Nancy's in bed when the workers come busting in to continue renovating the bathroom. Shane, wearing contractor head gear, puts a cup of coffee in her very sleepy hand and immediately starts asking for her opinions on some samples. "Bubblicious or Ribbon Field? I like Bubblicious, but it's on backorder, and Ribbon Field fell off a truck so there may not be enough..." Shane swears he just wants to give her options, and she reminds him he's the contractor, not the designer. She reminds him he's gotta go to school and he says he's a corrupt contractor now, but she reminds him he's their family's one shot at legitimacy: "You're going to grow up and become a doctor, a lawyer, or a business executive." Heh.
Downstairs, Cesar is looking for Nancy on behalf of Esteban. Shane, of course, thinks he's the copper pipe guy, and doesn't want her getting in the middle of things. Cesar tells her it's time to visit Esteban, and she pulls her Nancy shit, irritating him. "I have to take my kid to school, and then I have work. So maybe later on this afternoon? ...No?" She takes her coffee upstairs and dresses up all nice.
They pull up outside Shane's school on the first day in the Mexican-plated limousine. Shane's not happy. "Sometimes you eat the bear, sometimes the bear eats you," Cesar tells him. Shane is not comforted. "Some people are victims because they allow themselves to be." Nancy -- an expert in this phenomenon, and about to get her PhD -- agrees with Cesar, and gives Shane $10 in case he's still hungry after eating the bear. "Can't I do drug things with you guys?" Neither Nancy nor Cesar responds to this, and he leaves. "He's going to get his ass kicked," Cesar says, and Nancy notes dispassionately that he's used to it.
Celia's alarm has been going for awhile when Isabelle finally comes in to wake her up. Celia goes from zero to sixty and grabs her daughter by the throat: "Motherfucker!" Jail reflexes are working great there, Celia. Isabelle reminds her that the hotel suites they're living in aren't exactly on the bus route, to dress in clothes like a person, take a shower, give her $10 for lunch, and do her enrollment paperwork. Isabelle! Your mommy's a drug addict! The one upside is that you don't have to do any of these things! "Hand Mommy her pills," Celia says, and Isabelle suggests a breakfast bar instead. Celia makes a ludicrous childish whiny-face and lies back down. "Maybe I'll walk," Isabelle says as Celia washes down a handful of Xanbar with some random bedside water. "Good girl!" Celia says, and passes right out again.
Out at the border, Andy's wearing a "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go" hat with bonus burnoose, and explains why he's given his aliens dry matzo: it's because he's Moses now. Which explains the hat. Their goodie bags include breath mints, a portable fan and copies of Padre Rico, Padre Pobre, which made me laugh, and he tells the illiterates in the group that he also has it on tape. There are a bunch of panties in the tree above them, which one of the guys explains is because it's a Rape Tree, which is to say, that's where evil men rape girls. Then I guess they throw their panties in the tree. That is troubling. Andy suggests moving their little picnic to a less "rapey" atmosphere. Like, New England or something?
Cheese Gotta Have It. Some guy comes in asking if Lisa makes sandwiches, and she reacts poorly. "We're a gourmet shop, not a sandwich shop." Silas tries to talk her into making gourmet sandwiches, but I think she was attacked by a sandwich as a child or something because she is really, really anti sandwiches. You can't even say the word in front of her, is how much she hates them. They hit the bong in the back room, and Silas is not impressed with her weed selection: "I'm guessing you bought it off one of Rad's friends?" He calls it the Cheez-Whiz of pot and they have a conversation about pot cultivation that culminates in him admitting that he's dropped out of school and is now a grower, looking to deal. "I am fucking a teenage drug dealer?" No, he says: "We make love." Aww. Silas gives her a hit from his excellent weed that he grows, and she admits she's been smoking Cheez-Whiz.
In the TJ, Esteban takes his time while they get his lunch ready; Guillermo and Nancy have been summoned for a very awkward sitdown. "Last week Nancy received a portion of your shipment... I instructed you to give her that portion and you did... And then you announced you would kill the marimacha bitch in front of her children." This is news to Nancy and to me, but I guess Guillermo's sad face and Guillermo's lesbian-killing face are too similar to necessarily know the difference. That makes me sad. I don't even think Nancy's capable of having her feelings hurt anymore: she's just like whoa. Esteban explains the SOP: you have to clear slaughter of coworkers, in front of witnesses, with the boss. "Nothing bad is going to happen to Nancy, right?" Guillermo's sad face and lesbian-killing face become one as he realizes that nothing bad is ever going to happen to Nancy, unless she brings it on herself, and probably not even then: "Of course not." You just said a mouthful there, sweetheart. Esteban makes it clear that Nancy's under his protection and dismisses Guillermo. He asks Nancy to stay, and explains that marimacha is an offensive term for a lesbian, which makes her laugh, and offers to take her to lunch.
