The Real Housewives of New York City Recap: The Twilight Calzone

I hate the word vajayjay more than any other in the entire English language. I can’t stand it. I can barely stand to type it. With all of the wonderful and descriptive words for the vagina — or, you know, just saying “vagina” — it’s infuriating that grown men and women use this saccharine euphemism instead. The gross thing about vajayjay is that it’s both infantilizing and condescending at the same time. It carries with it an ounce of self-satisfaction, like the person using it is the Tyra Banks in the America’s Next Top Model of their very own mind.

We hear that word quite a bit during this episode because Jules is still suffering from a bruised front bottom and Bethenny has been colonized by the Fibroids, a race of mole people who used to live under a mountain until the Maloofs kicked them out. I shouldn’t joke about Bethenny’s condition, because the surgery she needs to have is no joke, and I feel really bad that she’s going through it essentially alone. I totally understand her reaction in the car, because going through any medical trauma is hard, and it’s even harder when you don’t know what the hell is going on, you can’t really count on anyone around you, and blood is pouring out of your underwear like you’re Carrie on her way home to blow up her mother.

The most telling reaction is when she says, while talking about her daughter on a phone call with her friend Terri, “Imagine if she ends up being with them always?” Bethenny isn’t as scared for her health as she is scared that something will go wrong and her daughter will wind up with her ex-husband’s family forever. Bethenny doesn’t fear death; she fears not being able to control what she loves, most of all her daughter. I wouldn’t want her living with Jason, a pair of boat shoes smothered in Axe Body Spray and spilled hot sauce. That is terrifying. That thought is what it sounds like when doves cry.

The hero of Bethenny Meets the Fibroids is Kevin the driver. Who is this saint that sits and listens to Bethenny Frankel’s phone calls all day while he carts her around to lunch appointments, business meetings, eyebrow-waxing interludes, and after-hours assignations with good-looking divorced men who have daughters old enough to have Snapchat numbers in the low millions? That saint is Kevin, generally amused by the conversation he hears, chiming in when he must, but knowing that, at some point, he must roll up the partition please. When Bethenny is just blubbering to a friend in the backseat about her surgery, I love how Kevin just says, very calmly and as if no one is really listening, “You’ll be all right.” Yes, thanks for that, Kevin. Here is your quarterly bonus.

Jules shows up at her weird pizza party and demands either a cushion or several dozen napkins so her injured pussy doesn’t meow all over the seats. I’m sorry, but there’s no way that I would ever want to wipe my hands — let alone my mouth — with a napkin after Jules had yoga-farted and crotch-oozed all over it for an entire evening. She should have taken those napkins with her, like Ramona Singer took the pizza, plate, napkins, silverware, decorative bottles of olive oil, funny hat that a dough-thrower wears, and red-and-white-checked tablecloth.

I’m going to have to side with Carole and say that Jules definitely has a weird relationship with food. The hard thing about having an eating disorder, unlike having a drinking or drug problem, is that every human still needs to eat. It’s not like she can just avoid food and be healthy. That’s what got her all messed up in the first place. But Jules clearly exhibits odd behavior around eating. Saying that she is over her eating disorder isn’t doing anything to get her cured and above a size negative-8. If she sees a therapist once a week and has nothing to say, maybe explore this a little bit more, yeah?

I don’t think that weird thing where she puts a fork and knife in the calzone and jokes about slipping her medication into it is because she used to be anorexic. Quite simply, Jules is a phony and was trying to have a good time and get all of the women’s attention. She goofs around in this really strange way that makes her look about one bag of Jelly Bellys away from buying a house on Scary Island.

The only good thing about Jules’s visit with Dorinda, however, is the amazing Missoni cape Dorinda wears to her house. Who do I have to beat up to get one of those? Obviously Dorinda, but I would never do that because I love her more and more with each passing episode. She handles Jules so well and so delicately, and everything about their conversation is just so sad.

I don’t understand why Jules gets her twat all bruised after Bethenny jokes to her, “Thank God it wasn’t you who I was with,” when she was bleeding from her cooch and had to go to the hospital. Jules likes to portray herself as a scatterbrained airhead. She is the kind of woman who makes a huge display out of not being able to make tea and struggling with her children even though she has a nanny. If she’s going to play that part, she can’t expect people to think that she’s dependable in a crisis. Still, Dorinda is right: If Jules wants to be a Housewife, she needs to give it back when they give it to her, or else she’ll end up choking on all the chicken bones these women try to shove down her throat.

