I feel like the world has finally reset itself back onto an axis I understand.
Watching this episode of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, I found myself returning to a very familiar and long-term mindset wherein I realized something rather definitive: I DO hate Kyle Richards! My recently detached hatred for a woman who is proud of having shiny extensions and a best friend who capitalized on another friend’s murder by spreading it for Playboy – heeeeeyyyy, Faye Resnick! – is back and I now grasp this very real dichotomy: I can feel badly for the life Kyle leads as the sister of an addict in denial, but I don’t have to allow that empathy to mean that I want to mentally hold hands with a woman I’d much rather clothesline during a good game of Red Rover.
And weirdly, it was the precise act of another woman’s attempt at empathy being spurned that made me remember that I HATE KYLE! I do! And I don’t think I’m alone in having this reaction because as I shouted it from my rooftop, I thought I could hear some people begin to applaud in the frigid distance, but then again, that might have just been my imagination.
What happened? Well, it’s what always happens: Kim – the person with the most questionable sobriety this side of Lohanville – sat in tears at Kyle’s Bottoms & Tops party because her sister had dared to beyond-vaguely reference that Kim had done some secretive and shady things in the past when she lived the life of a secretive and shady addict. Now, rehashing the past when you’re out of hash is never fun, but I’m pretty certain that part of the evolution of a person who is pretending to embrace sobriety is that you must face your former demons and stop burying your secrets or pretending that you don’t have any in the first place. It’s Kim’s resistance to seeing or seeking truth that should cue everyone in to the fact that she is not living the full life of a sober person, she never has been, and until she acknowledges the truth, she never will be.
But instead of doing any sort of introspection, Kim sits in a booth in a white jumpsuit and waves around an electronic cigarette while her sister begs her to not let a piece of soiled toilet paper like Brandi come between them. In the background, Brandi and her stylist – who should be fired and encouraged to go into accounting – shook their noble heads at the uncouth display in their midst, and I’m shocked that I can still be shocked by the levels of Brandi’s manipulation and her ability to shift from furious and nasty to impersonating a human being with kindness in just one swallow of a breath – or a pill.
Brandi’s an instigating monster who is in the wrong here, and Kyle is right to be furious and hurt that her sister brought an uninvited guest with her, one who told Kyle that she wanted to “knock her teeth out” and then questioned the kind of sibling relationship these women have had for about fifty years. And I more than understood why Kyle finally gave her sister the finger and said, “F*ck you,” because there’s only so much abuse one can take from a broken addict and her enabling and violence-prone friend.
Kim finally left the bar and she continued to cry on the street and Brandi stooped down the eight feet she needed to get on eye-level with her-best-friend-in-the-whole-wide-world-so-f*ck-you-Kyle-and-just-so-you-know-everyone-says-your-hair-is-not-even-that-shiny. Brandi hugged Kim, who kept whining about how unfairly Kyle had treated her, as though Kim had not just shown up without warning holding the hand of a woman Kyle hates, a woman who just insinuated to Kyle’s face that her husband is cheating on her. But no – in Kim’s swirling mind it is she who has been wronged, and I think it’s kind of terrible that I can’t even muster up a smidgen of pity for this assh*le who fears self-awareness like rational people fear fire and spiders.