Amanda is finding out that her strategy to shutdown confrontation won’t work on these housewives.
Photo: Bravo
This week on our favorite television program, Rich Women Doing Things, the rich women did things! They had their Uber driver carry two huge cakes into a restaurant while they tottered beside him in giant heels, carrying only an unclasped handbag. They sat in their living room, covered in oversize portraits of their sons, and wondered just why their divorce filing was getting so many headlines. Was it a slow news day? They said that the road to heaven is paved with good intentions, when it is clearly the road to hell, and then they questioned why anyone would pave the road to hell. No one reminded them that, until they get a camel through the eye of a needle, they all are going to hell, so it’s probably paved so that it will be easier to lurch down there on their high heels.
However, mostly, the rich women do nothing but talk about Amanda Frances, the newest among them. They might not have to wait the contractually obligated five episodes to judge Amanda like the rest of us, but the reviews from the other ladies are finally rolling in and, whoosh, they are not good. They mostly boil down to “OMG, WTF are we gonna do about this B?” The first, and my favorite, conversation about her comes from Rachel and Erika. Rachel says Dorit brought up her complaints about Amanda talking about her marriage, and Rachel seemed excited for them to get into it. Then, when Amanda mentioned it was the anniversary of her son’s death, “I just went dark.” Yes, Rachel. So did we. You are all of us, but better dressed, skinnier, richer, with better hair, a nicer house, and a worse ex-husband’s girlfriend to deal with — but still just like us. Erika defends Dorit while also coming for Amanda, saying that Amanda has told them a lot about her business and her accolades but hasn’t shared anything more personal. How was Dorit to know?
The best part, though, is when Rachel asks if it’s annoying when you’re in a close space with someone and they take a loud phone call. Rachel is, of course, referring to when she and Erika were stuck in the back of a car with Amanda in Sedona, while she droned on to some lackey about her maybe-or-maybe-not website launch. Erika’s short answer is, “Yes, it’s annoying,” an answer we saw in real time as she went cross-eyed in the back seat of that Suburban. Erika then adds that it’s performative, that she wants them to think that her business is so huge and successful. Rachel adds that everything about her is performative and, with that, the full indictment is in.
We get a different take when Boz has lunch with Dorit, Kyle, and her best friend, Summer, who is just happy to be there and has some stories to share. She was a stay-at-home mom whose husband worked in JAG in Oklahoma. You know, like the old Mark Harmon show. Summer sat in the house, baking in the hot prairie sun and trying to swat conservativism out of her face like it’s a fly infestation, and each day her life grew sadder as she imagined, who knows, a heist, a grift, a handsome stranger to whisk her away from everything, a lottery win, a bank robbery, just anything with more excitement than another trip to Hobby Lobby or a Costco run to get her husband’s tube socks. Wait. Sorry. I got mired in the quiet desperation.
When Dorit recounts the event to Boz, who wasn’t at the dinner, she says she never would have brought it up if she had known about the anniversary. However, after she apologized, it seemed Amanda was continuing the conversation, so she went with it. I still think that Dorit was a little revved up, like Lightning McQueen on too much pre-workout, but, yes, Amanda did keep it going. Boz, naturally, has the sanest and best take on the situation. She says that she lost a baby, too, and then adds, “There is a very stark difference between ‘I want to share this with you because this is what I’m feeling,’ and like someone is trying to address something with you and you try to throw it up.” She says Amanda was trying to block Dorit, like she guards information and then uses it as currency, which is exactly what she seemed to do in this instance. After that, Dorit says she looked up Amanda’s book and found an article Amanda wrote about being in a cult. Basically, Dorit said, “Oh, sister. You want to play Housewives? Let’s play some motherfucking Housewives!”
Amanda, naturally, has a very different take on the whole matter. When she meets Kyle for an impromptu shopping trip, Amanda says that she had a physiological response to the dinner, that she couldn’t sleep, and her heart was racing. She says her body experienced it like an attack. Okay, calm down. When Brandi Glanville accuses you of doing crystal meth in the bathroom, or Lisa Rinna asks if you were doing coke in your bathroom, or, really, anyone else brings up anything about a bathroom, then maybe we can start using the A word, but as of right now, that was nothing.
However, Amanda is a bit right. Dorit continued to pursue her after she indicated she wanted to stop for personal reasons, and that’s not cool. She says Dorit was aggressive, which, based on her tone and her line of questioning, I could see how you could interpret it that way. Still, I can’t entirely defend Amanda. She tells Kyle that when she told Dorit about the anniversary, “those are words that should stop anyone in their tracks.” That’s the problem. To Boz’s point, that is what they are designed to do, and that is the antithesis of what it’s like being on this show.
