Speaking of Tamra, she’s wearing a baseball hat with a logo that looks like bleeding Chanel and I really don’t know where this woman shops but I am convinced that somewhere in southern California is a small boutique that only carries tank tops that have been bedazzled with crucifixes and stupid expressions written out in metallic glitter and everything is available in hot pink and the owner secretly hates Tamra and actually only has the store so that Tamra will come in and buy everything that’s being worn by one of the plastic models in the window and the whole thing is really just a strategic and very cruel long con that was devised by someone Tamra wronged along her very bumpy path. The only other option is that Tamra actually likes the horrible things that she wears and that possibility is really far too terrifying for me to even consider.
Since Vicki and Shannon are down for the count, it’s only Tamra, Heather, Lizzie, and Meghan who are going scuba diving and that means that for a minute I thought the trip would be a really nice time since nobody getting on that boat is a total assh*le, but then I remembered that Tamra is kind of an assh*le, though there was a bit of hope that maybe without her assh*le comrades that she’d take the morning off and just be kind. Please excuse me while I slap myself silly for even contemplating such a scenario, as Tamra and Meghan aren’t alone on that boat for two minutes before Tamra brings up that people were talking about Meghan last night and how it’s weird that Heather is friends with both Meghan and Meghan’s husband’s most recent ex-wife and how that’s got to be some weird kind of conflict of interest and Meghan allows that Jim’s second wife is “a very unhappy person,” and there’s obviously a story there and I hope that nobody is shocked that Tamra – so comfortable with sh*t of all kinds – wants to go excavating through this bullsh*t so she can somehow put Meghan on the spot. It was all so unnecessary and annoying enough to me that I kind of wished that the boat motored away leaving Tamra floating in the middle of the ocean. Now, everybody needs to calm down! I did not suggest that she be dragged to the ocean floor and left there, just that she be forced to try to make friends with a colony of fish who would probably find her clothing too bright but perhaps a mermaid who has always dreamed of having hair as cascading and beautiful as The Hottest Grandmother in Orange County’s would swim up and save her and they could be friends for evermore and live together beneath the sea and Tamra could teach the mermaid how to bedazzle coral and North America would be down one less dipsh*t.
On another shore, Vicki and Shannon sit together in the sun and they immediately order beer and vodka because, hungover or not, neither seems quite willing to deal with a day while sober, and it’s after the drinks come that Shannon reveals that David’s affair went on for a very long time. Now listen, I’m not made of stone (or even of that unfortunate-looking brown stucco that covers Vicki’s sprawling home) and that means that watching a tear drip down Shannon’s cheek as she speaks of the very worst days of her life does impact me. It’s truly sad watching somebody so destroyed, especially someone who appears to still be relatively gutted while desperately maintaining that things are getting better, and I’ll even concede that Vicki is being kind to Shannon during her turmoil. However, I guess there’s just a large part of me that will never be able or willing to understand why Shannon is not working around the clock on her own personal betterment and trying to improve her fractured family dynamic instead of making what I see as the very odd choice to discuss deeply private matters on a beach with cameras aimed at her face even as she’s entirely aware that she will ultimately have absolutely no power over how her emotions are edited and then brandished to a world that includes her own children. I mean, I’m sure that she and her mildly catatonic husband will insist that being on this show allowed them to improve their relationship, but nothing shown so far this season (or last) could really be used as any sort of evidence to support such a claim, though I guess that’s what the nine-part reunion will be for. Still, watching this portion of the show as an adult who was once a child of divorce makes me insanely uncomfortable because there is really no need for the children of this couple to know every single thing that went down during the partial destruction of their parents’ marriage and what they probably have already been sadly privy to is, in my opinion, more than enough. Going back to politics for a second, I was recently watching the debate to decide which candidate I hated the least and I was texting with a friend of mine during commercials and at one point he wrote, “All these guys left their souls at the door.” It was a comment I saw as so astute that I told him then and there that I was stealing it from him and that I’d work it into a piece of writing – though I had no idea it would eventually land in a Real Housewives recap – but I think what we’re all watching this season is a woman and a man who, without intending it or allowing themselves to fully realize it, have left their souls at some door and it’s not even their door and neither one has any idea of which door they dropped all their sh*t off at and Shannon will never remember because she was hammered when she was outside of that door and now it appears almost too late for either of them to possibly reclaim anything that’s been lost.
