Episode Report Card Niki: A | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Sex, Lies, and Bugaboos
By Niki | Season 1 | Episode 4 | Aired on 10.11.1999
Lily arrives at the bookstore with an apology for being late. "I wasn't with him. I met Naomi for lunch." Judy just looks at her. "I did!" Judy tightly says that she believes her. Lily takes a seat near Judy and says that Judy was right. Judy softens and starts to say that she shouldn't have said it, but Lily won't hear of it. She says that she "should have been talking to Grace about it all along, but [she's] bad at this. [She's] a bad parent. Bad, bad, bad!" Lily says she watched Judy get totally obsessed with some guy in the past, "just utterly, utterly...." "Besotted?" Judy offers. And now that Lily's in the same boat, she doesn't get to feel all superior to Judy anymore.
Soliloquy Judy says, "It's hard to admit things, so yeah, it was cool that she admitted it. It still hurt."
Back at the store, Judy tells Lily that it's not too late to talk to Grace about it. Lily laughs ruefully and says, "I can't. I don't know how." Judy assures Lily that she can do it. "Look," she says, "the only thing I've ever done better than you is lose control. And now you can do that too. You can do anything." Lily smiles at this, bolstered. Judy smiles and asks, "So, that lunch story. Still sticking with it?" Lily's smile broadens. "Yeah."
Karen's ass-pole is working overtime. Rick's sitting in her office, apparently having just told her everything about what's been going on. She hides the fact that his screwing Lily is like a knife in her heart by focusing on how surprised she is that Eli felt he had to lie to her. "You think this is my doing, don't you?" she asks rhetorically, spinning accusingly at Rick, who denies it. She says it's obvious that Rick thinks she's sending Eli "some sort of distress signal." Rick starts to protest, but she cuts him off. "It's what you're saying. It's my fault!" she shrills.
"It's my fault," Soliloquy Karen says, matter-of-factly. "I've been leaning on him. I've let my son see how hurt I am....And deep down, I've wanted his help. It's exactly what I swore I'd never do."
Karen tries to convince Rick that she's "relieved." She says she was worried to think "[Eli] could study and do so badly." Rick says, "Well, but the point is --" Karen cuts him off: "I know what the point is. What's the point?" Heh. Between the two of them, they manage to say via broken sentences and awkward pauses that Rick's relationship with Lily is not something from which Karen needs to be protected. Rick stands up to leave and almost forgets his scarf. As she holds it up to him, he flashes back to some Super-8-looking footage of the Christmas when she gave it to him. Bad hair and happy times. There's a catch in Rick's voice when he thanks her.