Her List
by Pamela Painter
For a while I kept a list. I don’t know why I started it because when I started it I was already pretty deep into numbers and it was embarrassing, looking back, not to remember some last names, and even the first name of one man on the list. He was X, with the year and party where we met. Then I worried that someone would find my list and be appalled that I couldn’t remember last names. Then I wondered if that was all the someone would be appalled about? What about the dives and bars. Conferences. Artist residencies. Concerts. Hikes. Match.com… What was the list for? Why did my list make no distinction between a one-night stand and the first man I was married to for 13 dreadful years? Never mind the name of my second husband whom I loved? I didn’t use a code: No code for education, salary, cultural interests, weight, size, length, length of the attachment, who broke up with whom—if indeed the “attachment” was long enough to warrant a break-up. One-night stands do not. On the other hand, there is the second night of a one-night stand. You would think it doesn’t call for or deserve rules for disengagement. But it does.
PAMELA PAINTER is the author of four story collections, Getting to Know the Weather, which won the Great Lakes College Award Award for First Fiction, The Long and Short of It, Wouldn’t You Like to Know and Ways to Spend the Night. She is also co-author with Anne Bernays of What If? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers. Her stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Five Points, Harper’s, Kenyon Review, Matter Press, New Flash Fiction Review, Ploughshares and SmokeLong Quarterly, among others and in numerous anthologies, such as Sudden Fiction, Flash Fiction, From Blues to Bop:A Collection of Jazz Fiction, MicroFiction, Nothing Short of 100, and New Micro. She has received grants from The Massachusetts Artists Foundation and the National Endowment of the Arts, has won three Pushcart Prizes and Agni Review’s John Cheever Award for Fiction. Painter’s stories have been presented on NPR, and on stage in Los Angeles, New York City and London by Cedering Fox’s Word Theatre Company. Painter’s new collection of stories, Fabrications: New and Selected Stories, is due out from Johns Hopkins University Press in 2020.
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Her List”? Someone in the group of writers staying at my Cape house suggested this as a story idea and we all wrote our story on the spot, and then read them out loud to much hilarity. I don’t know why, but it pleases me that I use third person in the title, but first person in the story.
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