Real Housewives of Beverly Hills Recap – 3/10/15

Into the lobby glides Eileen, a woman still completely shell-shocked by the behavior she has witnessed in close-up from grown women. If she recently had LASIK surgery, the moment she saw the foam pooling in the corner of Kim’s mouth might have made her long for her formerly cloudy vision. Eileen greets everybody – some more warmly than others – and when they tell her that they are going shopping, there is a bit of a double-take that occurs before her acting craft kicks in and she then simply smiles and lets them all know that she will be heading to a museum. But she and Lisa R. do reach out their hands for a second and kind of touch one another to show that there are no hard feelings that Lisa is choosing to head off for the day with Kim, a woman who took more joy in threatening to destroy Lisa’s life than any one thing has provided her with – except for that last David Cassidy album – and topped the whole thing off by calling an Eileen a beast who has a face that she hates.

Kyle and Yolanda are not yet downstairs, so Eileen sits alone in the lobby waiting for them. It turns out that Yolanda will not be joining her friends for the day because all of the stress of trying to see all of the perspectives of all of these emotionally-ravaged women combined with the Lyme Disease she is battling has left Yolanda exhausted and needing to stay in bed. Kyle stops by her room and agrees that Yolanda should rest, but when Yolanda mentions that Kyle must deal with the Kim Problem because God gave her this job in life, Kyle begins to sob that she does not want this job, and I can’t really blame her.

I would never attend Kyle’s Now-I’m-An-Atheist! Party, but I would totally send a gift. What’s the Chanel version of a crucifix or a Star of David?

When Kyle meets Eileen down in the lobby, she learns that the rest of the women have all gone shopping – together. Like Eileen, she is dumbfounded that the Earth has continued to spin after her own existence feels turned upside down and she tells Eileen that Yolanda is not feeling well and is staying in bed for the day, to which Eileen responds, “Yolanda staying in bed is the sane reaction. It’s a good sign of her mental stability. How can they all just go shopping and pretend everything is normal? It’s like I walked into an insane asylum with these women.”

Both Kyle and Eileen have a really good point here: they were dragged through the sh*t-filled mud when they tried to stop Kim from attacking Lisa R., and here Lisa seems to have forgiven that creature even though Kim has not apologized or sought forgiveness from the others, so the whole dynamic is awkward as hell if you’re not into pretending that things are perfectly fine when there’s a lunatic who keeps joining you for dinner.

Turns out that Lisa R. has a very normal reason for deciding to go shopping with two women who hate her and with Lisa V., who might prove helpful should Kim or Brandi attempt to spontaneously throw-down with her again. See, she knows that if she spends the day with lucid women like Eileen and Kyle, they will attempt to talk about the hairy yellow monster in the group who can barely string a bunch of words together into anything resembling a sentence except for that time when she managed to threaten Lisa’s very existence because then Kim managed to almost master the art of language. But Lisa explains again that she is in survival mode and she does not want to talk about or think about or relive what has happened to her since arriving in Amsterdam, so she is choosing to put on her blinders and go shopping with some assh*les.

During the shopping excursion we get to see a few things of note. Lisa V. and Brandi still have somewhat of a funny rapport between them and Lisa acknowledges that she and Brandi can still have a laugh, but this is also a women who knows her limits and she does not seem at all interested in having anything but a casual chuckle with Brandi ever again. We learn that Kim knows that tassels are meant to be worn over nipples and that if she had to choose which ones she’d wear, it would be the white ones with the little black bow, and I would like to nicely ask if there’s a medic in the vicinity who can stop by to preventatively pump out my stomach, because the sight of Kim Richards choosing nipple tassels might cause this wave of nausea that just set in to never abate. And we learned that there’s a store in Amsterdam that has gravel instead of a hardwood floor, and it looks really cool, which means that I must rip up my own flooring immediately and install either gravel or a moat, which I will fill with goldfish because I cannot afford a family of swans.

