VivaSync

I’m not ready for all of this heartache.

It’s been 17 years into Housewifery, and we have seen all sorts of insane things. We have seen a boat nearly capsize. We have seen multiple people go to prison. We have seen divorce, death, eviction, a father refusing to talk to his adult daughter, a few wine tosses, more than a couple of slaps, and whatever you can call Teddi Mellencamp (say her name three times and she will appear). Among all of those stories, we have never had a cancer story. Okay, that’s not entirely true. Brooks Ayers had fake cancer, and his girlfriend, Victoria Denise Gunvalson Jr., had a fake charity called Kill All Cancer. Sainted Househusbands Gregg Leakes and Bobby Zarin both died of very real cancer, but their struggles happened mostly off-camera. But we have never seen a Housewife have to deal with cancer.

Until now, and I am not at all ready for it. I’m sorry. I love Guerdy so much and I am not ready to see her suffer. We all knew that Guerda Abraira was diagnosed with breast cancer, but knowing it and seeing it are two different things. Throughout the episode, we see the diagnosis settling in. We first see Guerdy when she goes to Dr. Nicole’s house, which is on its own fucking peninsula and costs more than $20 million, and I just wish that I married a hot, rich bear like Anthony. They sit in Nicole’s new backyard on the water, and Guerdy talks about some abnormalities in her mammogram. Nicole tells her not to worry, she could have been on her period and that would screw things up, or it could have been totally benign. She tells her not to worry. It’s no big deal.

And we’ve all been there. We’ve had our scares. We’ve had mole biopsies and colonoscopies that were slightly irregular. And, of course, we’ve all had a bit of nausea and a headache and let WebMD tell us that we have an inoperable brain tumor and about three weeks to live and, well, I guess now is a good a time as any to draw up a will. This happens to all of us, and it’s nothing. Don’t worry, Guerdy. But we know. Like the wind shaking the scraggly branches of a dead tree, we know what is coming, and it is bad.

By the time we get to Alexia’s “Nuevos Horizontes,” there is something clearly wrong with Guerdy, and she wants to leave the party early. She’d been beefing with Larsa all episode because she called Larsa “fake.” What is it with Housewives and being called fake? It’s like the worst thing you could possibly say to them. You could say that a Housewife was the cause of an entire genocide, and she’d just shrug one shoulder, but if you call her fake, she will put a fake nail right on your fake titty and call you an asshole with her fake lips while trying not to get any spittle on her fake tan.

After Guerdy steps out of the conversation about whether or not Larsa is fake (I have no opinion on the matter because I think fakeness is less of a fact and more of a vibe), Larsa tries to corner her before she and Russel get in the elevator out of Alexia’s party. Guerdy pulls her aside, grabs her by her wrist, and says, “Look at me. I’m going to need you. I don’t want to fight. When I call you, I need you to come.” It’s cryptic and strange, and now Guerdy is hugging Larsa and crying, and everyone thinks that she must be on magic mushrooms, because none of it is making any sense to them.

Oh, but it’s making sense to us. We know what she means when she says she’s going to need Larsa. She’s going to need all of them, and she’s going to need all of us.

In this episode that jumps around the timeline more than the last episode of Loki, we get a rewind to a week before the party when Guerdy is on a picnic with her family that seems arranged for the camera that she clearly doesn’t want to be around anymore. She’s gotten the diagnosis, but she doesn’t know how to tell her kids; she has heard it is invasive, and she doesn’t want to use the word cancer. Guerdy, who is usually so strong, so together, so focused, as Nicole said earlier, can’t seem to find the words or the emotions. She doesn’t know what to do, she doesn’t know what to say, she just looks like she’s going to crack like Humpty Dumpty the morning after a bender, and it just about cracked me in two.

Most of us watch these shows for fun. We like to see our TV friends get into some petty drama, go on a trip, and do something ridiculous. We like to see them falling in love and then falling out of it; we like to see them triumph, and we like to see them fail (some of them more than others). What we don’t want to see is them facing their mortality. That’s why we put on Bravo, so that we don’t have to think about our own impermanence, and now here is Guerdy dealing with a deadly disease, and she’s going to do it in our faces.

Still, we are here and willing to forgo our comfort so that Guerdy can get better, so that we can help her through this together, as if all of our love and applause will bring her back to life like one of the fairies in a stage production of Peter Pan. This is going to be harder than most story lines we watch on these silly programs, but Guerdy needs to know one thing: The Housewives fandom is fierce and faithful. When you call us, we will come. We might not be prepared, but we’re on this road with her and sending all of our love and support.

This was only a fraction of the episode, obviously, but it’s what hit me the hardest, because the rest of it was just piffle. It was just the silly little fights and low-stakes drama that made the RHOM reboot one of the strongest franchises in the Bravoverse. I was here for it, but it hit differently.

