The Dud Avocado - Elaine Dundy [58]
We walked into the drawing room, where everyone was sitting around like a bunch of stuffed owls. Gradually they came to life. About seven of them began exchanging glances with each other, very slowly at first and then with increasing vivacity, until exchanged glances were ricocheting around the room like bullets. I waited for the contractions in my stomach to start and the familiar jangle of nerves. I found I was not only not receiving them, but totally unable to produce them. I really was too tired. A blessed calm descended upon me and I surveyed the scene like it was something through the wrong end of Uncle Roger’s telescope. When I surveyed the buffet, I headed straight for it. Larry was so right. I ate as I had never eaten before. Then I looked around. The International Set, I said to myself wonderingly.
The first to engage me in a duel of wits was an elderly American gentleman of the Southern-fried variety. He wanted to know what part of the States I was from but when I told him I’d been born in St. Louis he became violently distressed. He seemed to take it as a personal affront that I hadn’t been born in the heart of the Southland—South Carolina, for example. In fact he got so childishly querulous and wrought up about it that I suddenly realized he was batty. In one glorious non sequitur, he demanded to know exactly what I had against the South.
“Too much woodwork,” I answered, just for the hell of it. Why should he get a sensible answer? Unfortunately I had chosen one of those split seconds when the clouds parted and the old boy was having a brief spell of sanity.
“Woodwork?” he asked suspiciously. “What’s woodwork got to do with it? What do you mean, woodwork?” he kept on asking me over and over again—boy, it was his Moment of Truth.
I suddenly realized why I’d said it. He looked just like the woodwork teacher—Carpentry, they called it—at one of my schools. I remembered his report on me at the end of the term: “Sally Jay has done good woodwork but she should try to be more co-operative and less vindictive. Promoted to Fourth grade.”
“I don’t know. I read it in a book somewhere, I guess. I’ve forgotten where,” I gibbered.
Luckily the clouds had already rolled back again. He shook his hoary locks and muttered something about not understanding why the young folks were permitted to go gallivantin’ around the Lord knew where nowadays without their mothers.
I said didn’t he think I was a little old to be trailing mother around with me and he said No, by golly, he did not, and I got irritated and said that maybe he ought to be with his mother, and then I realized that my God he was. Not far from us was an enormous mountain, about five hundred tons of insipid grandeur, covered in black velvet and topped by a fleece of white hair. One look at the two profiles was enough to convince me that they were out of the same cookie cutter. It was mothah, all right.
I backed away from him into a cluster consisting of a very famous musical-comedy actor called Rollo, a skinny old woman covered in ornaments and got up rather like a hysterical Christmas tree, and a superbly dressed, superbly indolent, superbly at home young man who was beginning, I noticed, superbly to get on Rollo’s nerves. In an evening of “firsts” I may as well mention that it was also the first Australian I had ever met.
“I think she behaved disgracefully,” complained the Australian. “I said it to her back and I’ll say it to her face.”
“I don’t know which is which,” snapped Rollo. “A woman of intarissable vapidity. Not you, my dear,” he turned to me. “My dear, you were delightful. Completely delightful.” He said it in a warm famous voice of such passionate sincerity as to be utterly indistinguishable from the real thing, and then added in a slightly lower but equally carrying tone, “But my dear, who was that you were supposed to be playing opposite, poor child? And I don’t know what to call that last set—an Obstacle Course, I think, really, don’t you? No, I mean it, you were quite marvelous. One of the seven wonders of the world, wasn