basket Yuri set it on the small picnic table next to a concrete bird bath and the collapsed wooden covering of the old well head that was now invisible beneath enough morning glory vine to hide a shopping center. June sat on the picnic table bench facing away from the table toward the tipi, leaned back onto the table top, stared into the blue sky for a few moments, and fell asleep.
When she woke up, Yuri was sitting in a red metal folding chair that was tipped back against the bird bath, softly humming Morning Has Broken. The bird bath had a plaque attached to it and three tiny flat pieces of wood in the shape of tomb stones stood at the base, barely taller than the crab grass.
That the bird bath held a fish was first noticed by Yuri’s two-year-old nephew Ralphie on the day that Yuri had lugged the bath from its original position at the side of the house in the middle of a small unshaded area next to where the sewer tomatoes grew, out to the spot by the old well and the picnic table. She brought the hose around and filled the bowl while Yuri’s sister hoisted Ralphie into her arms so he could see. At that moment the reflection of a seagull swam lazily through the water and Ralphie pointed at it. “Pssh!” he shouted.
His mother chuckled. “It’s not a fish, honey. It’s a bird. Biiirrrd.”
Ralphie pointed down at the reflection as it left the water and said “Brrd!” very sternly, as if to remind the fish what it really was so that it might remember in the future.
The next morning Yuri bought a gold fish and put it in the bird bath. When she showed it to Ralphie he looked at his mother and aunt and shouted “Brrd!”
Later Yuri would reckon that it was in deference to toddler sensibilities that the raccoons waited until mother and child had returned to Michigan to eat the gold fish. Yuri taped aluminum foil around the bird bath’s post to prevent more climbing and bought a second fish. To protect the third fish she tried adding red food coloring to the water to make the fish less visible. In the end she had nothing to show for her efforts but a group of four tiny wooden grave markers at the foot of the bird bath and a growing sense of guilt.
She went to the Japanese Gardens for advice from the gardeners and learned that the attack on her fish had almost certainly come not from the land but from the air. They advised her that she could put some screening over the water, but then the wrens and sparrows wanting a bath would be out of luck. So she stopped at a toy store on the way home and bought a small plastic wind-up gold fish bath toy, a small plastic blue bird and a couple of plastic dinosaurs to put in the water. Then she borrowed enough modeling clay from Bekka to make a plaque to attach to the bird bath. With a chop stick she drew a fish with long graceful seagull-like wings and baked the plaque in the oven to harden. Then, below the fishbird, she wrote in careful lettering with black ink and a calligraphy brush: Fountain of the Transcendence of Arbitrary Labels.
“Which itself is an arbitrary label,” she told Phil that night while he massaged her back with thick white lotion and drew waves and clouds between her shoulder blades.
Now, Yuri took a length of morning glory vine and had woven a hat-sized hoop out of it. She wound the stem of the dandelion around the morning glory vine which was already braided with a couple dozen flowers. She frowned, added four more dandelions to the same spot and smiled happily. “I wanted to make it entirely of dandelions,” she said as June stretched herself awake. “I wanted something that looked like a 19th century illustration. A few more weeks and the almost-lawn will be a splendid source of them but it’s just too early still. So it ended up pick-as-pick-can with morning glory flowers and those little white daisies that look like chamomile, along with the dandelions. The purple gives it an unexpected art nouveau look, I’d say.”
A few minutes later all the flowers had been placed in the braided vine. Yuri held it in her hand, took the pruning shears and touched it gently with them. “I crown thee floral crown” she said.
“Let’s see how it looks. Put it on.”
“Ah, but ‘tis not mine to wear, dear lady” Yuri said softly, then looked toward the house and pointed. “The nick of time,” she said and stood up.
All the racket from the house had already ceased when she woke up, June suddenly realized. And now everyone in the house had come out the kitchen door and were walking across the yard toward the two of them. They walked quietly, unhurriedly, not speaking – Phil, Danny and Arlene, Quinn and Sheila and Bekka and George. Each was smiling an I’ve-got-a-secret smile. They stopped when they got to the table. Yuri came to June and placed the floral crown on her head. Then she and Phil took her by the hands and silently led her toward the house. The others fell in behind, two by two and as they did so, and began singing Land of Hope and Glory which was the only processional any of them knew. Land of hope and glooo reee, mother of the free. How shall we adore thee, who were born of thee? La, la, la la la, laaaaah laaaaa…
June did, at that moment, look back to the picnic table just to verify what had to be the case: that her body was still at the picnic table, still soundly dreaming. The negative results were confusing but she somehow sensed that this was not a good time to insist on answers. The procession made its way through the kitchen door and stopped at the top of the basement stairs.
“June,” Phil said, “I’m sorry to have to tell you that we are evicting you from your room in the basement. Please know that this decision was made only after much reflection and discussion.”
Then they continued down the hall and up the stairs and into Bekka’s room. Where Bekka’s bed had been was a brand new twin bed smuggled into the Bunker straight out of the Good Will store in Oregon City. Next to that was a beautiful wooden cradle and a bassinet. The cradle had one pink and one blue blanket. June’s clothes were hanging in the closet and her dresser was against the wall and above the dresser was a framed picture of a teddy bear dressed in a tuxedo.
The window looked out at the top of one of the Hawthorn trees in the back yard, now in full bloom. Everyone had stopped singing by now. In the quiet it was almost possible to hear the first enormous tear slide off June’s cheek and plop onto the oak floor.
“But…” June said, and her throat closed around the rest.
Danny put his arm around her waist. “I told them they’d have to spring it on you or you wouldn’t let them do it. We fixed up the sewing room for Bekka, and Arline and I have the basement for hardly any rent. It’s perfect!”
June walked through the room. She laid her hand on the cradle, picked up the blue and pink blankets, refolded them neatly and put them back. She ran her fingers along the railing of the bassinet. She opened her mouth, her lips moved, but that was all.
“But…” started to repeat itself in her mind, that one word, but…but…but… bouncing off the walls of her mind, slamming into all the words that followed that one word, the words that in that moment were never going to find their way out: But I’ve scheduled an abortion for next week.