Entitled rich people think that every gosh darn thing in their lives has to be a freakin’ event. That is why Meghan and Jimmy are in their “second house” in St. Louis, cutting open a cake to see whether blue icing or pink icing is inside. I know this is a thing that people do because Pinterest and HGTV, but Meghan doesn’t even do it right. The cake is supposed to be a certain color, not the icing. This bakery gender reveal has all the legitimacy and veracity of an EPT test that you take hung-over in the plane bathroom on the way home from Vegas — any slight jump or jostle and the whole thing will be misread and your life ruined forever.
As stupid as I think it is for people to find out such a thing via cake icing, I can kind of see how it’s a fun way to reveal which set of sex organs your unborn child is going to have. You know, back in the day, instead of the answer coming out of a cake, it came out of a woman’s uterus and instead of seeing blue icing you saw an actual baby wiener and then everyone was like, “Surprise,” and you didn’t even get cake. What really annoyed me about Jimmy and Meghan was that this wasn’t at a baby shower or a family gathering or anything. It was just a Sunday and pregnant Meghan decided she wanted cake so they had this whole elaborate plan so that she could eat some sugary goodness. God, if I had to go through this every time I wanted cake, I’d have to find a lot of orphanages.
While we’re talking about Meghan’s fetus, there is something else I’d like to mention. When she is at Tamra’s Fatty Fatty Two by Four party and she tells Vicki the name she’s considering for her daughter, does she say “Callow” or “Tallow?” Either way, that is the third-worst name for a human female following Anna-Kat, the name of the daughter on American Housewife, and Adora Borealis, the name of the daughter of Rachel Reilly and Brendon Villegas from Big Brother.
“Callow” literally means an inexperienced young person, so that would be the literal definition of a baby, but what about when Meghan’s daughter is 90? Will she still want to be Callow? And what even is Tallow? It sounds like an app that you would download to help organize your finances and then use exactly once before deleting it ten months later when you need more space on your phone to take a video of your friend’s new puppy falling over in the park.
But I can’t even with Meghan and her baby anymore, I’m sorry. When she was all, “I wish I could give Jimmy a boy,” it made me want a goat to rip out my armpit hair with its teeth because Meghan just thinks that a boy would make Jimmy excited to have a kid and that is never going to happen. Then we learn she’s trying to talk him into having another one. Sister, do not press your luck. You are lucky you even got him to agree to this one. You push him much harder on the second and he will personally go and leave his one remaining viable sperm sample out in the sun for 20 minutes just so you can never get your grubby vagina paws on it.
Now, I guess we need to talk about Tamra’s Fatty Boombalatty party. First of all, I have never wanted to go to a Real Housewives party more than I have wanted to go to this one. Screw the Posche fashion show, screw Kyle Richards’s white party, screw the Chateau Sheree housewarming shindig — I would like to go to a party that is filled with greasy hamburgers, toppling doughnut cakes, disgustingly sinful desserts, one random fight to keep the onlookers entertained, and whatever product it is that Eddie Judge puts in his hair.
As for the outfits, it is adorable that Tamra changes her whole look just so she can wear the new Louboutins that Eddie bought her for winning her competition. That is such a sweet gesture (but really not one that will dispel any of those gay rumors). Vicki looks absolutely amazing, too. Her hair is perfect and her dress is amazing. Everything is on point. She is like a perfectly caramelized crème brûlée looking all shiny and inviting, but when you crack the crispy top, noxious swamp gas comes pouring out and you suffocate and die.
I love that Kelly Dodd, a car alarm that never stops going off, has a dress with an adjustable cleavage zipper, which is the sine qua non of Kelly Dodd attire. Given the option of how much of her bosom she wants dangling out of her dress, she’s always going to make them look like a dozen Krispy Kremes trapped in tiny ziplock bag. My boyfriend and I had to break up over a disagreement regarding the chicness of Heather Dubrow’s asymmetrical chain belt because, honestly, I can not share a tube of toothpaste with a human who thinks that is acceptable attire outside of a gay man’s Madonna-themed 40th-birthday party.
The big loser of the night, however, is Meghan. Why did she have my kombucha brewer’s man-bun piled high on the middle of her head? It looks like she had some sort of hirsute formation popping out of her cranium like a mutant cave beast or something. Man, it is bad.
I’m spending so much time on the outfits because, well, I don’t want to talk about these stupid fights again. I feel like we’re just arguing about the same thing over and over again. Vicki and Kelly are awful people and everyone hates them and doesn’t want to be friends with them. They are absolutely horrible. Vicki is the kind of person who will insist that she be invited to a party, and then, when she isn’t made to feel welcome, tell the hostess that if she didn’t want her at the party she shouldn’t have invited her. God, Vicki makes me madder than my co-worker Marty who always takes the last slice of pizza and then leaves the empty box on the break-room table making me think that there’s still a piece left and I open it up and all that’s left is some congealed cheese stuck to the bottom of the box.
Kelly is especially bad, starting to apologize to everyone for the way she behaved in Ireland but, as always, ruining what she has to say with her behavior, as she turns on Heather as an “interloper” and undermines her nice moment with animosity. It’s like serving someone a shot of really nice Scotch and then giving them a vial of antifreeze as a chaser.
Heather is no angel, either. She tells Vicki, “Don’t move,” as she tries to walk away from the fight like she’s the moral crossing guard of the entire universe or some nonsense. God, I just want to take these scenes and shove Heather’s nose in them and say, “Look what you did,” like she’s a puppy that just pooped on a throw pillow.
Then there’s Shannon. Oh, I love me some Shannon, but God is she exasperating. She accuses Vicki of telling lies and putting these falsities out there, but her husband, David, did plead guilty to “battery against a cohabitant” and without her to explain what exactly that means, it sure looks bad. Maybe she’s just as truthful as Vicki.
And Tamra, that long-suffering, spray-tanned garden slug. Is she any better? She was pretty mellow this season, but for all of her Christianity, she can’t seem to forgive Vicki. She can’t forgive anyone. She tries to pretend like she’s all kindness and light, but when the argument gets difficult, she reverts to petty name-calling just like the rest of them.
At this point, Brianna was barely tuned in. She tried to call an accord, just like she had so many times before, but Vicki wouldn’t even apologize and Tamra would never forgive. They were like two fighters on Dragonball Z, hurling bright streams of energy in the universe that wouldn’t allow one to defeat the other, just keeping the two parties at a perpetual standstill, at perpetual distance.
Vicki wouldn’t stop talking and searching around in her purse for something, no one was sure what — even Vicki. Brianna was fooling around with her phone and then she saw it, the email she had been waiting for. She clicked on it with her thumb and read each word carefully, even as they were crowded out by her mother’s voice. Then, while Vicki was in mid-sentence, Brianna looked her dead in the eye and said, “I have lupus.”
The noise started again and so did Brianna’s instinct to turn it all into loud fuzz as she looked out the tinted window and saw the night sky made blacker, the streetlights turned into a dull haze, like a bug-slicked lightbulb on the back porch in the summertime. She looked out, past all the houses, out into the sky, and wondered how the world could be both so large and so small at the same time, like a doughnut tower always threatening to fall, like a cake with unsure icing, like the zipper dividing the bust line, waiting to be unzipped and have hope spring out of it, like a firefly batting its head against a mason jar.