Our Dad had spent the whole ten days of us kids being grounded working, and, being fed and sat like Mr. Cleaver in his recliner with slippers and newspaper in the evenings. His slippers were gigantic, fuzzy affairs with large bear claw appendages that flopped around when he stomped to the bathroom.
It was true that he'd gifted me each pen on a birthday or milestone event at school. But it was also true that he'd conducted a red-faced, lip twisting, almost sweaty raid of every nook and cranny where the precious treasures might be stashed. Our mother stood apart from him, arms crossed, not really looking at any of us, and covering a couldn't-help-but laugh in her shoulder acting as if her nose itched.
"How could you?" He'd hoisted the growing number of pens found into the air. "WE DON'T need you to write about OUR LIVES. WE'RE LIVING IT!!!!!!!"
A deafening silence followed. For a full five days. That was how I fell in with some Asians. Two of us were both ten.
"Pandas don't have pens but they still exist." A big Asian brother told us girls. A slender hand started to reach towards a face swollen with tears but re-directed itself to a box of tissues. His sister clutched the box. Heavy sighs.
I sat on the medium-hard plastic packaging the sofa. Mrs. Asian's decor was very ivory in color with dramatic splashes and jags of deep, dark colors. An ebony-colored vase which looked almost squashed, like it was standing up almost flat had a spray of greenish leaves sticking up out of it. Eucalyptis, the girl named the dried out plant my eyes fell on. An ornate deeply red wooden sitting chair. The dragons on the arms and legs dumb-eyed. Mouths wide open. Soft-edged pieces of jade shades; stone chess pieces on a yellowing bumpy board. Paper lanterns on a snarled up yarn string. No patience, the little girl explained. She and I were the same size, different-looking human features. But we knew each other as pandas.
We'd found each other as such in the woods. We'd each hidden our bicycles. Stashed food and pencil bags. There'd been no paper at my school. And slipped out of wordly cares by imagining the woods like a still, shimmering pool of water. We'd glanced at each other feeling tree bark, scooping catepillars into hands, moving crispy leaves to find lady bugs, and finding bigger and bigger leaves. We just did this. Without talking because we didn't speak the same language. She'd shown me in the Atlas: Cambodia.
The teacher having a hard time with all the rules about Catholic school, like us kids, gave me two panda stickers and I gave one to my panda friend. She opened a big metal desk's top drawer and put the sticker next to the neat row of twisting pencils and click pens. A feather had jumped up when she opened the drawer. She tried to smooth it back in place but it kept sticking to her finger. Then the back of her hand. She shook it. It floated and she pointed it into place. Grown ups were coming so she closed the drawer quickly and opened a square in the wall. We sat Indian-style in the square. We saw legs and heard lots of talking in the "peephole". Then they went out the front door. And we just did our giggling in silence. Like a silent movie.
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