On Jasmine-Scented Stink Bombs and the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills

Saturday, March 4th, 2024

I can’t get my brain off. I can’t get it off, get it off, get it OFF…

Until today, when I get as high as I can and then I get higher, with a drink for good measure and I spend the whole day watching Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.

Until not only is my brain off, but it is MELTING off, it is liquid, it is volcanic, oh, my brain.

I braved the fortresses today, peeked out beyond the moat, today, a shabbos.

Because it is Fern’s birthday, that’s why.

My cute little niece. Nine. Nine? I think she is nine.

Whenever I think about Fern’s birthday, I think about the day of her actual birth and about Sekhar’s and my fight.

He had been trying to get us a new phone plan. I personally thought it was a giant waste of time; we were already paying an affordable amount and we got service at our house, which was a bit out in the boondocks.

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

There was a reason he wanted to switch to T-Mobile, though, and he assured me the transition would be seamless. He went on to spend seemingly hours of time on the phone with customer service.

When Forest was born, I was supposed to be there. I was still a teenager, in Nowhere New York with my parents and little brothers for Dad’s sabbatical. Or…no, wait. I’m confusing my timelines. Wait, how old was I when Forest was born?

Holy shit, yeah, no, okay, I was seventeen and dating Asher still.

He’s a January baby. A cold January baby. So cold that when a blizzard started threatening near her due date, Mom and Dad went up to Boston early, leaving me in charge of the house and my two younger brothers.

I woke up in the middle of the night to a freezing house. My brothers woke up, too. The pipes had frozen over and the heat had long since fled the building. With Mom and Dad gone, we called Emma and Eric. It was 5am. Eric being Eric, he was over at the house by about 5:30, a grim smile on his face and a cup of quickly-icing-over coffee in his hands.

He had the heat back going in a few hours.

Sometime in all that ruckus, far away in Boston, Forest was born.

I was sad I had missed the birth, but I drove up a few days later and got to meet him then, a tiny pink little alien attached to my sister’s breast.

I remember even earlier than that, when she first told me she was pregnant. It was summer still, and she wasn’t showing yet.

Pregnant. My big sister was pregnant.

She hadn’t been out of the house that long, had she? Or maybe she had. Six years, it had been.

She was six years older than me but I felt like I was light years behind her. Despite our dreams of homes next door, the cousins playing, I couldn’t even imagine being a mom.

I hugged her. She cried. I cried.

I remember thinking, This is it. Everything will be different after this.

As far as I know, the new baby doesn’t have a name yet.

She is a month and a half.

They’ve been calling her “number six.”

“Have you spoken to your sister?” asked my aunt when I spoke to her yesterday. I was calling her about this potential work trip on the West Coast this fall. I will be more excited about it if I get to see her.

“No,” I responded, and my voice must have sounded clipped because she said,

“Are you two talking?”

“No,” I said again.

This was reminding me of my conversation with my mom last week.

“Have you spoken with your sister?” my mom said, only she sounded less curious and more accusatory.

“You sound accusatory!” I said, proud of how even-keeled I was presenting.

My mom sighed. “You’re going to have to talk to her eventually, you know.”

“Mama,” I said, and now I could feel the blood rising, “Please don’t blame me for the fact that Mindy and I are on the outs. She is a narcissist who abuses her children and leaves me feeling depleted and sad every time I speak to her. She has ninety thousand problems she won’t solve, most of them of her own causing, she will drain you asking for advice she then won’t take, and when was the last time she was there for you? Not in a long, long time,” I spat out bitterly.

I couldn’t see my mom but I could imagine her lifting her hands in defeat.

“Alright, alright,” she said. “But…could you tell her that?”

“I HAVE,” I exploded, exasperated. “Multiple times! She just pretends to forget and acts like she has no idea what is wrong.”

I didn’t go into that much detail with my aunt, just skirted the subject back to my potential visit this fall.

That would be draining, too, though. I adore my aunt, but she and her husband bicker like you would not believe.

The number of intense conversations required to run the dishwasher…

My aunt has been telling me for a few years now that I should visit her. But when was the last time she came to visit me?

When was the last time any of them came to visit me?

Mom and Dad have. So that is nice.

When Reed was born, I was…where was I when he was born? I wasn’t…shit I was there. I WAS!

I had been back to visit my sister in Boston countless times by then. I took the train sometimes, but more frequently I drove. I guess I had my Subaru by then. Pippi was her name, and she sported a bumper sticker on her bum that read, Adios Pantalones.

That was before I learned how to speak Spanish. It was probably the first words I ever learned in Spanish, actually.

Goodbye, Pants!

My sister would take me to concerts and yoga classes. We biked all over Boston, visiting her husband at work, grocery shopping at the organic markets. One time, we volunteered as ushers in exchange for free tickets to Blue Man Group.

I remember them being very strange and wasting a lot of toilet paper for no apparent reason in an act that made no sense.