Celia is asleep on the counter at Maternity World as the third customer of the day walks out without paying. Ignacio is incensed by Celia's degenerating work ethic. "Where's Nancy? I'm lonely," she grumbles. "You're back there with your gun, and your puzzles ... movies... I've just got the donkey, plays Pop Goes The Weasel forty million -- hic..." She passes out on the counter again and he shoves some kind of inhaler in her nose, which gets her revved up a little bit. She offers to fuck him in the back room, but he's like, "RETAIL." She asks what it was, wobbling around all Celia-style, and he shows her a tiny little soccer shoe containing some kind of "stay-awake" medication. Remember when Celia looked down on people for using hillbilly heroin? Because I think even Oxy is a step up from random Mexican meth. "Wha' happen?" He tells her to take better care of herself, and to run the store. "I'm on it. The store is me. ...I'm tingly." He's annoyed by Celia and her mess, and goes back to the storeroom. "Okay, Mama! Let's get you dressed," she says to the customer. I think maybe I could have handled retail if I'd been high all the time... Oh! A lot of shit just started making sense!
Weird Minuteman guy is patrolling the border fence -- including a broken busted area covered in weeds with a sign that says "More Fence Coming 2005" -- when Doug drives up to distract him/be lonely and sad some more. They engage in some community-building discussion of how Mexicans are taking away jobs from decent mop-fucking retarded Americans. "My retarded cousin Tom used to be a janitor. No more. Mexican took his job. After he got caught trying to fuck a mop, but still..." Doug says this is shocking. Minuteman says that his freaky steroid girlfriend from last week has left him: "She was my masterpiece. Six months of injections and I took her from 130 to 215 with a BMI of 18.6. She was two weeks away from an Adam's apple!" He's so sad as he says this; he tells Doug a story about how she used to dead-lift him after they had sex. That is some R. Crumb shit right there. Do not like. "There'll be others," Doug says. "Not like Hope." Where on earth is this story heading?
Up on the hilltop, Andy watches them leave. "I will lead you now. You shall be a free people! ...Lady Liberty beckons." They run down the hill; Doug radios in: "Not a bean on the tortilla ... no spic, just span..." Sigh. Ordinarily this would be the hardest part to watch, but of course Nancy and Celia are busily slipping deeper and deeper into hells of their own devising, so it's just part of the overall disgusting texture. Davenport, under a blanket in the back, waves them over and passes out baseball uniforms. Doug asks if anybody's seen Maria, but they haven't. Doug and Andy hug in jubilation over their first shipment as Davenport explains the baseball costumery. "What do we do now?" Nobody knows.
Esteban pulls out Nancy's seat at lunch, and asks about the lesbian thing. "Around Guillermo I am. Made it easier to be friends. When we were friends. Before he wanted to kill me in front of my children." He says it's okay now, and Julio comes running up to show Esteban that he gave blood. Esteban tells her to order whatever she wants, and Julio will make it happen. "Elk," she jokes, and Julio nods and gets ready to find her some elk. She stops him and says to just make whatever his best thing is; Esteban orders the same. They talk about how it's almost like she's on a date with the Mayor of Tijuana, and she excuses herself.
There's a poster of Esteban in the bathroom; she's drawing on a lipstick mustache and antennae when shots ring out in the restaurant. She comes out and the place is wrecked; secret service guys are sending out radio calls for help; Esteban is caring for a woman on the floor when Nancy walks up. Esteban promises to pay Julio for the damage, and one of his guys tells him to get out of there. He yells and says he still wants to have lunch, and cracks open a beer. He assures the crowd at large that everything's going to be fine, and notices that his neck is bleeding a little bit.
"Do you have any Neosporin?" Nancy looks through her purse -- hair gone crazy, yet again, from this experience -- and comes up with Twizzlers, tampons, and a Tide stick. No problem. Esteban attempts to sit her back down and have normal lunch, because people are watching and need to know it's okay. Nancy points out that he didn't drink from his beer when he was toasting the crowd, which is bad luck, and he says he doesn't like drinking from the bottle. Me neither. A shaky person who has no problem with that is named Nancy Botwin, and she downs it in one: "But then, I have trouble breathing after I've been shot at, which clearly you don't, so... I guess we all have our things."
