Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: A+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Away We Go
By Jacob Clifton | Season 5 | Episode 3 | Aired on 06.22.2009
Silas is impressed; Nancy not so much. "Shane, you're going back with Aunt Jill, and you will keep your mouth shut to her husband and her children about what a nasty whore their Mommy is." Jill shakes her head: "No. He's all yours. In so many ways." Silas's delight in chaos has been my favorite thing about him ever since he became a man and stopped popping holes in deaf girls' condoms. Silas leaves them alone together, taking Shane off to unpack.
"Your little monster is not coming back to my home," Jill opens, and Nancy grits her teeth. "Perfect Jill Price-Gray. Perfect husband, in her perfect house, can't do the only thing I've ever asked her, in my whole life." There's not room in Bubbie's house for all Jill's horror at this hypocrisy. "Would you, could you... Why do you think I stopped talking to you?" Because you're a self-righteous bitch, Nancy offers. It's not even really a fight, just the memory of a fight and the pattern of fighting that keeps them both standing up. If they didn't have each other to blame, they're saying, they'd both be dead by now, of grief. "You know what, I don't need this. I'm better. This was a slip. I've worked through my codependence and I'm done bailing you out every time you get into trouble..." Nancy tries to explain that lecturing is not helping, but gets distracted: "That's a cute necklace!"
Jill thanks her sister, and they forget the fight for a second, forget their various crises, in ecstasies of shopping. "I got it at Nordstrom. No, you know what? I think I got this online, at Etsy." (Drunk Etsying is the new drunk eBaying, which was once the new drunk Amazoning. Don't do it.) Nancy nods and asks again: "Shane's not safe here."
Which gives Jill permission to come in from another angle, and ask her sister if she's okay. "I'm fine! It's nothing, I'm just pregnant." And the father? "It's complicated." It always is, with Nancy, but Jill's not allowed to say that without activating that viper addict thing Nancy always hides so well: "You know what, Jill, if you're not going to help me, then fuck off." If the addicts had a parade that would be their Casey Scott flag, Once You Really Need It To Stop, They Ask You Why You Started, because the devilment of addiction is poor time management: I can't be bothered saving myself until it's too late, so why are you holding my past actions against me now? They are both right and they are both really wrong. Jill stares at Sucio, who is a powerful presence in many ways: "Is he the father?" Nancy gives a wonderfully offhand, exasperated "Sure."