I was right about things changing after Forest was born. My sister had always been prone to nervousness about one thing or another, but she seemed so utterly helpless with this new thing in her life that screamed uncontrollably for hours at a time.

I don’t remember too much about those visits but I do think there was less Blue Man Group and more… baby. For sure. I mean, it would be weird if there wasn’t.

We planned in advance, with Reed. I had missed Forest’s birth but I was going to be there for this one.

I don’t remember the phone call. I just remember being there, in Mindy’s living room, ready. At the beginning of the night, as she went into labor, she played the piano. It was very wholesome and I was ready to accompany her on this big moment.

Except she wasn’t ready. She had changed her mind. Last time she had wanted everyone in with her when it came time for the hard labor, but this time she didn’t.

Which honestly, is understandable. I can’t even imagine going through childbirth, much less including an audience.

But.

When you have a home birth, the waiting room is your living room.

And there are no sound barriers.

So I just stayed in the living room, for hour after hour after hour, listening to what sounded like my sister’s torture and execution.

Then, I saw the bat.

Or maybe my dad saw it?

All I know is, there was a bat flying around the house.

We made the mistake of mentioning it to the midwife, who told us that the bat should be found and killed immediately. Frozen, to later send off to a lab, to determine whether or not it had posed a threat to anyone in the house, especially my laboring sister and my about-to-be-born nephew.

My father was bitterly upset; he doesn’t kill anything except mosquitos and, it must be argued, the occasional fish. But in any case, the bat had done nothing wrong, and here he was, charged with its murder and disposal.

I don’t know how he got it, but I think he did, in the end. I imagine it haunts him to this day. My father is sensitive like that. Or…maybe he’s forgotten. He forgets things, too.

At some point, Reed was born, and eventually I went in to meet him.

I was in Central America when Willow was born. But Fern…Fourth time was a charm, and my sister was pretty certain there would be no more babies, or at least there probably wouldn’t be, so this time was it.

By then I was living with Sekhar on the old farmhouse by the river, and he was trying to get us a new cell phone plan.

We were four hours away from my sister, but we all reasoned that if we dropped everything and jumped into the car the second she called us, there was a good chance we would make it before the birth.

Sekhar, pediatric medical nerd that he was, was also excited to attend.

For reasons that I have now mercifully forgotten, at some point during the cell phone transition we had two active phone plans, with at least two phones between us.

Yet despite that, or as I recall, because of it…

I just remember that for some reason there was a gap of service in our living room.

Which is where Sekhar left the phones the night my sister went into labor with Fern.

I saw the messages hours after.

We jumped in the car and drove as fast as we could, but it was still too late. Sekhar and I had missed the birth by 45 minutes, and I will probably never forgive him.

Which is funny, because honestly, did I need to be physically present for childbirth? In the olden days, only women who were already mothers were present. I think there was a reason for that.

So maybe Sekhar did me a favor.

Leif was born during the pandemic and we didn’t even try to have me attend. And I was in Panama for Number Six, the-niece-who-has-not-yet-been-named.

Juran has lent me a pole. Originally they were going to come over with a studfinder and help me set it up, but I started feeling sick so we agreed they would just help me bring the pole to my place and I’d ask Matt to help me set it up.

I was like, “Is it too heavy for you to carry it be yourself?” and they said,

“I can’t do it alone!”

Then, I got to their place, and Juran was like, “You think you can handle it?”

In no WORLD am I stronger than Juran is!

Bratty little bunny.

Today my shoulder hurts a bit and I blame the obnoxiously heavy pole, which I carried alone for five blocks and up three flight of stairs, in a bottom-heavy velcro package that didn’t have a proper strap or give you a way to maneuver it.

Juran wants to sell the thing to me anyway, so it’s not really like they’re doing me a grand favor by lending it.

Mommy is so going to give them a demotion when she finds out.

Still, though…I have a pole.

Oh! Oh! And not only did I survive some grownupping this week that was utterly insanely emotionally exhausting, but I also survived a client complaint about a mistake I had made.

It’s hard enough dealing with customers when they blame me for problems of their own creation, but this was actually my fault.

Well…technically, it was my web designer’s fault for not answering me about it when I brought it to her attention multiple times two months ago.

But, I had known there had been no follow-up, and I could have chased her, but didn’t.

She is SO getting fired.

Anyway, the point is, the client was understandably pissed, and I did NOT spiral into a panic attack!

I felt the uptick in adrenaline and butterflies in the stomach to be sure, and the seconds seemed to tick by inexorably slowly as I tried to access the administrative backend of my website to confirm the problem.

Sure enough, a charge of $742 had been made for no good reason. Eeeek.

Sometimes I go days without checking my email, but luckily I got this one within three hours.

I reversed the charge, cancelled the subscription, sent two extremely crisp emails to my developer and called the client to personally apologize.