"Another school, another first day," says Isabelle: "Another sweaty glass of social stigma." You know what's going to be awesome? Watching Allie Grant continue to transcend Disney for the rest of our lives. She's so great, and so young, and she's going to be doing this forever. That's going to be awesome. Shane tries to mantrify Isabelle that they are interesting and worthwhile people, but she's coming from the School of Hodes where you ain't shit, biscuit. "Yeah, well. If only life were a Judd Apatow movie where geeks rule the world. But it's not, so let's just suck it up." Word. Not to mention that it's not even realistic in the way of movies, because Seth Rogan is so the hot male version of the naughty librarian where the guy falls for her and nobody in the movie can believe it but you're like, "Um, no matter how many pairs of spectacles you put on Rachael Leigh Cook at one time, she's still fucking hot."
Shane locates the most popular boy in school and says hello, is greeted with a warm and open smile, and then bashes Dan's face in with a lunch tray. "Don't fuck with me," he says. Isabelle is horrified. How many fucked up things are they putting on Shane's plate this year? Graft, Oedipal masturbation, and now jailhouse preemptive strikes? Wake me up when he starts arming himself.
"Medium, large, large, small, petite... Petite maternity... Heh." Celia's still high as shit; some lady walks up and asks for a green sweater in blue. "Nice choice!" she says, slings her scarf over her shoulder like Amelia Earhardt, and rings up the sweater. "Forty! Two! Ninety! Nine! Pleeeeease. You want the box? A bag? The box the bag?" The lady's like, "Your freaky behavior is hilarious, but no. I just want it in blue?" Celia asks why she didn't say so, and hurls herself at the rack, which the lady has already checked. She runs back to Ignacio, forgets why she's there, and begs for more drugs. "Soccer shoe, soccer shoe..." He gives her a hit without looking up from his futbol game, and she snorts it gratefully. "Goal!" She runs back out, where the lady is still waiting for her to accomplish basic shit. So... "So what?" Um, so do you have it blue? "Just take the green come on come on come on green is the color of spriiiiing who's ? Let's go!" The lady bounces.
Esteban tells Nancy they can leave the restaurant when he's finished his coffee. No matter what they throw at him, he's going to pretend everything's okay, and he's going to drink his coffee. Just like Nancy. He lays out the possibilities for who's trying to kill him this week. The salt shaker is one group, the pepper is another. "Let me guess, you're the hot sauce," Nancy says, but no: "I am the table." That's all Nancy needed to hear. Her whole demeanor changes, and he notices. They talk about how people are constantly trying to kill each other, and occasionally/often kill innocent people while all of this is going on, but Esteban says he can't control the streets. "The streets that provide the latest in mobile health care," she says, toasting him without sipping her margarita. Bad luck.
Esteban says the philanthropy lets him give back. "Take a little blood, give a little blood..." They talk about how he's a huge hypocrite because he lets his conscience off by playing both sides, but because they're on a date nobody mentions that Nancy's doing the same thing. "You're bleeding again," she says, and tends his wound. He doesn't want anybody to see that he's hurt, but she doesn't care. She takes out a little bit of debris: "Maybe if you put it under your pillow you can get a dollar from the shrapnel fairy," she laughs. He's charmed. "Part of the job: people see you're afraid, they do not vote for you." She says he's afraid of something: dirty bottles, snakes, failure... She gets it right: "Heights." He admits he is. She likes that too. He asks what she's afraid of, and she says, "Calm." Before the storm? No. "The storm I can weather."
And that's your explanation for this season, and last season too. Celia's a good mirror for this: if Celia stopped dancing for five seconds and looked around herself, she'd go quietly insane because her whole life is gone, it burned up in a fire. It was gone before then. So her best bet is to do a bunch of drugs and live this fake half-life where she barely notices her child or her job or the fact that she has no permanent address, and she's completely unprepared for any of that. Nancy? Same exact deal. She's an addict. She's been an addict since Judah died; maybe before, but remember how she wanted her cover business to become her real business so that she could stand on her own? She keeps burning her life down, so she can stay in the game. All Guillermo wanted was for her to run the maternity shop, and she's done everything she can to fuck that up. Why?
