The Real Houselives of my Lizard Brain
I’m fairly new to the Real Housewives franchise. From what I can tell, OC and Atlanta are entirely without merit. New York is marginal; sort of like the feeling of maniacal jester tears being forced out of a botox-paralyzed face, so, ya know, great, but the sulphuric brimstone smell can overpower at times. I like how Kelly Bensimon’s closest fictional resemblance is the large sheep dog, Max, from The Little Mermaid, always bounding around and shaking off salt water as she tries to communicate in anxious barks about the goings-on of creatures with fins instead of legs; jagged metal cans instead of hearts.
New Jersey, though. New Jersey is a traumatic scene from childhood I thought I’d shaken, until I turned on cable recently, and it started hitting me like a psychedelic plate of Italian cookies that are all, in fact, madeleines. Dina is the good queen. If you pull on Teresa Giuduce’s ringlets, different things emerge from her, the spandex-sausaged fertility totem: children, mob movies, delicious plates of fried calamari.
Of course I worry about being complicit in the misogyny of RH but then all the ladies of NJ seem like characters from the Disney film Hocus Pocus except with all the primal richness of witch history behind them. Teresa and her three salty-voiced girls making jars of sauce in the garage and then with her one slightly lazy twinkling blue eye she tells you how women who are time-of-the-month can’t be making the sauce.
Teresa. I don’t know what’s on loop in the mall in her head. The mall is air-conditioned and paved in Carrera marble. When she reaches the end of a long corridor, the click echoing from her gold heeled shoes, a fountain is beginning to erupt afresh.
When I watch it I feel like the globe of America hasn’t stopped turning since 1985 and someone’s always coming around the block in a Corvette interrupting a game of street hockey. There is fresh bread on the table of Di Pasquale Felicitano Ristorante Italiano, the one next to the dry cleaner in the strip mall; the lazy Susan of your microwave oven will bring your refrigerated leftovers to warmth and there are gold bracelets, so many gold bracelets and thin gold crosses dangling from the leather tan wrists and thoraces of women who smell like department stores.
In fact I feel sort of like that thing the kids are doing these days—the “California Dreaming,” where they asphyxiate each other until they get high. And I have to assume the only thing that could be in a high to make you do something as stupid as that is the same thing that makes me do things as stupid as this, this New Jersey thing, the thing that is O to be on the cool tiles of Dina Manzo’s kitchen floor while she wafts around under her mantle of blonded cotton candy and pours herself a chai.