He was mollified at once, and used the opportunity to push for me to give him something extra for free, which I almost agreed to without thinking because of how vulnerable I was to his approval in that moment.

People, I swear.

Anyway, the fact that I didn’t beat myself up during or after the problem, and that I resolved it as quickly as I did, is a cause for pride to be sure.

Thursday, March 7th, 2023:

Fucccccckkkkkkkkk.

Holy shit.

It had been a long time since I felt the Gale orbit. But this…this was more than an orbit. This was a Gale stink bomb launched from…a Jasmine-smelling stink bomb canon.

As a matter of fact, the whole thing reeked of Jasmine.

That fact didn’t stop me from feeling really, really hurt. Like, punched to the gut, hurt. Really, Gale, you think that I’m going around spreading vindictive rumors about you to hurt your reputation?!

Said Lorelai, writing to her anonymous audience.

Okay, touché, fair point. But even here, even now, I’m not revealing her secrets to the world. I’m not spreading rumors. I’m talking about my pain in relation to her, while trying very hard to make sure that I don’t hurt her.

But clearly I didn’t try hard enough, and in a moment of weakness I trusted Jasmine with my pain. And Jasmine, smart girl she is, has realized that she could hurt me by hurting Gale.

So gross that she would then go off and…

No. I can’t even.

I immediately sent Gale two voice memos, spent the entire day thinking about her, sent one more voice memo, and now it’s up to her. She can decide for herself whether she wants to trust me or trust a stink bomb.

I wonder how Gale will receive my messages. I wonder if she’ll remember the time she said (more than once, actually) how I was one of the most trustworthy people she knew. How much she respected me.

I still remember holding her in my room that day after I read her my letter. We were both crying.

“I can see through the fog right now. I understand myself better,” she said, thanking me. Her appreciation allowed me to feel the tiniest bit hopeful that perhaps this exhaustion, this total emotional depletion had all been worth it. It allowed me to imagine a world in which I wouldn’t regret engaging her repeated urgings for me to “talk it out” with Richard.

The cautious optimism only got me so far, though. She felt better, but I was scared. I was scared because I knew a bit more than she did about these patterns I had written about. Patterns that don’t usually change. Patterns that, gone unchecked, would likely result in her reality being re-written for her on a pretty regular basis.

And if there’s one things abusers like to write out of their victims’ narratives, it’s the victims’ close family and friends.

Support systems do not further the cause of a perpetrator who is trying to take a person’s kindness and point it at themselves like a spigot 24/7, while radiating outward the insecurities they don’t care to examine, to the grave injury of those in their close proximity.

“Sometimes these kinds of things effect friendships,” I said cautiously.

She laughed, at that. She actually laughed.

Or maybe she didn’t. It’s been, what, two and a half years since this conversation happened? Almost. I’ve kind of lost track. But I remember her laughing. I remember her saying how silly she thought it was, how impossible it was that anything might come between us. That she could ever stop trusting me.

And yet. How many months later was it? Two. Two months later, she wasn’t laughing anymore.

Two months later, she’d had time to discuss it with Richard, and she wasn’t sure she could trust me anymore.

That was the first thing she told me when she saw me.

I wanted to scream it at her then, I want to scream at her now, “Do you know how painful that is?! All I want in this WORLD is for you to be happy, but you’ll believe all the manipulators who tell you you’re a terrible person, and then you’ll trust them when they say I am not a good friend?”

I hate her, I hate people, I HATE ALL OF THEM.

I don’t really hate her, just like I don’t really hate…anyone, really. Well…I hate the bad people. I think I do hate them.

But when I said it about Gale, I didn’t mean it.

Mommy says it’s okay to say “hate” like that. She says it doesn’t mean I really hate whoever it is, because I don’t. But that it momentarily helps me to express a feeling and get it out.

That’s what she says.

Oh, the baby has a name! Juniper. Juniper Hermione, if you’ll believe it. Oh, my sister. :)

I think my anger scared Estrella this afternoon. She was like, “I totally understand your feelings. And you are entitled to them! But…perhaps, just maybe, there’s a silver lining.”

Estrella can always find the silver lining.

“What is it this time? That I HATE PEOPLE?!”

“No, that…well, that you’ve had some closure. Right?”

“Closure? How? Because…”

“Well, now you know how Gale feels.”

Do I, though?

Does Gale even know how Gale feels?

I wonder if/when she’ll listen to my voice memos.

I wonder if she’ll wait until she’s with somebody safe to do it, and who that person might be. Pierre? I don’t even know if they’re still together.

Clearly she’s still with Richard. That’s for damn sure.

The fucked up thing is how very…childish it all is. Straight out of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.

I almost stopped watching it, actually, when Lisa Vanderpump weaponizes Taylor’s actual trauma just because she’s feeling snakey.

That’s what Jasmine just did.

So gross.

Well, soon my bubble will be strong enough, and none of this will matter.

Love,

Lorelai