The Real Housewives of New York City Recap: Jeep Shots

The Real Housewives of New York City
Much Ado About Brunching
Season 16 Episode 2
Editor’s Rating ★★★
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I hate that the first thing I have to do to our returning champion Carole Radziwill is disagree with her, but no, real New Yorkers do not drive. Real rich New Yorkers drive. Most New Yorkers are so poor that they don’t have anywhere to go that the subway, a Lime bike, or their own two feet won’t take them. Rich people have places to go like the Hamptons, upstate, or to a Costco in New Jersey, because if they have a car, then they have an apartment big enough that they can store 74 rolls of toilet paper in a cabinet somewhere. Regular New Yorkers? They have to poop with the door open, or else they won’t fit in their bathrooms. We are not the same.

Carole, however, is not a rich New Yorker, but she still has a car. It is the most Carole car imaginable. It is a 1992 Jeep Cherokee, which is the exact same car I had as my first car. Back when I was driving it, in the late ’90s, the cloth ceiling was already falling and would hit people on the head and give them terrible static electricity on their hair. Carole’s ceiling is almost totally caved in so that it looks like some sort of intentional swag centered on a chandelier, though this is just one interior light. Carole has to keep it up with a staple gun. This is not a rich person’s car. Well, Carole’s pretty rich, but at least frugal enough that she doesn’t have a parking spot, and she sits in her car for 90 minutes every Tuesday and Thursday so she won’t get a ticket from the street sweeper, but also won’t lose her spot. She sits in her “office” with newbie Erika, and when the street sweeper comes, she goes across the street but keeps the car in reverse so she can go right back from whence she came. When another driver tries to horn in, she bolts her car right in there and drives him out of the spot. Okay, maybe I was wrong. Maybe real New Yorkers do drive, because this is some serious New York behavior.

Of course, Erin Mew Mew Lichy and DeuxMoi’s lawyer have a car (and if I had to guess, they also have a vanity plate that says MEZCALUM). They need it to get out to the Hamptons for all the time they spend in their second house. They’re traveling out this time because their real-estate agent called to say that the house flooded. Turns out it got so cold that a pipe burst in their bathroom and, well, the damage is extensive. The walls got so wet that the TV fell out of it and crashed on the floor. Erin is not my favorite person, but I do have sympathy. It’s going to be terribly expensive to redo the walls, floor, and carpets and replace all of her Tori Burch flats that she’s been hoarding in that closet for years. The real loss, however, is that her photo albums, her grandmother’s furniture, and the little spot where she measured all of her children’s heights (strangely in a closet?) are all ruined. That really is heartbreaking, and I’m sorry. I will not make fun of Erin for at least three paragraphs because of it. 

Back in Manhattan, Hailey and Daisy are taking Erika’s boxing class at Equinox. Neither of them has a car because they have Equinox memberships, and a normal human can only afford one or the other. We learn a bit more about Erika, her past in the WWE, and that she thinks neither of her co-workers can handle the class. Hailey, who seems like she’s higher than Einstein’s IQ in every scene, does not seem like the person who knows the inside of an Equinox. A Taco Bell sidewalk drive-thru, yes. In fact, we see her at one. Hailey seems like one of those women who eats one meal of Taco Bell a day and hasn’t exercised since Friends was on the air. Good for her. Maintain it however you can, but watching her struggle to box was not nearly as much fun as watching Sonja Morgan of the New York Sports Club Morgans struggle her way through Dorobics.

This scene was just an excuse for Daisy to explain that she’s having a surprise non-birthday brunch for Sai because of “everything she’s going through,” though she can’t talk about what she’s going through or explain why it’s a surprise or say why she’s inviting the whole cast or why cameras will be there or why she’s getting a $1,200 bottle of Champagne for free or why there is going to be a burlesque performance or why I would be so horrified by that burlesque performance that I would get up and leave right before it just like Carole did, and that’s not because of boobs (I love boobs!) but because restaurants are not a place for entertainment unless that entertainment is your friend’s story about the dude they fucked the night before. 

This brunch is awkward before we even see the first pastry. Carole shows up last and hugs Sai and says that they met once, and Sai reminds her that they met multiple times, including once in front of her building. Carole looks at her and blinks so hard that we can hear the [plonk, plonk, plonk] sound effect coming through the television, and then Carole is like, “Oh, yes!” But you know she remembers that just as well as Hailey remembers her Social Security number. (Hailey does not have a Social Security number because she was born on Proxima Centauri.) Then Daisy shows the texts she’s getting from her son’s 26-year-old tutor that say how hard it is having a crush on a married woman, and, I’m sorry, she is breaking a cardinal rule of brunch. If you’re going to talk this much about a man, then the first thing you better be doing is pulling up his Insta and scrolling straight to the vacation swimsuit pictures. I need to see this guy. I am, after all, a visual learner.