As always in the premiere, we checked in on all of the ladies before they all gathered at Alexia’s house for the new horizon. We see Larsa and her new boyfriend, Marcus Jordan, on a (cough, rented, cough) yacht with Lisa and her new beau, Jody. There’s something about him that seems a little bit off, a little bit strange, like a fingerprint on your sunglasses. Then we find out that he’s Canadian, and it all makes the most sense of all. Lisa is still trying to unravel her divorce from Lenny, a man who was bit by a radioactive worm and retained the powers of assholery. Nothing has really changed from last season.

Over at Julia and Martina’s, they’re talking about Martina getting over cancer while trying to put a diaper on a goat. Lesbians gonna lesbian even if one of them is bisexual. Also, why can’t the goat just wear a dog diaper? And why did they wrap the diaper around the goat’s weiner so that it could just shit little pebbles on the floor? I don’t know, but the whole scene was worth it when Julia — looking gorgeous with a new bob — is trying to say nice things to Martina, and she just shouts, “I can’t hear you over the goat.” If there was ever a metaphor for their whole relationship.

Alexia and her gringo, Todd, go on a walk on the beach and talk about the nine-minute apology that he issued to Dr. Nicole’s man, Anthony, on social media. He wanted to apologize for talking shit about Anthony’s business on television, and it was a really stand-up thing to do. The apologies on these shows are so often lacking in all departments; it was good to see someone really making an effort, even if that effort was so hard that it was actually quite cringe. We see all the women saying he shouldn’t have done it on social media, including Nicole, who said he could have just called.

When it’s time for Alexia’s bit party, Todd doesn’t want to show up because he knows they will talk about the video, and he doesn’t want to be embarrassed. Oh, Todd, tell them all to shut up. You did a nice, principled thing; don’t let anyone ride you just because it went on a little bit too long. Middle-aged people shouldn’t be using social media anyway. Any of us could have made this mistake.

But the real problem with the party is Adriana. Neither Alexia nor Marysol want her at the party because of the awful things she said about them last season, namely likening Frankie’s very real accident to Adriana’s fake sprained ankle on a cast trip. Alexia and Julia have lunch alone together, which is odd, mostly because they spend most of it talking about what Cardi B said about Larsa. At the lunch, Julia makes the excellent point that if she really wants this party to be about new horizons, she needs to try to have them with everyone, including Adriana, a cannon so loose that all the Ikea Allen wrenches in the world couldn’t get her so tight.

As a result of that lunch, Alexia has lunch with Adriana, who arrives waving a white flag. Yes, Adriana is a stunt queen, but if someone I was fighting with showed up waving that, I would have laughed my ass off, picked it up, farted in her face, and then put my ass right back on and totally forgiven her. Alexia, on the other hand, is all, “Ugh, always with the props.” But this is how Adriana makes good TV. She’s crazier than an eject lever on a helicopter, but she knows what she’s doing.

You can tell that Alexia is already over it, but Adriana just apologizes and apologizes, making sure she can get back on the show. She doesn’t even hold Alexia accountable for saying that Adriana was dating a married man and then refusing to say he wasn’t married, even when she was met with irrefutable proof that it was true. I guess some shit sandwiches can be eaten as long as it leads to a paycheck.

Then the party comes, and it’s a bit of an anti-climax. Marysol says she’s not going to attend if Adriana is, only to show up and get into a fight with Julia, of all people. I don’t know why they’re yelling or what they’re even mad at, but the dudes all go to the balcony to smoke cigars and pretend like Todd is actually there, even though his apology video scared him into hiding from the entire group. As the guys are chatting, Anthony tells them all that he bought a $250,000 Porsche that had 64 miles on it. He says he had to drive it once, so he drove it four miles, and now it has 68 miles on it. This is a missed opportunity. Anthony couldn’t have driven one more mile? Or maybe a half a mile? Whatever it would have taken. I bet that Elon Musk would have paid a cool $1 billion for a rare car with 69 miles on it. He would never drive it; he would have it helicoptered to his house, dropped in his driveway, and then he would pull the eject lever on that helicopter, and we’d never hear from him again.

But the party turns quickly when Guerdy is ready to leave. It’s all so fragile, really. We’re all so fragile. You take one thing away from the group, and it all crumbles, and you take one thing away from a person, notably their health, and something worse happens. It’s all so delicate, it’s all so hard, and while a season of this is going to be heartbreaking, we just have to keep our eyes on that hope, on that rising sun that is throwing rays and beauty at everything around it, that’s shaping the world by drawing attention to it, by giving us all something we really need: Nuevos Horizontes.

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