Real Housewives of Orange County Recap – 7/6/15

Over at Vicki’s house, the health coach arrives. She is ready to get Brooks off of any solid foods that involve chewing and to encourage him to lie in the middle of a forest and to have coffee shot right up his ass – and the truth is that if any of this could help when a man’s body is riddled with something terrible like cancer, why not try everything? That said, my support for Brooks’ health plan might have managed to put me off coffee forever. And someone needs to be punished for that.

I’d suggest that Shannon be the one who is punished for the fact that I wake up at dawn and now I can’t even have coffee because it is irrevocably linked in my mind with Brooks’ rectum, but Shannon is kind of being punished and punishing herself enough these days and I’m a girl who knows how to show restraint. I can’t heap anything else on top of this woman who is already floundering, and – in case it wasn’t clear that she is a jumble of nerves threatening to blow – her reaction when her husband tells her that he ran into that woman on the beach is to go momentarily catatonic in her own kitchen. Now, she thought David was speaking of the woman he had the affair with (my guess is that she’s thirty), but he was just shakily telling an anecdote to his wife about someone else. Both David and Shannon look terrified of the other. They’re afraid to hurt one another and they are desperate in the moment to show that they themselves are not hurting at all. It’s not really a fun dynamic in that house and I cannot imagine that the ever-present cameras do anything but dull reactions in that very second, but I can still say that my heart hurt a little bit for Shannon when she says, “David has promised that if he ever runs into the woman he had the affair with, he will keep walking and won’t speak to her.” Shannon’s voice is timorous at best when she says that she believes his words, but it is my sad belief that it will likely not be another woman that causes this marriage to detonate into shards of misery and lawyers; it will be Shannon, a woman who wants to move forward but doesn’t really seem capable of doing so.

Looking at best haunted, it’s time for Shannon to throw the party to play the dice game, and her home and the appetizers look great and there are festive dice all over the place so the night has a literal theme other than My World Is Collapsing Down Around Me – though that would be a pretty unique theme and it all but mandates that vodka be served in a tall glass.

First to arrive is Meghan. She compliments the house and brings Shannon a hostess gift that Shannon believes has sinister hidden motives because Shannon is crazy. Then Shannon makes sure to have put aside some bottles of wine for the charity event that Meghan has already thrown…the one that Shannon was not invited to…the one she pretends she’s over, but we all know at this point that Shannon Beador never truly gets over anything.

Tamra, Vicki, Jeana (it still freaks me out to look up and see her and her hair on my screen like it’s the mid-2000s again, but I think that maybe I’m just afraid that it’s a sign that trucker hats could return), and Heather all show up next. Heather is sporting a little hand sling since, earlier that day, she showed up at Terry’s office to simultaneously have a weird growth sliced off of her hand while appearing on his plastic surgery show. The whole thing went pretty well. Terry made a joke about whacking off, which was almost as horrible as those times he shows up at night wearing his black leather jacket, and Heather stayed aware of how her cheekbones would look in high-definition and got her hand sliced open for a day’s pay. And then, since she multitasks like a filthy rich dream, she still managed to show up to game night and made sure her sling matched her outfit.

Before the dice start rolling, there’s some mild chitchat to be had. Vicki thinks it’s a huge red flag that Meghan’s husband only spends fifty percent of his time in Orange County, though I think the red flags are not that the guy is cheating but that he keeps coming off like a huge d*ck. There’s also a flashback that’s far more upsetting than imagining Meghan as a scorned woman, and that’s to some other game night in this show’s history, one I must have blocked from my mind entirely before the faded flashback made it real again. Like someone with PTSD, all I can tell you is that I saw the images in fragments but Gretchen was there and her hair was crimped and I think I saw that human slug named Slade and the theme of that night was The 80s, and there were ripped sweatshirts and terrible headbands strapped across peoples’ foreheads and Vicki was shrieking about something in that way where at first you think that she has to be joking because nobody shrieks like that – it’s inhuman – and then you realize that neither she or the shrieking are jokes, that all of this is real, and look! Here comes the apocalypse.

When the game eventually starts and Shannon explains the rules to Meghan, the thirty year old looks like she’d rather be off rolling a blunt out of bubble wrap but she gets into the game quickly and the women are all having a fun time and that’s precisely when the most devastating thing that can ever happen to a human being occurs and it all ends up being filmed.

Getting a phone call from her daughter, Vicki excuses herself to call Briana back and finds out that her mother has suddenly died. Immediately almost collapsing to the floor, Vicki is wailing deep, guttural sobs and it is devastating to watch any person in this primal sort of pain that brings up all of our own deepest fears. And I know that this is a reality show and all, but that she was filmed instead of helped to her knees infuriates me. That this moment was recorded for posterity sickens me. There are certain lines that maybe needn’t be crossed and authentic pain at the loss of a parent should be one of them.

Vicki’s friends do in the moment the only things that friends can do: they hug her tightly and they try to soothe her tears and her screams and Heather quickly calls Brooks so that he can come over. They tell Vicki that they will be there for her. They hold her hand and simply nod when she cries out that she’s too young to have no parents. Their eyes fill with tears and terror as they realize that one day this situation will happen to each of them. They allow Vicki to say things to her brother over the phone about their mother that do not make much sense like, “Make her wake up!”

They gather around the friend before them who is broken in the way only a permanent loss can really break you and they all try to figure out how they can help put Vicki back together again.

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.