The saddest part, of course, is when she talks about how Pizza Box is totally checked out of their marriage. It’s even sadder now that we know he filed for divorce. She says that when she was in the hospital with her twat all waffled, Pizza Box didn’t answer her calls and didn’t show up for hours. My boyfriend doesn’t know many things, but he knows that if I call twice in a row it’s a dire emergency and he better answer the fucking phone or else his vagina will be so bruised for the rest of his life that he’ll need a whole roll of Bounty to sit on every time we go to a pizza place. Then, when Jules gets back from the hospital, Pizza Box couldn’t feed and bathe the children. Now, I have never in my life bathed a human child, but it can’t be that hard. Sure, I might get all wet and make a mess in the bathroom, but that’s a small price to pay so that my partner can lie in bed and let her swollen genitals heal.

I don’t really have much to say about the Countess’s party because it looks like we’re going to once again rehash her split with Carole and Bethenny next week, so I’m just saving it for then. I will note that if Ramona Singer is telling you how to get along with people, then your shit is entirely busted. Seriously. This screaming gibbon ghost who usually tears people asunder is the one trying to bring people back together. That is just bonkers.

Speaking of bonkers, poor Sonja Tremont Morgan of the Wesson Oil Morgans. Seriously, did you see what was going on in Sonja’s basement? The only thing she has more of down there than interns and dyed poodles is Wesson oil. There are, like, four entirely full bottles of it on the shelf in her basement. How much Wesson oil does one woman who probably eats out four nights a week need?

Yeah, Sonja is definitely a hoarder — and not in that cute way that people with too many piles on their coffee table say that they’re hoarders, but in a real way, like she actually isn’t throwing stuff away because she won’t let go of the past. She says it herself, that she doesn’t want to give away her daughter’s stuffed animals or her 1971 hair dryer because it reminds her of the past, it reminds her of the family that she had before her life was a literal and figurative ruin.

Sonja says that the mess got bad because she still can’t deal with her divorce. It’s been a decade. The clearing of Ground Zero and the building of the 9/11 memorial and the new World Trade Center happened more quickly than Sonja getting over her marriage, going down in that basement, and throwing away an entire suitcase full of hangers from the dry cleaner.

Doesn’t she realize that her old life isn’t coming back? She should just clean that house out, sell it, downsize to something a bit less unwieldy, and move on with her life. She thinks the house makes her happy, but it’s shackled to her leg and not letting her go anywhere, like one of Lindsay Lohan’s house-arrest bracelets. The house is actually the cause of all of her problems.

Once again, Dorinda is the perfect friend to have on this task, making sure Sonja really gets rid of all of those snot-covered stuffed animals and addresses her attachment to them. She tells her, quite frankly, that it is time to move on. She is firm but fair, a true friend who helps you laugh at your own folly while making you see it more clearly.

But after hours of tearing through boxes, looking at photographs of old yachting trips, twice-worn ballet shoes from an abandoned class, and empty humidifier boxes full of old manuals for appliances that were obsolete as soon as they were purchased, Sonja and Dorinda couldn’t handle the mildewy stench of the basement anymore.

When they were halfway to the door to the ground floor, Dorinda stopped dead. She heard something that sounded somewhere between a whine and a whistle — a shrill, continuous whir of sound like a release valve that wasn’t tightened correctly. It was accompanied by a quick scratching sound, like something trying to get out of a trap. “What is that?” Dorinda asked, slightly alarmed, her voice deeper than usual.

“Oh, it’s nothing,” Sonja said. “I need to get the furnace replaced. It’s probably that.” They continued upstairs, not afraid of a ghost necessarily, but something different. Like so many shards of the past distilled themselves into a dew, condensing on the ceiling as errant moments eked out in that unsettling drone. But it wasn’t that. It was a thing. No, a person. Sitting in the corner, her knees pulled up to her chin, her hair matted and falling all over her face as she tried to swat it out of the way with her forearms, her legs suddenly convulsing in fits and starts, a woman was making those scratches, those irregular grating noises.

Who knows how long she had been there, or why, but she kept making that sound to comfort herself, not because she had something to say, but she wanted the existential scream circling through her head to manifest itself on the outside. Covered in moldy clothes, she was stunned into immobility, lying there on the floor, trying to figure out where it all went wrong. But then her keening stopped. At that moment, Kelly Killoren Bensimon reached up into the air as if to pull the cord on a light that would send the shadows skittering away and make it all clear again.