If Nancy stopped dancing for five seconds and looked around herself, Judah would still be dead and her kids would still be entirely too fucked up for words. So she's addicted to one thing, which is anything but calm, which takes her further and further out into space, which intensifies the fucked-upness of her life at every turn, which suits her just fine, because as long as she's dancing she doesn't fall apart. Except, like any addict, you have two problems there: one being that nobody can dance forever, and two being the fact of diminishing returns on the high itself. She likes Esteban because he's just like her: no showing fear, no admitting anything real, looking for the high. And because he's smart, like her, and because he's going to give her permission to go crazier than even she has ever gone before. He makes it look good, he makes it look professional. People have been getting into dangerous and weird sexual relationships with government officials since the dawn of time because it's simultaneously powerless -- which is to say responsibility-free -- and completely empowering, by association. Take a little blood, give a little blood.
Andy and Doug put the ersatz baseball team on a bus and say farewell to Davenport, finally realizing that he's going to Florida and not Iowa or whatever. Andy is somewhat sad to see him go; it's only about ten minutes later -- after a long talk about what great people they are for being coyotes, "doing God's work" -- that they realize they forgot to get paid.
Celia runs back in for more soccer shoe -- "Futbol shoe, whatever you call it" -- and he tells her to fuck off. "It helps me," she whines, and offers to pay. "Let me check my purse," she says, by which she means the till. This is just getting better. Every story about drug dealers is also a story about addiction, because addiction is the gas in the machine.
Did you ever read Infinite Jest? It's good as a novel, like as a literary thing, but it also says the smartest thing about addiction and recovery. You could say the entire novel comes down to this idea, which is that the thing that gets you into it is the thing that gets you out. You become addicted to something little by little, minute by minute, day by day. Nobody goes from trying a little blow to giving blowjobs for crack in the space of a week: it's little by little, moment by moment. The moments start to spread out until your objective sense of time is so out of whack that you are unable to count the days. And the thing about recovering from addiction -- and I'm not a great believer in mantras or conventional therapies because I believe strongly that the smarter you are, the crazier you get to be, because you have more answers for everything and you could conceivably justify yourself all the way to dead if you wanted, and people often do, and Nancy Botwin is the smartest person alive so she gets to be the craziest too -- is that the thing that gets you in is the thing that gets you out. Little by little, minute to minute, you don't feed the bear.
Every second that goes by that you want your fix or get it: that's the tunnel down; every second that goes by that you don't feed the bear, that's the tunnel up. And the real bitch about addiction is that feeding the bear is a lot more fun, and there's not really a good reason to avoid doing things that feel good when the alternative is feeling horrible. But second by second, you don't feed the bear and he gets weaker. Frankly I can't understand how anybody kicks their habits when you look at it that way. Because we always put addiction between us and something really bad, whatever it is, that we don't want to look at: that's the real bear. You eat the bear or the bear eats you -- the real truth is, in order to accomplish anything, you have to let the bear eat you if you're ever going to kill it. Like Nancy: on the other side of her addiction is grief and self-hatred and boredom, which are the three bears that Nancy's been running from forever. So as long as she keeps her eyes on the big fake bear, which is her ridiculously fucked up life, she doesn't have to deal with the actual bears. And she's super-smart, so ... somebody's going to have to kill the bear, because no matter what, she keeps missing him. You can't miss the bear.
Lisa, with Silas all over her, starts to ruminate about how Cheese Gotta Have It is very, very strong-smelling, as in, it overpowers all other smells. She shows him a storage room in the back and offers to let him rent it as a grow house. "You really don't want to make sandwiches, do you?" No, she does not. She wants to fuck teenagers and have a grow house, but no sandwiches.
Esteban takes Nancy to see his pet lion. One of three. "My son has turtles," she says, just as they bring in a goat. Nancy can't tear her eyes away; Esteban says this is his favorite part. The lion goes after the goat, which makes a sound I have never personally heard; somewhere Shane's a lamb to slaughter; it's about five seconds later that they're fucking. Oh, Nancy. Up against the wall, he takes off his blood-soaked shirt; in bed, he rakes his claws down her back, drawing blood. It hurts, it feels like something. She thrashes around. When they're done he rolls over with a buenos noches, and she socks him. He slaps her back. They cuddle together with blood on their hands, on the sheets and pillow cases.
Some guy tells the asshole coyote where to find Andy; he stumps off with his leg in a complicated brace where Andy shot him in the knee. At least somebody has the option of learning about accountability. Coyote's walking wounded.
Nancy makes her way back down the rabbit hole to the US with a stupid smile on her face and long scars down her back.