Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: A+ | 1 USERS: A+ YOU GRADE IT Chai Achievers
By Jacob Clifton | Season 5 | Episode 10 | Aired on 08.10.2009
Fine. So they tell Silas to leave before he announces his candidacy next week, and Silas starts to get mad. He thanks Nancy for being proactive for the first time in her entire life, but before he can finish that sentence she whines, "How is it that I have to beg an eighteen-year-old to travel around Europe with a wad of cash and my blessing?" Silas pulls up a chair and asks an even more apposite question, which is how it is that anyone could reasonably expect him to believe his brothers will be "fine."
"No one is fine around you!" he says, fulfilling this episode's quota, and he explains that, since he's not going to Europe, he'll move into Esteban's house with the rest of them -- which, you remember, Esteban offered months ago, even including Andy in the deal -- to make sure the boys don't get lost in the shuffle. He's really done a good job turning into himself. Achieving a life, as it were.
"This beer's warm! Someone get me another!" Shane shouts from the pool, relapsing into Season One Lupita abuse: "Where's the fucking staff? I have thirst!" Nancy tells him he's cut off, and Silas demands that Esteban promise to protect them all, quite seriously. He's impressed; Silas less so. "So. I'll move my shit in, the two of you can stop dicking around and get married, and on we'll go: one big happy." Nancy smiles, because her idea of happiness is so approximate and cargo-cultish that this actually sounds like a nice idea. "Get in the pool, fags!" screams Shane from the pool, floating by blissed out, and Esteban laughs against her shoulder. He always wanted boys.
Nancy is putting on her lipstick, but has not yet donned The Shrug That Lives, when Andy arrives with his wedding gift: Stevie's paternity paperwork, transferring fatherhood to Esteban. Nancy tells him she registered at Williams-Sonoma ("we could use a new tortilla warmer"), and he almost smiles. She asks if he's sure, and whether he has a plan. He does. A good one: Go back to the house, spread out his life like a map, deliberate on the topography, chart his path. "Maybe call a girl who calls me on my shit," he says, making Nancy smile. She is proud, and scared.
Not only of his absence, but also of his plan itself: this is the day he becomes a man, he's saying. No more addiction, chopping up days into moments and relapses. Actually finding the map, the road, and walking down it. This pendejo who sticks around, maybe he just outgrew her. Maybe next time she leaps he won't catch her, and she can't hedge her bets with Esteban anymore. Maybe she's really getting married after all.
"You love him," Andy says. "You're going down a road." She nods. This much is true. He kisses her cheek. It's more of a blessing than the Shema was. "I think I'm happy for you," she says tearfully, and he reciprocates. It's the only way their goodbye could have gone. "See you downstairs?" she asks, but she already knows the answer. He's gone, with a smile and a firm shake of the head. She smiles at herself in the mirror, shuddering with one sad breath before she moves past it.
And they are married, with Entenmann's cake, and the worst article of clothing ever worn: a strange shrug over her camisole, with these acidic, radioactive hot pink plastic-looking blossoms all over it. They're like polyps, spreading to her hair. Cesar is there, and Ignacio in an ornately hilarious blue tuxedo, and Silas looking uncomfortable in a well-tailored hoodie, and Shane sitting near the cake with a bottle of champagne, and Ignacio weeping with joy while Cesar looks on jealously, crushing a bag of rice to his chest. Trying desperately to let Esteban's happiness be his.
Nancy points at the CONJUGAL VISITS 15 MINUTES sign, joking that she and Guillermo are man and wife for the moment. Long enough to get privacy, anyway. He asks if she wants to fuck, pulling out all his sexy Guillermo tricks, and she likens sex with her post partum self to "throwing a hotdog down a hallway," which is maybe a brilliant play on last year's birth canal metaphor or this year's attempt to take over the entire world using only her cervix and a smile, or maybe it's just gross.
Either way, he laughs and tells her to work on her Kegels. He remembers a cousin of his who practiced "putting pressure" on a cucumber but had to stop when it got stuck, and then three months later a pickle fell out, which is misogynist on some level, but probably also ties into that thing I just don't get about Guillermo or his purpose in Nancy's life. He offers to fuck her in the ass instead, and while she calls this "tempting," she points out that she's not there to socialize: she's there to order a hit on Pilar.
And to offer him a piece of the wedding cake. Three episodes left, and I'm given to understand that this next one is a doozy.