a few more gumball machines
I was in kindergarten and my sister was a bouffanted, false-eyelashed, Motown-listening teen skank in a silver-lamé jacket and roach-killer shoes. She spent her entire first paycheck from her waitressing job buying me toys, most notably a little plastic gumball machine. She spent so much on me that she didn't even have bus fare left, so we wound up walking five miles home, me toting the gumball machine the whole way.
Around the same time, she found out that some neighborhood kids were teasing me, so she marched down to their clubhouse and screamed at them like only women can scream. She was highly protective of her nerdy little bookworm brother.
But when I was twelve, she allowed her husband to bloody my nose and routinely threaten me. And later on, she proved to be such a rotten cunt that I'll never speak to her again. NEVER.
This has been my experience with women—gumball machines and bloody noses, sweet moments and heartbreaking viciousness, protectiveness and endangerment. And I wonder how my life's trajectory would have been altered if there had been a few more gumball machines.
