The Dud Avocado (New York Review Books Classics)

by Elaine Dundy

A rowdy bunch on the whole, they were most of them so violently individualistic as to be practically interchangeable.

I thought of sex and sin; of my body and all the men in the world who would never sleep with it.

It’s amazing how right you can sometimes be about a person you don’t know; it’s only the people you do know who confuse you.

But what the hell, I told myself, it wasn’t as if I were one of them or even competing with them, for heaven’s sake, I was merely a disinterested spectator at the Banquet of Life.

I was experiencing that terrifying thing of suddenly seeing someone you know terribly well as if for the first time.

There are, I know (it was in our philosophy course in college), at least a hundred different reasons why some particular event takes place.

That’s my answer to the question what is your strongest emotion, if you ever want to ask me: Curiosity, old bean. Curiosity every time.

I reflected wearily that it was not easy to be a Woman in these stirring times. I said it then and I say it now: it just isn’t our century.

typical of my lunacy to ascribe surrealist motives to a door

It always made me sad to see that there were so many unmarried women in the world—sadder still to realize that they were largely unseen because there were so few public places they dared brave without a sense of strain.

To find someone to giggle with I place just below finding someone to flirt with and just above the ability to knit.

Never undersell yourself unless you want everyone else to.

Why not everybody change countries with everybody else?

I mean, the question actors most often get asked is how they can bear saying the same things over and over again night after night, but God knows the answer to that is, don’t we all anyway; might as well get paid for it.

Frequently, walking down the streets in Paris alone, I’ve suddenly come upon myself in a store window grinning foolishly away at the thought that no one in the world knew where I was at just that moment.

I’m afraid I shall be looking back on this whole episode as yet another example of what my total and abysmal ignorance always gets me into.

Have been crying steadily ever since two o’clock this afternoon when I came back and found Jim’s letter waiting for me. I sat down and replied to it immediately, tears splashing all over the pages and my hands trembling. I sealed it and sent it without even rereading it. It’ll probably make me curl up and die in a couple of days but I can’t help that.

What the hell is the matter with me anyway? Why have I written that monstrously awful letter begging him not to go through with it, swearing black and blue I’ve never loved anyone but him, that I only came down here in the first place to test us? I mean—lies. Nothing but lies.

What happens when your curiosity just suddenly gives out? When the will and the energy snap and it all seems so once-over-again? What’s going to happen to me five years from now, when I wake in the night (or can’t sleep in the first place, like now), take a deep breath to start all over again, and find that I’ve no breath left? When I start running again and find I can’t even put one foot in front of the other?

Lesson I: No matter what you do you’ve got to try to do it well. Otherwise it’s unbearable.

I’ve been thinking. How many things have I ever done well in my life? Done really well? Done wholly with all my attention and concentration focused on the doing? None. Not school. Not college. Not Teddy. Not Jim. Not this.

What was the use of remembering? If it was unpleasant, it was unpleasant. If it was pleasant, it was over.

I look back in wonder at the 1950s. The dull conformity of those years as they are generally imagined is something I don’t recognize.

“Succeeding only means you get another chance to try to do it again.”