Amanda also loses me when she says that Dorit would have been inappropriate whether it was the anniversary or not. She thinks that Dorit should have just asked her a question rather than attacking her. But didn’t Dorit ask a question? It was a pointed question, for sure, but it’s not like Dorit yelled and screamed at her. Kyle says that Amanda is going to need thicker skin to be in this group, and she is absolutely correct. I just wish Kyle would have said that in the moment, told Amanda what the job entails and that she needs to confront these things if she ever wants to find the reality success she, as of yet, only manifested. But Kyle did not. She just nodded and agreed and waited until she was wearing one of Shane from The L Word’s old costumes in her confessional to do her sniping.
The whole episode works up to Dorit and Amanda’s confrontation at Dorit and Erika’s birthday dinner. And then just as it gets good, the episode ends with a big fat, “To Be Continued.” What is this? An edging tutorial? When Dorit broaches the subject, Amanda asks if she wants to go talk about it somewhere privately. Again, this is not the assignment. The assignment is to sit there and talk about it in public and possibly embarrass yourself by getting into a verbal confrontation in front of a restaurant of otherwise uninterested bystanders. Amanda then says she needs to be able to go to a dinner party without being “verbally accosted.” When Dorit and others express surprise at her use of words, she then looks up the definition of accosted, which isn’t even a junior varsity way of arguing on Housewives. It’s not even making the team. It’s gonna be such a delight watching Dorit mop the floor with her in the next episode.
But before we leave, we need to talk about a few scenes about the world’s slowest-moving divorce. When Kyle has lunch with Dorit, Boz, and the mysterious Summer, who I need to know much more about, they talk about Mauricio. Who walks in right as they’re gizzard-deep in talking about him, but the man himself, wearing a blingy ornamental dog tag like he got dressed from the International Male catalogue. It is a crazy jump scare, but totally worth it for Dorit to ask Mo if he’s ever considered filing for divorce from Kyle. He says “no,” which is seriously interesting intel. Kyle says she thought about it because he made her mad a few times, which is so very Kyle.
Then Dorit says she’d like to have a chat with Mo so she can talk about her divorce from PK, a jellied eel stuffed with rancid eggs and shat out by a dying orca. She wants to share her perspective, and Mo says he will listen to her for as long as she wants and won’t respond or judge her. Listen to her? For as long as she wants? Without judging her? He just gave Dorit a spontaneous orgasm. She’s so excited that the L.A. River just flooded. This is all Dorit has ever wanted from a man, and I hope that Mo has cleared the next 17 centuries in his calendar for this discussion.
Even more interesting to me is Kyle talking about how she’s considering filing, because it seems really over. She says the last time they traveled as a family, she felt like he didn’t see her. Those old feelings are gone. She didn’t even feel like a friend, she just felt like, I don’t know, like the best friend from Oklahoma just peeking in for the weekend. That’s why it is curious when Kyle and Mo meet Amanda and her fiancé, Eddie, at their house, which is Kyle and Mo’s old house, to see how they have desecrated the work of one of our finest living interior designers, the morally corrupt Faye Resnick.
They clatter around the house, looking at how Amanda has blenderized their former kitchen, study, office, hallway, and old primary bedroom. Kyle looks at the closet that Portia was obsessed with and the desk where she once called and invited other Housewives to her birthday party. There’s flashbacks like spectral memories. Lisa Vanderpump and Ken Todd, a ghost then as he is now, walking into the house with a llama. Kyle and Mauricio lounging on a pool float at one of her White Parties. The good old times, the happiness.
Kyle finally loses it. She thinks that if she never left this house, maybe they would still be together. She thinks that she can hold onto that happiness, that she can press it in her hands like a limp-winged butterfly, that she can contain this fragile thing that wants to be free. But time doesn’t work like that, people don’t work like that, houses don’t work like that. It wasn’t the moving of locations that did them in, it was the moving of everything else: human lives, bodies, clocks, the flow of power from husband to wife and back again, a circuit that can stay connected only under the most difficult of circumstances, both of them flowing in tandem like two twigs floating in a stream touching and retouching, sometimes entirely together, sometimes on top of each other, but never far, almost drowning in their love. But the water gets rough, the times get rougher, and eventually one twig falls in love with a country star and the other makes out with skanks on the sidewalk. It’s hard to stay together, but Kyle should remember that she’ll always have those moments, she’ll always have this man, she’ll always have this house, but only if she can let them all go.
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