Things get really weird when Erin gives a toast for a brunch that has no occasion whatsoever, but at least Carole thinks it’s Sai’s birthday. (It is not. Sai’s birthday is November 22, which makes her a Sagittarius and Scorpio cusp, and you don’t need to be an astrology girlie to know what that means.) Erin gives this really nice toast and then says she’d never kick Sai out of her party, because if she kicked her out, it would mean they are not friends. Just like Jessel ending her toast with a dig at Erin last episode, so goes Erin. They start talking about her expulsion, and Jessel wants to know why Erin talked shit. Erin says that they connected after their fathers’ deaths, which happened close to each other, and then Jessel didn’t talk to her that much. Okay, I get how that would feel bad, but why is she calling her thirsty, desperate, and a snake? It seems more like an excuse for talking shit about Jessel than a reason. I think the reason is that Erin doesn’t like Jessel, but she can’t bring herself to say that, for whatever reason.

Then there is some nonsense about a dermatologist, and they’re fighting over who found the dermatologist first and whether or not Jessel was nice to this dermatologist before or after she found out that the dermatologist is also Martha Stewart’s dermatologist. Okay. Two things. First, the only RHONY dermatologist I recognize is Dr. Giese. Secondly, how is Martha Stewart not a friend of? She is the connector between Erika and Carole; she’s the connector between Daisy and Erika; she’s the connector between everyone and this male doctor whose name I’m refusing to learn. She’s done more in these two episodes than Sutton Brown Stracke has done in the past two seasons. I don’t care if it’s a $1 million check, Andy Cohen is good for it, and it is what we need!

The pair apologize, decide to get over it and move forward, and be nicer to each other. Then, ten minutes later, Erin is at the other end of the table telling Daisy that Jessel is so thirsty. Okay, so she clearly means it and is going to keep shit-talking her. I can’t stand Erin, but she is so good at this. She is so good at being a Housewife and is so necessary for the show because she never learns, has no idea how she comes off, and thinks that everything she does is perfect and justifiable. Never leave us! 

Hailey also has some beef with Erin because she didn’t like that Erin mentioned to her girlfriend, Allison, that Hailey got her nose broken by a boob, a story that I still don’t believe. Was this boob Canadian? Does it go to another school? Would we not know it? I don’t know how I feel about this. I love a modern arrangement, but how can Hailey’s girlfriend be upset when someone says that Hailey hooked up with someone else, considering that Hailey is entirely legally married to another dude? Erin shouldn’t have brought this up, at least until she understands the rules of Hailey’s entanglements with her husband and with Allison, but it seems like Allison is also overreacting to a fake story about a fake boob and a fake nose. 

Speaking of the rules of Hailey’s union, she calls it a “lavender marriage,” which usually means a gay man and a lesbian who get married to avoid detection and carry on their separate romances. Does that mean that Hailey’s man is gay? Does that mean they aren’t boning at all, and that’s why she needs a pied-à-terre? If that’s true and the point is to avoid detection, then why is Hailey going on the ad-supported tier of a national streaming service and telling people that she’s in a lavender marriage? It’s not mine to get, sure, but I am befuddled.

Jessel and Daisy decide to make the brunch even more awkward by asking Carole questions about Love Story, which I have not watched because I lived through the ’90s once and I don’t need Ryan Murphy to remind me what I was doing in a ’92 Jeep Cherokee with a collapsing ceiling. Carole seems good-natured about answering questions but also acknowledges that she’s been bombarded by them. Daisy keeps the questions sparing, which seems fitting. She gets some answers, and Carole gets off easy but also doesn’t look like she’s avoiding talking about it.

As they’re discussing it, Jessel says, “Just ask the question. Was she a bitch?” Okay, really? There is a way that I could understand asking this question. If Caroline is portrayed as a bitch on the show (which I wouldn’t know) and Jessel was checking to see if Ryan Murphy was accurate in his depiction or not. However, I can’t imagine that it’s called Love Story and the protagonist is shown as a total asshole. Jessel makes it worse, asking if Carole thinks it’s a “Caroline Bessette summer,” and that everyone is dressing like her, wearing neutrals and minimal dresses and Calvin Klein. Carole definitely bristles at these questions, and I totally get it. Jessel says in her confessional that if she died and people were having a “Jessel Taank summer,” she would love it. Sure, but that’s not what is going on here. She’s boiling Carole’s friend, someone she was very close to and spent years hanging around with, down to a trend, down to a TikTok, down to a color palette and a designer and a heap of signifiers that have nothing to do with her personality, her being, her laugh, the way that she hated going to the movies after 5 p.m., the way that she would touch Carole’s arm and laugh when they were both making fun of their partners right in front of their faces, the way that she would answer the phone like there was nothing wrong after she and John fought but Carole would still know, she could hear it in her voice, the wetness of tears that turned to snot and that she swallowed over and over and hid with a smile. They can’t ask about those things; they wouldn’t think to. Some things are not suitable for brunch.