But you know what? Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it’s not a big deal at all that Shannon discloses to the world at large that David’s affair lasted for eight months and that the woman he cheated on her with went out of her way to befriend Shannon while peppering her with frequent questions about the state of a marriage that was in a hellish free-fall. Maybe Shannon is correct when she keeps saying that one day she will be able to declare that her husband betraying her was the single best thing that could have possibly happened to their relationship because of how good it is now, though again, does anybody with sight actually look at these two people interacting onscreen and point at the television set and wish upon a star or the blinking lights of a passing airplane that one day happiness such as theirs will befall you too?
I suppose the bright spot of the Shannon/Vicki scene is that Shannon makes it really clear that Vicki has been a good and loyal friend to her – and I’ll try to keep that in the back of my mind later on when she once again attacks Meghan for saying that she wishes that her step-children were her actual children, a remark that I just think has been blown up from something that was stated poorly and has been seized upon and turned into stone-cold fact by a few women who cannot stand a new girl entering their rarified atmosphere.
Dinner is served at the hotel and it starts off relatively calmly in spite of the fire-eaters across the way. Tamra, of course, plays her own perverted game of I-Spy as she looks for dangling penises on the male fire-eaters and I’m not sure if I should blame the boat captain from today or the other women she was hanging out with, but I would like to launch a formal investigation as to why that woman is not still in the water somewhere searching for the c*ck on some dolphin. At any rate, when Vicki and Shannon are asked if they missed the others while they were off scuba diving, Vicki quickly answers “no” and Tamra follows up by asking the kind of question one always poses to a good friend: “Did you talk about us?” But as Vicki is really pretending to be a good friend these days and Shannon was (quite fairly) talking mostly about herself, the answer to that question is “no” as well and all appears to be calm until Meghan asks if they were talking about her the night before. It’s a question that I suppose is acceptable, but it’s also a question that really doesn’t f*cking matter. I mean, why does it matter that people who clearly don’t care for you and have done very little to hide such a thing are talking sh*t about you? Who cares? But Meghan is still in an inaugural season kind of mode where she wants everything lobbed directly to her face – amateur! – and so Tamra says that they did talk about the whole stepmom thing and Vicki jumps in to once again to say that Meghan is being disrespectful in the way she speaks about kids that were not grown in her very own uterus, to which Meghan calmly explains what she meant and that was that. Wait…that was not that? There’s f*cking more? Why yes there is, because it turns out that Tamra was not only recently enhanced with huge t*ts but also with the ability to only spout the truth, so it’s time to lay it all on the table – literally – about how messed up Shannon says it is that Heather can deign to be friends with two women who have both had the blessing of being betrothed to a man like Jim Edmonds. Personally, I think those women should all band together and form a support group that can meet in one of the vast wings in Heather’s new house, but maybe that’s just wishful thinking, though there is a seventy percent shot that Edmond’s Onetime Wives will premiere on Bravo by the spring of 2016.
And how does Heather feel about Shannon being negative about her being friends with both women? She doesn’t really appreciate it and she tells Shannon exactly how she feels and then Shannon turns to Tamra to berate her for telling Heather any of what they talked about in the first place, but Tamra is so committed to not being caught in a lie anymore that she will out any woman she ever has a conversation with. Down shots with her at your own peril, ladies, because the Girl Code that Shannon feels so strongly about is a set of rules Tamra has never heard because she was taking a sh*t in a bathroom while they were chiseled in marble and voted into law.