Мариам Петросян - The Gray House

Today the room reeked of menthol and medical alcohol, again reminding Ralph of the dentist.

Homer and Raptor, slumped in chairs, had all the appearance of victims of a natural disaster. Homer's balding dome was crowned by an enormous cold pack. Raptor stared fixedly at the ceiling. Their ties looked like they'd been used recently in vigorous attempts to strangle their owners. Their jackets were nowhere to be seen.

One desk was occupied by Darling, applying a fresh coat of paint to her face; another, by downcast Sheep, preparing a new cold pack. Sheriff crowded the door to the balcony. The smoke from his cigar wafted into the room, and that concerned him not a bit: his body was safely in the smoking zone, and where the smoke chose to go was its own business. Sheriff wasn't about to miss a single detail of what was going on in the room.

Ralph sat on the sofa between the two chair dwellers, moaning Homer and ominously silent Raptor. Sheep tiptoed over to Homer, changed the cold pack, and shot Ralph a reproachful glance. “Where have you been hiding while we were in agony here, desperately in need of your help?” was the approximate message of that glance. Or maybe she was just chiding him for staying silent. Or for lack of compassion. Or maybe neither. Sheep's watery stare seemed always on the verge of tears and always accusing of something. The playful curls of her hair and the girlish ruffs of her dresses clashed with the permanently sour expression on her face.

“Thankfully I was able to refrain from throttling anyone today,” Darling muttered through clenched teeth, studying her reflection in the compact's mirror. “An amazing feat of self-control ...”

“Ha, ha,” Raptor said grimly, as a reminder that he was still alive.

“And to think, I assumed Lenses had set the bar impossibly high,” Darling continued. “But that oversexed cow Bedouinne managed to top even her.”

“How can you say things like that about a child?” Sheep exclaimed indignantly.

“A child?” Darling almost dropped the compact in surprise. “A child? The dumb little slut looks older than her mother!”

“Language,” Sheep squeaked.

This was obviously far from the worst language that had been uttered in the room recently, and Sheep's indignation somehow lacked conviction. Ralph again congratulated himself on not coming up here earlier. The hysterics seemed to have died down, and he wasn't enough of a sympathetic listener to precipitate another round. He had no doubt, however, that all the sordid details of the indignities suffered by each of them would be rehashed anew before the meeting started.

“What is it you're trying to see there?” Homer said caustically. “New lines that appeared since morning?”

“No!” Darling snapped the compact shut. “New gray hairs in my nose!”

They exchanged looks full of deep mutual loathing. Homer self-consciously probed his own nose. There was plenty of hair in it, gray as well as other colors, projecting happily far beyond its confines, so he could only take Darling's remark as a personal jab.

“Look who's talking! Like he's the one aggrieved,” Darling sneered. “After everything that we had to listen to on his account!”

Homer moaned, jerking his legs in untied shoes, and hoisted the cold pack higher.

“He has the temerity to portray himself a victim!”

Sheep, seemingly to cool down the room's overheated atmosphere, switched on the fan standing in the corner. Sheriff stomped to the windowsill and mounted it.

Darling, unexpectedly pretty in anger, her eyes shining and even her nose appearing somewhat shorter, addressed Ralph directly.

“Now you tell me, whatever has he been thinking, dragging three Pheasants to meet with the parents of one of them? I wish someone would explain that to me!”

Nobody was planning to explain to her anything about Pheasants, Ralph least of all, but Darling wasn't really in need of explanations. She wanted to spill out her frustration. A silent listener was perfectly acceptable. But she got some unexpected competition.

“Damn Shark couldn't be pried off the phone,” Raptor said to Ralph as if taking him into confidence. “Forty minutes! Booger's daddy is eating me alive, and the old codger keeps babbling nonsense into the dead receiver. Ain't that a riot?”

“What did he want?” Ralph said, accepting that one way or the other he'd have to listen to the whole story.

“Who?”

“Booger's father.”

“A graduation certificate, what else! What do all of them want when they start that whole song and dance about quality of education? ‘I don't care where you get it from, that's your problem, you should have warned us that you were running a school for retards here,’ all that crap.”

Raptor rubbed his forehead.

“Boogy brought his old man a copy of the question booklet. So this buffalo keeps waving the goddamned sheet in front of my face, roaring so loud you could hear him two blocks away. Wants to know how come most of our students botched the answers to those questions. And what am I supposed to tell him? When the hardest one in there is ‘Austria is located in a. Europe, b. Asia’? And to top it off, those disgusting little Pheasants of his”—he nodded at Homer, who blinked guiltily—“are right there next to us, tossing out Latin proverbs and happily citing philosophers of antiquity.”

Homer moaned, loudly and defiantly, sending Sheep scrambling.

“Then,” Raptor went on, winding himself up, “Cupcake's mom takes that splotchy little scrap from Booger's daddy, acquaints herself with its contents, and starts an inquest, for what possible reason these boys here”—Raptor switched to a high-pitched voice—“these two gentlemen, who have just displayed an astonishingly high level of intellect, could have failed this, the most straightforward of tests.”

Ralph couldn't help himself and smiled.

“So, how did they wiggle out of it?”

“Wiggle out?” Raptor said. “Pheasants? They didn't! They just sat there ogling us and smirking! I was the one who had to do all the wiggling. For everyone, because Alf here decided to keel over and play dead!”

“It was a heart attack,” Homer protested. “I really could have died. There was not an ounce of deceit!”

“Yeah, right.” Raptor nodded. “Of course not. One's clutching his chest, the other his phone. Guess who's left to deal with the mess?”

“If you ask me,” Sheriff growled from his perch, pointing at Homer, “it's all his fault. There's no call to be pushing his Pheasants everywhere. They'd give anyone the willies. Now take my Ratlings, they make sense whenever they open their mouths.”

“I see, so that's why their mouths are always hanging open,” Darling interjected. “And their eyes are closed. And their heads are twitching.”

“Right, that's what I'm talking about,” Sheriff said, unfazed. “Just the ticket.”

Homer, wearing a deeply haunted look, swallowed a couple of pills and took a swig out of the mug brought over by Sheep.

“Coffee? Tea?” Sheep addressed the assembly.

Before anyone could answer, Shark came in. His suit was rumpled, the tie hung askew, but overall he was unusually bright and businesslike. Godmother followed right behind him.

Shark went to the table, poured himself some water, drank it up, looked around the room with the air of a commander before the final battle, and announced, “The topic of today's discussion is graduation.”

Ralph thought that Shark couldn't be anything but disheartened by what he saw. His hastily assembled putative army was in disarray. Homer, even after having pulled the cold pack off his head, cut a pitiful figure. Raptor, with his twisted tie and vacant stare, wasn't much better. Sheriff, perched on the windowsill, brought to mind Humpty-Dumpty just before that great fall. Flustered Sheep imitated a pincushion. Darling, as always, overdid it while applying her makeup; the result was a teenager on her first trip to a nightclub.