Real Housewives of Beverly Hills: The Ghosts of Housewives Past
[There was a video here]
Because she is a complete idiot, Kyle Richards decided to have a seance last night. Doesn't she know that whenever there is a psychic around Real Housewives a black hole opens in the sky and destruction rains down on everyone? The same thing happened last night, but the terror was much more subtle.
Before we can get to the table tapping psychic we start where all things do, in Dr. Maloof's House of Horrors. Yes, Adrian's husband Paul invited all the Housewives to his torture chamber of beauty for some poking and prodding, gels and creams, nips and tucks, darkness and spinning red lights. Of course they all wanted to get some free plastic surgery because the only thing that Real Housewives love more than plastic surgery is free plastic surgery.
So, Lisa showed up and Dr. Maloof said, "I can't do anything else to this face. If I even touch it, it might shatter into a million pieces or pop like a well-stretched balloon." Then he went to Taylor and said, "Well, we can fill in some of your skullbones here, but that is more taxidermy than plastic surgery, honey." Then he went to Kyle and said, "WHOA! Fatty. Get me the Muffin Top Eradicator 3000. This is a robot from the future that feeds on your fat cells. Just sit there and let him gobble. He's going to be stuffed after this." Then he went to go talk to Kim, but Kim wasn't there yet.
Kim Richards has been moving out of her sad ranch in the valley (that is also the brand of salad dressing she once did a commercial for in her heyday, Sad Valley Ranch) for approximately seventeen weeks. Like a shark or a meth addict, Kim Richards is always moving, moving, moving. As soon as she settles in and gets all the boxes unpacked she starts filling them up again, getting ready for the next move. You'd figure that she's moved so many times she'd be a pro at it, that she would have it down to some pseudoscience. But no. Nothing for Kim Richards is easy. So the reason she is late to the Torture Chamber is because she's moving, or whatever the hell she's doing.
Dr. Maloof calls and talks to her on the phone and she's not making any sense as usual. When Kim gets there, she walks in on a confused scene because Lisa is asking Taylor why her dead husband Russell is sending her emails from beyond the grave about how great their marriage is. Taylor is all, "I can't talk about this. I have to go! Ghost Dad is on and it's my daughter's favorite movie." (Oh, too soon, Dame Moylan, too soon.)
Anyway, Kim goes off into a room with Dr. Maloof and he says, "Before we can give you the full Brazil, I need to ask you what medications you're on."
"Well, I took two Advil this morning because that's the only way to fight the headaches. I'm on Lipitor for my heart, Flomax for my bladder, and Boniva because I once did a movie with Sally Field and now I just like to support her projects. I put Latisse on my eyes and Cortizone cream on my hands to keep me from itching the invisible bugs. I ate some Activia last week, is that a medication? It tasted like it. I think that's about it."
And then Dr. Maloof said, "Are you sure?" drawing out that last word like it was an indictment.
"Oh, I'm on Trazodone, Topamax, and Lexipro, but those hardly count."
Suddenly Dr. Maloof had a sudden realization of suddenness. "That's why you look limp eyed all the time and don't make any fucking sense. You are doped up to the gills! You are so pumped full of various and assorted psychotropic drugs, sedatives, and mood enhancers that it appears that you're drunk. But you're not really drunk, you're just crazy. That explains everything!"
Kim just said thank you and braced herself to get her face shot full of fillers and diseases and had her lips pumped up a few notches. She just turned those lips up to 11. Well, they were really thin to begin with, so maybe she just turned them up to like a 7.4.
Before Kim could leave Dr. Maloof's Beauty Emporium and Sushi Bar, she had to have a fight with Kyle. Kyle asked Kim if she'd be coming to her seance. Kim says, "Oh, no. I can't. It's that the dead are too close to me. It's like the spirit world is this thin curtain and I'm just on the other side and it constantly flutters with the wind of the dead and it freaks me out, Kyle. What happens if I pull away that curtain? They might come and take me back to ghost town." And Kyle just gives her the side eye. Then Kim says, "Well, I'm moving and I have to get my housekeeper to help me clean out all the plastic dividers in my bathing suit drawer." And Lisa gives her this oh please look. Then Kim says, "OK, It's against my religion." And Kyle says, "Bitch please. You ain't got no religion. Stop being stoopit." Here's the thing Kim needs to learn—Excuses are like assholes: you can bleach them and wax them and try to make them pretty, but no one really wants to touch them. That is an axiom. It is truth for the ages.
Kyle has her party anyway, and while she's getting ready, there's a faint knock at the door, like a bundle of branches scraping against the window. It's Taylor, rapping with her willowy digits. The door just sort of creaks open and she lets herself in, like it's some sort or horror movie. She finds this crazy looking woman walking around with a ticking box. "Excuse me. Is Kyle here?" she asks. "No, but this place is full of spirits. Full of ghosts. Look! It is magnet readings. Oh, and you are haunted my child. You are haunted even now! Oh, the future holds sad and awful things for you." And then the box started ticking faster and faster until they weren't ticks anymore but a dull hum and the box started shaking in her hand and the witchy woman tried to control it but it flew into the air and burst into a million pieces, the cogs and springs hitting the floor with tinny tinkles and bright bounces.
Taylor ran upstairs and Kyle was dressed all in white. Taylor thought for a second she was dead, but it was really a bathrobe. Taylor explained that she's pissed at Lisa because she thinks Lisa told the press about her shitty marriage. This is such a stupid red herring that I don't want to get into it, but it seems like it's foreshadowing for next episode, so let's keep it in the back of our minds.
