Voice Messages

KYLE DEACON

I wasn’t surprised when my sister broke down. Her history is branded by bouts of depression. A lifetime of flapping red flags made her a standard case study for an acute psychotic episode at twenty-five. Even my earliest memories of her replay as pictures of misery, with tears always trickling down her olive cheeks and drool tarzaning from her lower lip. It doesn’t help that we come from a family of nut jobs. My parents separated when I was five and Margaret was nine. By the time the divorce was final, everyone in my family had assumed new identities. My mother, Nancy, became involved in a polygamous relationship and started growing marijuana. My father, Bob, married a professional psychic, found himself a guru, and started devoting much of his free time to meditation groups and spiritual workshops. Shortly thereafter, Margaret underwent her first emotional crisis. 
I remember getting dropped off at Nancy’s house so Bob and Margaret could go on a daddy/daughter date to see David Cronenberg’s remake of The Fly. The next day Margaret was changed in a way that made me resolve never to see the movie. She came home and put on this old pea-green nightgown and curled up for a couple of weeks. Bob said she was sick, and I left her alone as best I could, even when she was blindly hit with one of her crying fits. Inevitably, when my friends came over after school, there was explaining to do. Whether we were at Bob’s or Nancy’s, calling my family a bunch of nut jobs added a stroke of observant humor that made me feel nearly completely removed from psychics and polygamist potheads the world over. It made Margaret a different species. 
I started first grade the next year, and Margaret and I were at the same school for the first and only time in our lives. My memories of the fifth grade version of my sister play back in variations on the theme of her not fitting in: girls in groups collectively turning their backs and boys taunting. I remember hearing her crying in the bathroom between our bedrooms for days because a boy kicked her in the crotch on the playground. 
Junior high marked the start of Margaret’s tomboy phase. She was the only one sent home from music camp because she couldn’t get along with the other kids. A year later she got a perm, but the crying remained constant, ever accompanied by the question, “Why don’t they like me?” She spent high school alone with books and black-and-white movies. During her early college years, Margaret cooked a lot of insubstantial and tasteless meals in support of seemingly endless diets. She woke up at 5:00 am to go running in search of the ever-elusive, skinnier version of herself. When she was twenty-one she called me sobbing because her first love had stolen her money and pawned all of her CDs. Twenty-two was marked by self-inflicted cuts tracking her arm.

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