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

  No, Buckys are well-coordinated, masculine men who probably have several high scores recorded at area arcades and can throw baseballs with impressive accuracy. It was an overly masculine name for a petite man. It was almost comical how it didn’t fit.

  I knew right away that he probably didn’t get a lot of girls because he was tensed up when I grabbed his arm. It was obvious that talking to women did not come naturally to him. It looked like he was having a meltdown and was about to blip an “Error! Error!” message as steam bellowed out of his ears. Unfortunately, I found his social ineptitude charming.

  Long story short: I picked him up. Then I kissed him and made him pinky-promise that he was going to call me. Which he did.

  We took our seats, and that was when I got a good look at him.

  “So,” he said.

  “So.” I nodded.

  “It’s nice to see you again!” he gushed.

  “Yeah, totally.”

  “You look great. I love the dress.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I was so happy that you came up to me and introduced yourself. It made my night.”

  “Oh, wow. That’s awesome, Bucky.” He looked terrified trying to think of things to talk about, like he hadn’t done his social studies homework and I was about to make him tell me what the ramifications of the Magna Carta were. He was more wound up than a Hot Wheels matchbox car as he strained to think of things to ask me. I watched him oscillate between stilted conversation attempts, straight-up conversation avoidance, and sheer terror. I’m not an IRS agent performing an audit; I’m your freakin’ date! Chillax!

  “Um, do you have any brothers or sisters or…”

  “Yeah, I have two sisters. I’m the middle one.”

  “Cool, cool.”

  “So, Bucky. What do you do for a living?”

  “Well, I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.”

  “No, really. What do you do?”

  “I just said! I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.” Then he shrugged his shoulders, like he was saying, Hey, it’s outta my hands, lady. That’s the policy around here.

  I waited a full ten seconds to be dramatic. “Seriously. What is your job? What do you do all day? How do you pay your rent? Are you a can collector? Do you sell your blood? Do you sell vacuums door-to-door? What’s with the secrecy? Just tell me!”

  He was determined to stick to his line: “I already told you! I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you!”

  My face looked like he’d just told me that he had “only a handful” of DUIs or that he was really into the furry scene.

  Well, he finally admitted that he works for the state government assessing whether businesses adhere to their discrimination policies. That’s it? No Mafia connections? No spy work? Just a regular Joe with a desk job? All this hubbub for that? Oy vey.

  As we looked over the menu, I noticed that his fingers looked like salted slugs that got smacked in the face with sandpaper. He appeared to be a chronic nail biter. Every time I looked over, he was chewing away on his middle finger like he was snapping into a Slim Jim. I’m sorry, but the only acceptable times to bite your nails are during a suspenseful scene in an action movie, if you are at the Oscars wearing a tux waiting to find out if you won the Academy Award for best director, or if you have a hangnail and aren’t near an emery board. That’s it! Those are the only times!

  Stop fiddling with your fingers. Put them away. Sit on them, if you must. Get a grip on something else besides your teeth. Watching him nervously nibble on his cuticles while trying to have a conversation with me was beyond gross.

  He looked really sweaty sitting there trying to think up things to talk about. I averted my eyes when he reached out to hand his menu to the waitress because his armpits had salad plate–sized sweat stains. It looked like his armpits had been crying. He needed to calm down. I thought about sprinkling a crushed-up Xanax on his mashed potatoes when he excused himself to go to the bathroom, but I felt like drugging him without his consent on a first date would be frowned upon.

  For a split second, I wondered if this might be my fault. I flashed through a checklist: Did I have something in my teeth? Did I forget to put on deodorant? Is this dress on inside out? Did I mistakenly blurt out that I was going to perform oral surgery on him without anesthetic after dessert? Did I do anything to cause this extreme reaction?

  Hell no, this isn’t my fault! When he came back to his seat, he was shaking more than Sandy and Danny did in the Shake Shack (and that was a lot!). I decided that he needed a drink to, shall we say, unwind. I ordered us two shots of tequila.

  “Here, this will calm your nerves.” I pushed the drink toward him. “Just follow me: Lick the salt on your hand, take the shot, then finish with the lime. You ready?” He nodded yes. The shot went down smooth.

  “Woo! There, that’s much better.”

  “My whole body is tingling,” he giggled.

  “That just means that it’s working.”

  “Let’s do another one.”

  “You sure? Okay. Let’s do another.” We ordered another round, and it seemed to do the trick. Bucky was laughing his head off. And, as a bonus, his sweat stains appeared to have gone down roughly fifty percent.

  “You’re a terrific date, