Clearly, I Didn't Think This Through : The Story of One Tall Girl's Impulsive, Ill-conceived, and Borderline Irresponsible Life Decisions (9781101612255) Read online

  Clearly, I Didn’t

  Think This Through

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  Clearly, I Didn’t

  Think This Through

  The Story of One Tall Girl’s

  Impulsive, Ill-Conceived, and Borderline

  Irresponsible Life Decisions

  ANNA GOLDFARB

  BERKLEY BOOKS, NEW YORK

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

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  This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume

  any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  All names and identifying characteristics have been changed

  to protect the privacy of the individuals involved.

  Copyright © 2012 by Anna Goldfarb.

  Cover art: Red Polka Dots copyright © by Thinkstock;

  Businesswoman copyright © by Paul Bradbury/Getty;

  Red Female Leather Shoes copyright © by Thinkstock.

  Interior text design by Laura K. Corless.

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  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Berkley trade paperback edition / November 2012

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Goldfarb, Anna.

  Clearly, I didn’t think this through : the story of one tall girl’s impulsive, ill-conceived, and borderline irresponsible life decisions / Anna Goldfarb.—Berkley trade paperback ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-61225-5

  1. Goldfarb, Anna. 2. Self-realization in women. I. Title.

  PS3607.o4536c57 2012

  814’.6—dc23

  [B] 2012029462

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity.

  In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers;

  however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.

  ALWAYS LEARNING PEARSON

  To my parents, for not charging me rent.

  Yet.

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  Future Plans

  CHAPTER 2

  Your Place or Your Place?

  CHAPTER 3

  Short Guys Rule

  CHAPTER 4

  Never Trust a Jazz Hound

  CHAPTER 5

  It’s All in the Details

  CHAPTER 6

  Halloweenies

  CHAPTER 7

  Best Man Bingo

  CHAPTER 8

  The High Cost of a Free Sandwich

  CHAPTER 9

  I Am Impressed by the Worst Things Ever

  CHAPTER 10

  Anna Goldfarb, Nerd Whisperer

  CHAPTER 11

  You Aren’t My Ex

  CHAPTER 12

  His Picture Lied

  CHAPTER 13

  Blizztarded

  CHAPTER 14

  Those Who Can’t, Teach

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  Future Plans

  Well, look who decided to show up.” My mom turned around to face me and put her hands on her hips, balancing the cordless phone on her shoulder. “It’s okay, Officer. She’s here. In fact, she just walked through the door. Thanks for your help. Yeah, we’ve got it from here.”

  My name is Anna Goldfarb. I’m a 6′1″, barely employed, single, thirty-three-year-old Jewish woman. And, judging by the look on my mother’s face, I was in trouble.

  “Hey, guys.” I gave a faint smile. “Who were you just talking to on the phone?” Looking around the kitchen, I saw my mom, my younger sister, Rachel, and her dog, Ginger, all glaring at me. My dad was at the dining room table, clicking around on his ancient Toshiba laptop. The keys stick, which makes it sound like a leprechaun is doing a tap dance routine when he types an e-mail. No one said anything; my mother tapped her foot.

  “What’s up? Why is everyone looking at me like I just committed a crime or something?”

  “I will have you know that I was just on the phone with the police,” my mom said sternly.

  “The police? Why? Is everything okay?” The dog growled at me when I reached over to pet her head. She always does that.

  “Well, when we didn’t hear from you and I saw that you didn’t come home last night, I had no idea what to think!”

  “Wait, you called the police because I didn’t come home last night? Really? Is this a joke? Oh my God, Mom, I’m fine.”

  “I tried to call your cell phone at least a dozen times, but you didn’t pick up, Anna. Didn’t you get my messages?”

  “I tried to call you, too,” Rachel said, clutching her dog. “No one knew where you were. We’ve been freaking out, like, all morning.”

  “Your father was worried out of his mind!” My mom gestured toward my dad. His huge glasses reflected the computer screen. He seemed calm. “Weren’t you, Roy?” my mom prodded. “Weren’t you worried?”

  “What? Oh, yes, yes,” he mumbled. “Very worried. Very.” Then he went back to staring at the computer.

  “I’m sorry, guys. I didn’t get any of your messages. Hold on, let me check my phone.” It took a while to find it because it was buried under a few things, but sure enough, there were seventeen missed calls. Scrolling through, it became clear that everyone on the planet had been trying to reach me today.

  “Why didn’t you pick up your phone?” my mom shrieked.

