There is a small moment in this finale that will be enshrined in the Real Housewives Institute and played on a loop forever against an alabaster wall in the Kelly Killoren Bensimon Memorial Atrium. No, it is not St. Camille of Grammer throwing caution and propriety to the wind and twirling on the dance floor with the Sisters Richards after everyone left the party at Kyle’s house. But it was close.
The best moment is when Lisa Vanderpump is ready to leave the party and Kyle tells her to say something nice to the Morally Corrupt Faye Resnick on her way out. “Goodnight Faye,†Lisa says, in a voice that is usually reserved for the disinterested concern you give to someone after bumping into him and asking if he’s okay. “I’m sorry I’ve been rude to you in the past,†she says, with the sincerity of Anthony Weiner telling the world that his phone had been hacked. It is an absolutely genius display of I don’t know what. I will be so happy to arrive at the Institute every morning and walk by it. I will be so glad that when I go home at night I can say, along with Lisa, “Goodnight Faye,†and barely mean it.
Of course, Faye and Kyle take the path of least resistance. They just take Lisa at face value and say how great it is that Lisa finally apologized, as if the road ahead will be paved with the golden foil from a million Werther’s Originals and butterflies will skip off Faye’s remarkable bosoms, which have been held aloft much more firmly than her reputation.
All of this is to say that I can’t talk about the fight between Lisa, Lisar, and Cult Jam (in this instance, Cult Jam is both reality and the laws of physics). Yolanda, who finally put on some makeup and did her hair, spends most of Kyle’s party trying to figure out exactly why everyone is fighting. Erika tells her that they aren’t even fighting about whether or not she has Munchausen syndrome anymore; they are just fighting about who said it first. That is the only accurate description that I have heard of this fight and it shows just how little substance there is to it. They’re not fighting about the meat of the issue — just whether or not it was slaughtered within the codes of kosher conduct.
In the end, none of it really matters because they are fighting about nothing. When you’re trying to catch the vapors of a spring morning in a jar, you’re going to end up with crushed grasshoppers under your feet. I have no idea what that means, I just made it up. But it sounds profound, so I guess it basically means: Shut the fuck up everyone because this fight is dumb and it makes no sense.
Here is an enumerated list of things that I would rather talk about:
- Lisa’s giant black cuff, which looks like something a very femme Cyclops would wear as a cock ring. Â
- Eileen explaining the fight between Lisa and Lisar to her husband, Vinny. When she asks him if he understands, his mouth says, “Yes,†but the look on his face says, “Is it really gross that I got turned on by Gigi Hadid on the cover of a Victoria’s Secret catalog?â€
- The worker at the Parker in Palm Springs, who has to wear that blazer in a highlighter shade of magenta. Each of the women complimented him on it and he thanked all of them the same way a bored go-go boy does after you tell him what a firm ass he has. He quit that job that very afternoon and got hired at the Denny’s downtown.
- Kyle’s house is in a place called La Quinta, which is named after the crappy hotel chain. My father likes to say that La Quinta is Spanish for “behind the Target.†That is his best joke.
- How good does Kim Richards look in a jumpsuit? Really good. Don’t you love how she told Ken that she was living in Westwood? What she really meant to say was that Westwood is her name for two shopping carts turned upside-down and covered by a tarp beneath an overpass in Tarzana. Also, doesn’t Kim seem like she spent half the party wondering where she was exactly?
- When Lisa and Eileen have lunch together, there is a pizza sitting between them and no one eats it. It is still sitting there now, autographed by the two women and encased in plastic inside that restaurant’s lobby.
- Lisa Rinna has a lip-gloss line. Stop laughing. No seriously, stop. I’m giving it to every single person I know as a stocking stuffer this year. The only stocking stuffer I want is Kathryn’s husband, Donnie.
- Kyle’s horn-rimmed glasses!
- Yolanda wore the same red dress in her interview all season that she wore to Kyle’s party. Isn’t that breaking some rule of the Housewives universe? Isn’t that like Ghostbusters crossing streams, feeding a Gremlin after midnight, or saying Brandi Glanville’s name three times in a row?
- The Young & The Restless would be stupid not to cast Erika Jaynerardi, because I would start watching that show just for her. Also, where can I see her new music video? I’ve been Googling that shit for a week and I still can’t find it on YouTube. Not making it publicly available is some sort of hate crime against gays.
- Lisar is totally right about Kim Richards. Nothing has really changed from last year. She sits down and tells Lisar that she is all better now and anyone who questions her is being a jerk, when we all know that she has been arrested multiple times, is having a hard time dealing with her family, and her sobriety is as tentative as ever. Sure, she might be dry, but there is no way that she’s recovered. I hate that Lisar tells people to “own it†as often as Donald Trump looks at his fingers, but Kim really does need to own it.
- What the hell is that crazy silver space suit that Yolanda Bananas Hadid wears while she is FaceTime-ing with Gigi? How are we supposed to take her “journey†seriously when she looks like the robot from Lost in Space with her tiny hands sticking out of this giant mylar bag connected to all of these bizarre machines?
And that leads us right back to Yolanda, who is getting a divorce from David Foster (Wallace), which should come as a shock to no one since this man goes through marriages like Erika Jaynerardi goes through Swarovski vajazzles. It was never going to last and I am sad for Yolanda, of course, but I think it’s for the best that she is no longer cozying up to one of those creatures from V that could pull off its skin mask at any moment to reveal the nefarious reptile beneath.
Like Kyle said, we will have no idea if Yolanda’s health issues ruined her marriage or if her marriage issues ruined her health. It’s all one in the same, a toxic punch created with organic lemons, residual resentment, and the stiff spray of the Malibu surfside. It’s all of those forgotten things for Yolanda, crammed inside her second condo far away from the sunshine and the citrus grove. The day after she got the news of the divorce, she was on her new couch curled up into a ball with her head tucked under a puffy grey blanket. She couldn’t turn the vaporizer up high enough as it spilled its mist into the air. She thought about those little droplets going inside of her as she breathed, like little cleansing bubbles getting rid of whatever rot and ruin clogged her cells.
Would that even work? she wondered. Does any of it work? Any of the balms and salves she’s been running around the world collecting, the rows and rows of pills and supplements, the holistic living and the extrication of everything foreign from inside of her body? Maybe it was something outside of her that needed to be cut off. Maybe there was something that needed to be added, like a capsule of quiet around her body that she could grow into. Plants need water and food, but they also need sunlight, something that doesn’t even seem like it’s there until it isn’t.
As if she had finally gotten that booger that eluded the tip of her finger, or sucked that seed out of the crevice between her teeth, something finally freed up inside Yolanda as she kept thinking. She sat up in her living room and looked around. It was silent in a way that takes up so much space. She convinced herself she heard a noise, like a key in a lock. “Hello?†she said out into the empty room, as much with her mind as her voice. “David?†she said as the vaporizer ran out of water and just started humming as it gnawed on the invisible flesh of a ghost.