Over at the hotel, the women are impressed by how beautiful it all is and they wait for the arrival of the husbands so they can be told how beautiful they all are. It should all be idyllic in as far as anything can be when you’re being followed around by a camera crew who has every intention of capturing your very worst moments in high definition, but there’s a problem on the grape-covered horizon and I’m sure we’re all shocked – shocked! – that it’s David and Shannon who are having the issue. I know! How did the couple’s therapy with the cardboard tombstones and the practice eulogies not solve everything? Turns out that Shannon – a woman who carries around hangover pills in her purse, a woman who arrives at a party for a new line of alcohol and instead heads straight to the bar and requests a syringe filled with straight vodka – is annoyed that David stopped on the way to Napa to have lunch and drink some shots of sake. As the rest of the happy couples stand and and wait for them so they can all pile on the party bus and head to the event, Shannon and David take a painfully slow ride on the back of a golf cart and it’s like watching a journey straight into the bowels of a certain kind of hell where the only alcohol served is that which was invented by Housewives. Watching this bumpy ride towards misery makes me realize several things:
1. It’s about time for me to reread Dante so I can review the seven circles of hell because I have a feeling that this season of the OC Housewives is going to feel like a ride to hell in the back of a station wagon with no air conditioning and I like to be educated about the places I’m going to visit.
2. Maybe it’s shit like this that explains why Tamra recently decided that ending up in heaven is an absolute must.
3. Shannon and David really stand very little of a chance of ever having a happy marriage. Will they end up a statistic in the pie chart of divorce? Maybe not, but they will probably never be happy.
See, it’s how they communicate that’s the secondary issue here. (The primary issue is that Shannon is very definitely insane.) On that golf cart, David mumbles that he did nothing wrong today – his argument might have greater resonance if he didn’t finish with the word “today” – and Shannon replies that he has the power with the choices he’s making right now, and the choice she is talking about was him choosing to drink some sake. This strikes me like a hammer blow on the temple as a let-go-of-the-small-stuff moment. There are bigger and far more miserable fish to fly, but everything brings her back to the affair, even sake, and that’s why pretending you are a person who is able to reconcile – you know, to legitimately forgive and forget – when you absolutely cannot do either one is a slippery slope made entirely out of sh*t and she’s about to tumble down it right on camera.
At the party, David says something to Eddie and it’s too quiet for Shannon to have heard him and he refuses to do an interpretive dance to indicate what his words might have been, so Shannon does what any wife would after intensive therapy that ended with her on her husband’s lap, declaring she had forgiven him for his past indiscretions. She hisses, “What did you say to him?” about three times in a row and I’m officially concerned now for the physical wellbeing of every single person at that party – and that’s before Heather sabers open the bottle of sparkling wine with a hatchet.
Tamra’s in a great mood at the party! She is wearing a pink fur shrug that looks like it came from a gerbil who used to strip in Vegas and she gets to show off her enormous new breasts and she and Heather yell into a speakerphone to Vicki that they miss her and it all could not be going better for Tamra. Even she and Shannon are getting along – and I’m sure it has nothing to do with the fact that they are all drunk and you’re a bitch for even thinking such a thing. Shannon too is in rare form at the party, and by “rare form,” I mean that she’s not crying. She accompanies her former pretend nemesis Meghan to the bathroom and doesn’t decapitate Tamra who keeps knocking on the door while Shannon is in there and even Tamra deals with what last year would have turned into a humongous and nonsensical conflict with humor because now Tamra knows that if God had really wanted her to pee right then, he wouldn’t have presented her with a locked bathroom door.
In the one percenter’s corner of the room, Heather explains to Terry that the cabinets in their new home are over budget. How far over budget? Well, take the national debt of Spain and then multiply it by seven. Terry takes the news well and he has himself another sip of the sparkling wine and he looks up briefly to thank the heavens that women will always bend to societal pressure to look as perfect as is humanly and surgically possible so he can provide all of the cabinets his family might ever require.
On the other side of the room, Meghan wants to make sure that Shannon is okay with her and she brings up the time when Shannon’s eyes spit fire mixed with hazardous chemicals because her husband deigned to look at another woman, and Shannon tells her that Meghan was not the issue. The issue was that David never drinks and he did that day and then he didn’t introduce her to a woman he was standing next to and Meghan smiles thinly and backs the f*ck away, which is where she should have stayed, but we’ll get to her misstep in a moment.
First there’s a winery with sex dolls to visit! The entire group takes the bus to the vineyard and the owner allows them to taste the wine straight from the barrels. Heather allows the guy to use the long instrument that extracts the wine and then waits for him to pour it into a glass before she takes a sip, but Tamra insists that she suck off the instrument and she puts it directly into her mouth and then wipes the corners of her lips like she just blew a guy covertly in a basement. Meghan follows Tamra’s lead and Tamra now really likes Meghan in much the same way she likes Lizzie after their anal sex bonding session.
Tamra is just extremely classy and such a girl’s girl. She’d never betray you – said nobody ever.
On the last night in Napa, the group attends a dinner at a home that has a pizza oven – and that means that I’d like to live there – and Heather makes yet another toast about her love of bubbles and it’s all silly and light and then Shannon basically throws up all over the festivities and the vomit is chunky and impossible to dry clean. I think that Meghan should have just left it all alone now that Shannon has tossed away the maps she had been carrying of places to bury Meghan’s body, but Meghan calmly explains that she was offended when she called Shannon to ask about the appetizers for the charity and Shannon was so dismissive of her on the phone. Bad move, Meghan. Only normal people can hear an honest statement and explain or apologize or calmly disagree.
Shannon is not normal.
Shannon was annoyed that Meghan didn’t use her married name when she called her. Shannon is furious that Meghan contacted her on a cell phone that has a number so private, even her army of therapists and homeopaths don’t know the number. Shannon cannot believe Meghan called her when her children were in the car with her. Shannon can hardly think straight through the rage that boils within her like her entire body is a cauldron when Meghan talks about how she’s just trying to do something for charity, but she finally regains her strength and stands up and announces, “I start charities, Meghan!” and then she walks away, refusing to deal with being attacked by the woman who didn’t raise her voice even once.
Thank goodness the rest of her life is brimming with such joy or I’d really be concerned for Shannon’s wellbeing.
Next week, Brooks discusses getting an enema and I have scheduled myself an appointment to get my stomach pumped just in case.
Nell Kalter teaches Film and Media at a school in New York. She is the author of the books THAT YEAR and STUDENT, both available on amazon. Check out her website at nellkalter.com. Her twitter is @nell_kalter.