  “It must’ve been on vibrate or something! I’m sorry.” I put the phone to my ear and heard the first message, left around seven A.M. It was my mother, slightly
agitated.

  “Hey, Anna. I saw that you didn’t come home last night. Your car’s not here and you’re not in your bed. I want to make sure that you’re okay. Give me a call when you get this.” I deleted it, and then listened to the next one in the queue, which was also from my mother.

  “Hey, Anna. It’s eight A.M. I still haven’t heard from you. Give me a call.” After that, the messages increased with alarm. My mom’s voice changed from concern to straight-up panic.

  By the seventh message, anxiety had firmly taken over. “Anna, I’m really starting to worry here. It’s almost nine thirty A.M. and we haven’t heard anything from you. Please call home when you get this.”

  Rachel got in on the manhunt around then, leaving a few panicked messages of her own. “Anna, call home. Mom is worried.”

  My best friend, Kat, even left one around ten A.M. “Yo, your mom just called me looking for you. I told her I had no clue where you were. Did you stay over at Alvin’s last night or something? I hope you just got some action and aren’t dead. Anyway, call home and talk to your mom. And, if you got action, call me later and tell me how it went. Bye.”

  The last message on the voice mail is where shit got crazy. My mother’s voice was wobbly. “Anna, we’ve contacted the police. We have no idea where you are. Please, please call us when you get this message. Oh, God!”

  Apparently my impromptu slumber party had left me one step away from having my picture plastered on the side of a milk carton. I could see it now:

  Name: Anna Goldfarb

  Height: 6′1″

  Hair: Brown

  Eyes: Green

  Weight: Curvy (Even in a police description, I’m sure my family wouldn’t print my actual weight, but instead opt for a vague estimation to spare me the humiliation.)

  Last seen wearing: A black hooded sweatshirt and black jeans.

  Age: 33

  She likes Black Sabbath, Mexican food, reality television, and the first two movies in the Back to the Future trilogy. If found, please contact the police.

  “Well, the good news is that I’m not dead, so you can call off the search.”

  “I was this close to calling the hospitals, young lady,” my mother said. Her fingers were spaced roughly a millimeter apart.

  “Mom, I stayed over at a friend’s house. Don’t worry about it. Oh my God, I never stay over at anyone’s house and the one night I do, you all panic. It’s not a big deal.”

  You could tell I hadn’t planned to spend the night because my eye makeup from last night was smeared and trace amounts of dog drool were crusted in my hair. Don’t ask.

  “Why didn’t you pick up when I called?” she demanded. “I was freaking out!”

  “Clearly, you’re still freaking out. I got that. My phone was in my purse, which was in his closet. I mean, the closet.” Oh shit. My cover was blown.

  “His closet? Which friend was this exactly?”

  “Look, Mom, don’t worry about it. I’m fine. I’m alive. There’s no need for law enforcement to intervene.” I had finally hooked up with a guy and my mother had called the police; you know, totally normal things to happen to a thirty-three-year-old woman, right?

  The dog barked at me like she wanted some answers about who this guy was, too.

  “Shut up, Ginger,” I moaned.

  Rachel crinkled her nose at me. “Hey, don’t tell my dog to shut up.”

  “Well, don’t have a shitty dog then.”

  At that moment, all I wanted to do was kick off my boots and have a long, hot shower. I wanted to wash away the events from the night before. Mostly I wanted to wash off my mascara, which was flaking off like it’d had enough of being yelled at, too. I dreamed about the second I could slip into a comfy pair of sweatpants. I had been fantasizing about wearing them for the past two hours since I’d woken up in Alvin’s bed. That’s the thing about wearing tight jeans; it makes wearing anything with an elastic waistband feel like a hug from an angel.

  Truthfully, I was too hungover to have a conversation with anyone about anything. Taking off my sunglasses to meet their gaze felt like an unreasonable request, like caring about Lindsay Lohan’s prison record or getting in an argument with a third-grader about Pokémon.

  My dad finally looked up from his computer. “And when exactly are you leaving?” He wasn’t talking about me leaving to go back home. I was home. Or rather, I was in their home, having moved back into my parents’ house about a year before. He was really asking when I planned on getting my life together. And it’s not that I didn’t agree with him, it’s just that I didn’t feel quite ready to give up my life of leisure, at least not yet.

