TALIA CALLS

She's I guess the showgirl that is friends with Michelle that kept asking when they were going to get drunk? I assume. Showgirls look alike. That's kind of the whole point of them.

Michelle: "Well. We got here, I bought a dress, went to a party, fought with his mom, had sex, danced with his mom, he got in a car accident, and now he's dead."

In case you thought one character was capable of being anything less than tone deaf and glib about death, let me assure you that this quickly turns into a referendum on how Michelle has terrible taste in men, in this real Catskillsy jazz-hands way of like, "All the good ones are married, or gay, or dead." (Or in Hubbell's case, kind of all three.) Michelle hangs up on Talia, Talia calls back for take two, and it gets cool.

Michelle: "I'm... Lost."
Talia: "Oh, honey."

Michelle: "No, I'm genuinely lost. I have no idea where I am. I have nowhere to sit down, I have nowhere to sleep, I have no clothes to change into... Oh my God I have no key to the house, I don't even know if she'll let me in when I get back, if I get back... They won't let me do anything, they won't let me clean up or make phone calls, she's calling her Mom, and I'm ... walking an old guy's dog -- that's not a sexual euphemism -- and I don't even know when the memorial service is, and no one eats carbs anymore..."

That, there, is what death is like. Everybody said last week that ASP has a problem with death and her funerals are always uncomfortably glib or uncomfortably maudlin or uncomfortably saccharine, and most of this episode I would agree, but that right there is death. We are getting worse and worse at pointing in the direction you can't see -- "I take my spirituality very seriously," Fanny said, "If I don't see it with my own eyes, I don't believe it" -- and this is an example. You get the same place whether you think of death as a person or a place or a thing, but most of all you get there when they won't let you clean up or do anything and you don't know what to wear or where the memorial is.

I don't even think death is really about missing the person, honestly: It's just the unbelievable unfairness and powerlessness of it. I think that's what really pisses us off. That even having become adults, or almost adults, some arbitrary bullshit thing like biology can come along and fuck you without even asking nicely.