Some Other Town by Elizabeth Collison Page B

booming West Texas drawl that stops conversations in crowds and seems to turn in particular the heads of short men. “Them li’l cowboys jes take to me,” Lola says. “Flies to manure,” she adds, throws back her head, and guffaws.
    Frances studies Lola from across the table. She lights a cigarette, stares. Frances is a hard woman, we all think. Celeste says it’s because she is fat, well pretty much going on obese, there is no other way to put it. It’s what makes Frances generally ill-tempered, we believe, although oddly, ominously serene. When trolling our halls, she does not walk so much as she glides—well, a cross really between glide and lumber—a menacing half smile about her.
    Her stillness is unsettling to us here. In meetings, for instance, she sits back from the rest, holding that cryptic smile, lights her cigarette, and waits. Then if someone on staff makes a mistake, says well, it just seemed like precipitous behavior to her, always Frances strikes. She sits forward, leans toward the speaker. “You mean precipitate, don’t you now, dear? Precipitate behavior,” she will say. “Precipitous is for cliffs, don’t you see?”
    But now Frances considers Lola’s comment on romance. About the necessity always of new men. “Agreed,” she says, and leaves it at that.
    We at the table are surprised. It is not like Frances to concede. But after she stands then to go back for seconds, Lola asks us so, did we know? Lately Frances has herself been collecting men. “She has taken up tennis,” Lola says, “for the exercise, she claims, for all that runnin’ around at the net.” But mostly, Lola thinks, it’s because of the lawyers. “So many lawyers, you know, like their tennis,” she says. “And some none too well hitched, neither.”
    Lola stops here and gives us a look. “Married lawyers in this town play singles,” she says, and nods like she’s sure Frances knows one or two.
    â€œI see,” Celeste says, looking uncomfortable.
    Celeste likes to keep things positive. At forty-eight, she’s our oldest by a decade and also our most pampered and frothy. Of the editors, you might say she’s the pretty one. That is, if you had to choose one, it would probably be Celeste, she does at least try the hardest. She wears her hair down in long flaxen waves, she smells always of musk and patchouli, and thanks to a color consultant who said, “You, Celeste, are pre-Raphaelite,” she dresses in long flowing silks and gauze. It’s as though she were wearing drapes, Frances says.
    Celeste generally ignores Frances. She thinks now a moment on what she can add to this topic of finding men. And steering away from the adultery option, Celeste offers a new example. “Or then there is Sally Ann,” she says. “I happen to know Sally Ann writes long letters to men she has never met, whose names she finds through community outreach. It must be how our Sally finds her new ones.”
    As usual, Sally Ann has not joined us, Celeste is speaking forher in her absence. Sally Ann does not often come down to lunch and it happens we sometimes forget her. She is a small, slight young woman with one lazy eye and olive, acne-prone skin. She is also achingly, clinically shy. She keeps all day to her hospital suite, or, when it is absolutely necessary, scurries the halls, head down.
    Sally Ann, like me, is not one of us, and when we are honest, we admit it’s a relief she does not come down to lunch. Although we hasten to add it is not only because of her appearance. Sally Ann has one habit particularly distracting, unnerving even to those who know her. That is, in the last year now going on two, Sally Ann has taken up with a puppet. She calls him Bones or Mr. T. Bones, and it’s as though they are going steady. Never mind that Bones is just an old sock with two cereal bowls sewn in for a