  It’s not like I didn’t watch my high school and college friends fall into line, one by one. As they became more stable, settling into lives that seemed plucked from the pages of an IKEA catalog, I strangely found myself regressing, exploring things that most people got out of their system when they graduated high school. As my friends hung works of art in their freshly painted foyers, I tacked up Michael J. Fox posters on my bedroom wall. As they set up savings accounts and monthly budgets in Excel spreadsheets, I dipped into my paltry funds for beer money. We looked at each other like we were different species and in a way we were: They were Homo sapiens maturus and I was Homo sapiens immaturus. If we mated, we’d probably start a whole new breed of human being.

  Frankly, despite my best efforts, I just wasn’t well versed in how to be an adult. There were entire swaths of skill sets that I wasn’t fluent in. Maturity used to be something I aspired to, but as a woman in my thirties, I wear it like an ill-fitting sweater that I’ve flung into the corner, hoping one day that I would pick it up and it would magically fit better.

  I’m sure my parents wished that they could send me to Adult School to enroll in the following classes:

  —Maintaining a Healthy Relationship 101

  —Bedroom Decor: Put Some Effort into This, for the Love of God

  —Wearing Pigtails Is No Longer Cute at Your Age

  —How to Sleep Like a Human Being and Not Like a Nocturnal Animal

  —Picking a Viable Career with Reasonable Job Security: A Roundtable Seminar

  And it’s not like I didn’t want to join my friends on the quest to maturity, but like a cosmic game of duck-duck-goose, the desire just hadn’t tapped me on the noggin. I was still sitting cross-legged on the carpet, watching everyone around me get the head tap, scramble to their feet, and run around in circles. Life hadn’t goosed me yet; at least that was what I told myself.

  And believe me, no one was more surprised than I was to find myself in this position of needing lessons in maturity. I grew up by the book, doing everything right. I studied hard in school; I spent my early twenties striving to build a career for myself. But by following the rules, I’d missed out on a lot of things, like staying over at a guy’s house on a whim.

  “So, you lose your minds when I’m not here and now you’re asking when I’ll be gone again. Unbelievable.” I rolled my eyes.

  “Your mother and I are concerned, that’s all,” he said calmly.

  “Okay. What exactly are you guys concerned about?”

  They exchanged looks, and my mom nodded for him to keep going. “Where do I start? What are your future plans? You have no job and no money. When are you going to get your life back on track?”

  “Dad—” I started to defend myself, but he interrupted me.

  “It’s a fair question, right? You’ve been living here for over a year. Maybe it’s time for the bird to leave the nest. Again.” He made a little shooing motion to hammer the point home.

  “I think it’s great that Anna’s home again, recharging her batteries, saving some money, paying down her bills. A lot of people are doing that these days. It’s pretty common.” I looked around the kitchen in the direction of the voice and saw my older sister, Sarah, on my mom’s computer monitor, offering her two cents via Skype.

  “Hey, Sarah. You’re in on this, too?”

  “I
told Mom that you probably weren’t dead. Glad to see I was right. Oh, and Julianna says hi. Say hi, Julianna!” She picked up my niece and placed her on her knee. The baby waved into the camera, gurgling and cooing.

  “Hi, sweetie! Auntie isn’t dead. But everyone’s decided to have a life intervention while I’m tired and hungover, all because I got a little action with this hot, short guy and—”

  Sarah covered her baby’s ears. “My daughter isn’t ready to hear about hangovers and action yet. Let’s just keep the conversation about puppies and rainbows, okay?”

  My mother piped up. “What your father is trying to say is that we think you should give some thought to your future, that’s all.”

  “You guys want to do this now? Can’t I get a shower first?”

  “Well, you can’t stay here forever, kiddo,” he said. “You are an adult. We get that. We do. All we’re saying is that maybe you should start looking into your options. We don’t want you to be a slacker all day, watching life pass you by.”

  “Dad, no one’s used the word slacker since the nineties. You’re like two decades late on that. Besides, I’m not slacking around during the day. I’m working on my blog. You know that.”

  “And how much money have you made on this, uh, blog of yours?” He said it like he’d never heard the word before.

  “Technically, none. But it has potential! I’m riding the wave. I’m hanging in there, like that little cat on that poster people put in their cubicles. I’m that cat, hanging on the branch with my feet dangling, toughing it out.” I raised my hands like I was hanging on to an invisible branch. “You know, hanging in there.” The baby laughed when I did that.

  My mother cleared her throat before she chimed in. “Honey, you’re very talented. We all know that. We love having you here. We love how you cook dinner and help with the food shopping. Your father just wants to know that you have some”—she searched for the right word—“direction.”