Later all the women gather for the seance and Faye Resnick was there wearing the innards of a disco ball. I don't know what she was dressed for, but it wasn't a seance. In fact that all of these women gathered to a seance and not one person dressed like Stevie Nicks is a fucking travesty. Don't they know the dress code for these kinds of things is always Belladonna realness?
Speaking of Faye Resnick, just what the hell was Kyle doing with this damn seance? Why did she think this was a good idea? Here we have Faye, a psychic, Camille, some crazy friend of hers from the island of Amazonia, and all the ingredients that made up last year's psychic dinner contretemps. Was this like the end of The Moonstone where they had to get everything back together in exactly the right places to see if they could accurately recreate the events of last year? And more importantly, who was this new friend of Camille's? Where the fuck was Deedee, her constant silent companion. She was at home sharpening her fucking knife to kill this bitch Elizabeth, that's where she was. Deedee is the only one who gets to sit next to Camille on camera and listen to her talk and not say anything. It's in her contract, damn it, and she's not going to let any blonde bodyguard get between her and her camera time. Oh hell no. Do not cross Deedee, motherfuckers. She will not only cut you, she will disappear you until the ends of time. Know that.
The psychic goes around the table and tells each person which spirits are there for them. Adrienne's father George is there to tell her she's good at business and not to trust her brother, who still has a subscription to Juggs even though he told everyone he cancelled it. She tells Brandi that she's going to have more kids and Brandi just laughs the laugh of a million LeAnne Rhymes Christmas Specials and says, "You crazy, bitch." Lisa gets to talk to her grandmother who explains that she was at the last dinner with a psychic and that she tried to get through to Lisa, to warn her about this whole enterprise, but she failed. Then she gets to Kyle and says, "There is an intense spirit here. Her name is Allison DuBois. She tells me that she doesn't want to tell you anything, but she keeps saying, 'Offer her a drag of my cigarette,' and then laughs like a crazy person. I don't like it, it's creeping me out."
No, that didn't happen. Kyle's mom Big Kim was there (I love a Big Kim/Little Kim dynamic, it makes the Richardses so much more Grey Gardens than they were before) and she says not to try to be Kim's mother. And then Camille's grandparents are there and they make some gay joke about Kelsey and everyone laughs and then the wind whisks through the dining room and all the candles are blown out and all the curtains flutter in the same direction and all the ghosts are blown away, back onto the other side of the light, back into obscurity.
But Kyle's spirit was blown away too. It was blown all the way down the highway into the deep reaches of the valley and suddenly she was sitting on Sad Valley Ranch with Kim out on the back porch.
"Kyle, I've brought you here today to tell you where I'm moving. I'm moving in with a man," she says. "A man I've been seeing for a year."
"Oh, Kim, what are you talking about? Which man? Is it the one you brought to Paris' premiere?"
"Yes, that's him."
"Kim, that's not a man. That's a pile of rocks that you painted a face on. You can't move in with that. You can't move into a cave."
"I'm not moving into a cave, Kyle, I'm finally happy!"
"Is this a dream? What am I doing crying in the valley?"
Kim really seemed happy. Even more surprisingly she seemed sober and coherent, which is a complete oddity for Kim. She had the fresh out of rehab calm, the determination to do something serious with her life. To find a good man to love and who would love her back. To give up all the glitz of Beverly Hills and the champagne temptations and caviar dependencies to just go to soccer games with Pumice in the valley. He seems so normal. He has kids and doesn't like plastic surgery and thought that a Manolo Blahnik was some sort of Israeli fire arm. Oh, she was so happy. She thought this was the last time she was ever going to move. This was finally it. This was the one.
Kyle wants to believe it, she really does, but she knows her sister too well. She knows that she makes bad choices with men, and she's seen this serenity before, and she's seen it fade, like the fog that slowly sizzles up over the harbor by midday only to come back again at night, thicker and colder and clinging to your hair in little pellets.
She's also sad for another reason. Kyle likes to think that all of Kim's happiness comes from her, like little bits of fairy dust that she found lying around the house, or the second half of her pasta platter from the Cheesecake Factory. Kim gets all the extra happiness that Kyle doesn't know what to do with. She thinks Kim can only be happy if she makes her, if she lets her. But not anymore. Not after the limo fight. Not after last year.
Here is Kim, right here on this sunny porch with a view and the Valley, and it doesn't look so sad anymore. Now it's Kyle who's sad. She realizes that Kim doesn't want to move closer to her after all. That she doesn't want her to set her up with men like Civil War Veteran Martin. She is trying to make her own happiness that has nothing to do with Kyle and they're both unsure and they're both sad, but only Kim is hopeful, either too stupid or too stubborn to think about her past mistakes, the ones Kyle is playing over and over in her head on a loop.
But the sun on their hair is warm and the day is so clear. "Just take a minute and look. Look at where I am now. I don't know if it's going to be great, but it has to be better," Kim says, with that clinging pang in the back of her throat that feels like pushing down tears.
"Kim, I just..." Kyle says, reaching under her sunglasses and wiping away a tear. Trying to give herself up to the moment, but failing.
"I know, Kyle. I know you do," Kim says, holding her hand and turning them both out toward the green hills cluttered with trees and sprinkled with houses, laid out like a giant funnel to the city up north, to where Kyle and all her friends live in their glittery palaces looking out over their own hills, their own trees, their own lives. Kyle just looks and looks, not sure what to do next but she has an itching in her legs that feels like, if she jumped, the wind would carry her all the way home.