Part Two

The dying process begins the minute we are born, but it accelerates during dinner parties.
-- Carol Matthau


For most of my adult life, the standard for awkward social situations
has been a hideous weekend with a friend of D’s way back
in the late seventies – and I would have been more then happy
to keep it that way.
However, life had other plans for me, and those plans arrived a few
weeks ago in the form of one Maylene Throckton: girlfriend from hell.
My brother J (either in spite of or because of his brain injury)
has an eerie ability to attract women - women who are, in one way
or another, needy, dysfunctional and very, very strange.
In the 21 years since his accident, he has gotten quite involved with
a number of these women and - because I am his sister/mother/
life coach/counselor/warden/herd boss/legal guardian - so have I.
First there was the high school sweetheart who felt that their love would
magically bring about a miracle, and punished us all when it did not.
And the nurse who had known him before his injury; she stuck around
until she realized that having a late-life baby with a profoundly disabled
guy was probably not a workable plan.
Next came the angry 460-pound social worker and her 87-year old mother,
followed by the 18 year old in a wheel chair and her angry mother.
Beth from New Jersey actually moved in with J, after creating such misery
with her incessant outbursts and complaints that he was evicted from his
former place. She brought with her a service dog the size of a pony, a boatload
of issues related to her brain injury, and a penchant for calling her lawyer
anytime things didn’t go her way (“He’s a shark I tell ya, a New Jersey shark!”)
Following Hurricane Beth, there was a merciful drought, interrupted only briefly
by Saralee, a retired forensic pathologist involved in animal rescue.
I met her only once, and after sharing with me her passion for dogs,
she returned to the tiny home she shares with 10 of them – never to be heard from again.
Lulled by the calm that usually precedes a storm, I allowed myself to think
that J had finally had his fill; that maybe we were finished with the awful meet-
and-greets that are de rigueur once he begins another doomed affair.
And I held fast to such wishful thinking until one recent night, when he phoned
around 11 pm to tell me that he was ‘entertaining company’ again.

According to J, the story goes like this:
He met her at the library, and after lunch and some coffee, they went
to his house and spent the rest of the day in bed. She is a movie producer
and director, currently filming a thriller she wrote about the ancient
Egyptians and some deep-space aliens.
She presently lives with her sister and her niece (who she is helping to raise),
but she is looking for a big old house where she can raise her own foster daughters (2)
as well as the triplets she recently went to Canada to adopt.
Total bullshit? Uh, yeah…however, (in part because of J’s short term memory deficits)
I was willing to try and suspend my disbelief, at least until I had a chance
to speak with Maylene herself.
I did finally manage a few conversations with her, and each was weirder than
the one that came before. Her voice sounded rather babyish and she spoke
in a singsong manner that made me long to get away from the phone and
rinse out the inside of my head. She echoed the stories J had told me, adding
more fantastic details, and then she made some assertions and assumptions
regarding J that I found a bit alarming, given the brevity of their relationship.
In the end, everything she said seemed slightly off, leaving me absolutely
certain of only one thing: we had a flaming nutbag on our hands.

Last week, my husband D and I decided it was time to face the music,
so we went to see J and meet his ladylove. It was J’s birthday, so we
brought along some gifts and an offer to take them both out to dinner.
Things were scary right from the beginning.
For starters, Maylene was behind the kitchen door when D and I arrived,
and she came out very slowly, like an animal emerging from a cave.
She whispered hello and thrust a folder toward me, saying brightly in her
tinny voice, “Here, I brought a copy of my script for you.”
Then she sank into J and began nuzzling and petting and cuddling him
as though they were alone in the bleachers at the junior high.
We gave J his gifts, and she grabbed them from him, opening each one
and chirping, “Thanks, we needed this.” And when we finally got in the car
to go to dinner, she continued her strange canoodling, while simultaneously
finishing all of J’s sentences for him and regaling us with stories about
meeting celebrities. “Johnny Depp, he’ll either talk to you or he won’t.”
And “When Steven Spielberg read my script he said go for it – so I am!”
Dinner was downright ludicrous, with Maylene cutting J’s food into
little bites and continually caressing him with her pudgy, pale hands.
She sat across from me and, while she looked fairly benign (think
bloated, middle aged Mia Farrow), every once in a while I saw her
taking my measure in a feral way that left me jittery and chilled.
At one point, when Maylene was gassing on about the “huge factory
high in the Ozarks” she bought so her brother would have a job, I
leaned over to D and whispered, “Hey, remember the Silver Pear?”
He nodded, and then he whispered back,” I’d do that ten times in a
row before I’d ever do this again.”



In the days since we endured our dinner with Maylene, I’ve had time to
read her ‘script’ and ponder the claims she’s made.
And while I’ve laughed about how totally bizarre she is, I am also concerned
that she could be a danger to J.
At best she’s a whack job, needy and sad; at worst a pathological liar and con.
Her conversations are peppered with dark comments about her mother,
who she refers to in the past tense much of the time, and vague statements
about the progress of filming her movie.
To date, J has never been to her house or seen where it is.
And even though she says things like, "The triplets just LOVE J - my foster
daughters are always asking when they get to go meet him!", J says he has
never met them- or anyone else in her life.
Her script is a jumbled, pathetic mess – it looks (and reads) like a 5th graders’
rush-job report. There are misspelled words (like ‘seen’ for scene and ‘rapped’
for raped) on every page and an angry, juvenile violence that seems much more
like memory than the plot of a sci-fi flick.
Yesterday J told me that Maylene hates her mother and wouldn’t speak to her
if they passed on the street. Then he told me that they have the same name –
and a little warning flag popped up in my brain. He also told me that she is
pressuring him about marriage, and suggesting that they keep it a secret from me.
I am trying to get some dirt on her – but so far that has proved impossible.
And though I want to try and warn my brother, I have to move cautiously,
because if I even hint that I do not like her, he is likely to find her irresistible.

stay tuned.............


bs