As the shoppers trek over both gravel and veiled animosity, Eileen and Kyle go to the Rembrandt Museum, where Kyle spends most of the time commenting on the outfits the women in the paintings are wearing because she misses America and she hasn’t seen Fashion Police in over a week. When they leave the exhibit, they see an enormous sculpture outside of letters spelling out “I AMSTERDAM” that you’re allowed to pose in or next to and Kyle shimmies herself into the “D” and giggles that she fits inside of that giant consonant because she is so tiny, which might be the reason that she did not allow herself even a single chocolate truffle when she and Eileen then went to get some coffee, because what if next time she wants to do a split inside of the “R”? She had better retain her figure!

Over coffee, Eileen mentions that it’s very weird that Lisa R. is acting like she’s fine, because both Eileen and Kyle are not fine with what transpired, nor should they be. They were treated viciously by a woman who now seems to have experienced zero consequences for her revolting behavior, and though Kyle might not actually confront the issue, Eileen is just too perplexed by it all to end up staying quiet for long.

The first person Eileen approaches is Lisa R., and the two of them go off on their own to get a glass of wine. Once again proving that she is articulate and rational and a good friend, Eileen calmly asks how Lisa could be spending any kind of breezy time with Kim and how legitimately messed up it feels that it doesn’t seem as though Lisa has Eileen’s back when Eileen so clearly and publicly had Lisa’s. After all, Kim has not deigned to apologize to either Eileen or Kyle for her behavior and Eileen genuinely believes that Kim does not even fully realize that her behavior was not acceptable, and that’s when Lisa tells Eileen that she is sorry that it seems as though her loyalty has been compromised – it has not been – but Lisa is afraid of Kim and is reluctant to talk to her about anything other than what color bow she wants on her nipple tassels.

“All she does is attack,” explains Lisa. “You can’t talk to someone who is not completely rational.”

Eileen sort of nods and seems to realize that Lisa is stuck between their friendship and her own legitimate fear of the ferociousness that best defines Kim, a woman who greatly resembles a generic Barbie Doll named Kiki – Kiki has long blonde hair and she only swallows pills sometimes! – and they end their discussion still friends with one another because sometimes grown-up can see things differently and the whole thing reminds me that it’s kind of a pleasure watching smart people fight.

But then the sun begins to descend in the distance and it’s about to be nightfall and Yolanda – who is feeling better – has made arrangements for all of these women to have a gourmet dinner on a boat that takes them through the canals, which would be amazing if the following brawls might not break out at any time:

Brandi vs. Kyle – If I were a betting woman, I’d give the win to Brandi here. She’s almost always wrong in what she says to or about Kyle, but Kyle dissolves into frustrated tears too quickly during a battle and I think the salt in her tears throws off her thought process.

Kyle vs. Kim – Look, there’s no reason Kyle should not win this brawl – even if she wins by standing on top of her sister’s face or by tossing her hair-first into the canal – but the thing is that nobody wins during a fight between these two because they don’t deal with the actual issue at hand; they only fight in subtext and it’s exhausting, even for a viewer. I’d totally go get a bottle of water and maybe some Twizzlers and then check my email during this showdown, but don’t worry about me missing it; it’ll happen again and again.

Brandi vs. Eileen/Kim vs. Eileen – that anybody legitimately hates Eileen strikes me as weird. Eileen is refined and sometimes she injects witty comments into a conversation and she is smart, and that’s obviously the attribute she’s got that so terribly threatens the biggest idiots in the entire bunch. Eileen sees through all of their barely-veiled bullsh*t and will call them on it if their bullsh*t causes them to be disparaging to others and, if there’s one thing we have learned on this trip other than the fact that Kyle can fit inside of a giant “D”, it’s that Kim and Brandi are allergic to accountability.

Kim vs. Lisa R. – their dispute has been tabled for now, but that doesn’t mean it can’t magically pop up again and remember: dinner is being served on this boat, and that means that there are knives on the premises.

What in the hell was Yolanda thinking…?