The Real Housewives of New York City Recap: Invite Only

The Real Housewives of New York City
All Bark, No Invite
Season 16 Episode 9
Editor’s Rating ★★★
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I love it when Real Housewives get arrested on camera, get caught in fraud scams, and return from prison for their fourth DUI and then totally deny having an alcohol problem, straight to Andy Cohen’s ever-improving hair. (Seriously, which devil did he make a deal with?) But this episode has just the kind of low-impact fights that I want to deal with. There is an expanding fight about who has a better fish market, and while Sai has publicly repped Fish Tales in Brooklyn, Daisy has yet to name-drop her preferred seafood purveyor, even as she insists that it’s better and Fish Tales gets their fish from hers. Then we move right on to not being invited to a party. Then we move on to talking about that party in front of the person who wasn’t invited. Take us back to the good old days of petty squabbles and none of this dark legal bullshit.

Well, there is that part where Carole and Erin are walking down the street eating pizza, and someone yells at her about the Epitein Files. Okay. Fine. We’re still dealing with that, but it does give Erin “Mew Mew” Lichy a moment to shine. She needs it after failing to parallel park the most famous jalopy in Manhattan, Carole’s 1996 Jeep Cherokee. Who taught Erin how to parallel park? John Barlow? The two have a little chat in the park about how Carole doesn’t like Sai and then go to get a slice to alleviate their hangovers after Abe’s party the night before. As they’re walking, someone yells at Carole about the Epstein Files and then ducks into a bodega. Erin, a true New Yorker, still has her slice in the grease-splattered paper plate as she goes and yells at the lady that it’s not nice to just shout random accusations about people on the sidewalk. I talk plenty of trash about Erin, but she had her friend’s back more than Bethenny ever would have.

Carole seems a bit unruffled, but in her confessional, it is probably the most emotional we’ve seen her in her long tenure. She is grappling with something that Hailey said, about how her involvement with Ghislaine Maxwell will forever be a footnote to her story. I understand this. Even if Carole thinks that their relationship was minor, because of what Ghislaine did, it’s going to have an outsized impact on Carole for the rest of her life. Despite what you think of Carole and her involvement, it must sting that after all of her accomplishments, she’s going to be stuck with a black mark because of someone else’s evil. 

The first part of this episode goes around and checks in on the ladies in their personal environments, which is fascinating. We first watch an argument slowly unfurl between Erin and Abe in front of their absolutely adorable tiny baby, Jack. Abe doesn’t like that Erin scolded him at his party about spilling his drink and not helping with the kids, and Erin is frustrated that none of her children will listen to her. Earlier in the season, it was her daughter, and now it’s one of her sons. I have never parented, so feel free to just put a piece of tape over me and ignore me as Hailey did with the surveillance cameras on her terrace, but if two out of four of the kids (one of whom is still an infant) aren’t listening to her, maybe it has something to do with the way she and Abe parent? I don’t know. She was selling it as if her daughter was really tough, but it seems like she’s struggling in general. I don’t think Erin is a bad mother, but maybe she could use Super Nanny or something? 

Next, we see Sai and Jessel go to lunch, and Jessel is bitching about Pavit. Not only is she upset that he isn’t making much money, but she says that he “despises” her. Really? Of all the husbands we have seen on these shows clearly hating their wives, Pavit does not seem to be one of them. I can see how he ignores her. She points out that after the kids are in bed, they’re on their own screens and he doesn’t even say goodnight to her. But despise? I don’t know. Jessel tries to bring this up to her mother, Nilam, who is visiting, but she’s not hearing any of it. Nilam was set up in an arranged marriage, and Jessel says that she’s always taking Pavit’s side. I don’t know about that, but it does seem like she is giving the man in the relationship the right of way and putting it on Jessel to make it work out. Wait, I also did the same thing. Are we both right, or are we both brimming with internalized misogyny? Maybe both? When Jessel tells Nilam that Pavit doesn’t take an interest in her or her career, Nilam points out that Pavit asked Jessel how a meeting went, and she said, “Fine,” and shut it down, so maybe there is enough blame to go around.

Next it’s off to Orville Reddenbacher Village to visit Daisy’s popcorn ceiling and meet her sister Samona, who is the Bizarro World version of Ramona Singer. Samona is visiting from her home in Boca, and Daisy tells us that she and her sister are super close even though they fight all the time, which is exactly what I would expect from Daisy and her sister, Fake Ramona. Daisy is now upset because Samona left her “doctor husband” for a 28-year-old Cuban firefighter. Daisy asks if the “D is that good” and, well, we get to meet Anthony, the Cuban firefighter in question. I can guarantee that, yes, the D is that good, and I fully support Samona and all the decisions she has made in relation to this fire hose. Daisy also asks if she couldn’t have just had an affair, and I think that is a very good question. To paraphrase the Baker’s Wife from Sondheim’s genius Into the Woods: “Have a child for warmth and a baker for bread and a big-dicked Cuban fire man for … whatever.”

On to the gorgeous-looking Crane Club where Erika is going to commit the absolute hate crime of eating a whole pizza on camera while still having a stomach flatter than the Alex Jones thinks the Earth is. She’s upset that they met with a potential surrogate and they might get rejected again, that their embryos aren’t good enough, and that she’ll never have the child she dreamed of. (Wow, this is all very Baker’s Wife.) Her husband, Ankur, is incredibly reassuring, telling her that it will all work out, and of course he thinks that. He’s the billionaire son of a billionaire. He knows that they have the resources and the power and the will and that they can pay their way out of any single problem they might ever face. As if he just wrote a check to heaven itself, Erika gets a text at dinner that their potential surrogate accepted their offer and they’re going to work on implanting an embryo soon. Why did this make me so emotional? We barely know this Erika, so no, I’m not crying, you’re crying. 

The more I learn about Erika, the more I love her. She invites the entire cast, minus Daisy, to her birthday party. Daisy, instead, has some dog charity gala she’s at with Samona and Anthony the Hose. Jessel stops by and says she has to leave to go to Erika’s birthday party. She assumes that Daisy knows about it, and Daisy says she wasn’t invited. (She also wasn’t invited to dinner with King Charles and her boss, Martha Stewart.) Then Daisy goes to Erin and asks if she was going to the party. Erin says no, but makes it clear, in that mean girl way of Erin’s, that she was totally invited. Daisy, we know, is someone who likes to be included and likes to be asked to things, even if she can’t go. She’s pissed, but she should have been thinking about all the future invites when she shit all over Daisy’s private island for three days in a row. We see some Insta stories and cellphone footage of Erika’s birthday, with Jessel, Carole, and Hailey all whooping it up. Wait, she had a birthday party during filming, and the crew wasn’t even invited? How did she get away with that? We need to see this party! 

When they all convene at the end of the episode for a comedy show in a pizza restaurant (seriously, I have more questions than Anthony the Hose has inches), Carole, Hailey, and Erika are all talking about the party in front of Daisy. Erika could have taken the easy out. Daisy invited her to the gala, and Erika declined, saying it was her birthday. She could have just said, “I didn’t invite you because I knew you had the gala,” but she didn’t. She just lets Daisy sit there and fester in her own juices. I get it. I’m just like Daisy. I hate being left out and have incurable FOMO, and to have to listen to this dispatch while she suffered at Chelsea Piers, objectively the worst event space in Manhattan, at a boring dog benefit with her Floridian sister and her boytoy must be absolute torture. 

Just then, in the backyard of a Brooklyn pizza restaurant turned comedy club, they all looked up as a black cat jumped from the roof to the fire escape, scurrying its way up through New York. Daisy wished it were her at that moment. She wanted to scamper away, but also have the best seat in the house. She wants everyone to look at her in awe and want to touch her, but to be so removed that they can’t possibly. She wanted the freedom to go wherever she wants, be invited everywhere, part of every group, but also so aloof that they all wonder what she’s up to when she’s not around. Just as Daisy entered back into her body on that fairy-lit back patio, she wished that she were a cat again because Sai just loped into the joint, and Daisy could tell that she was ready to pounce.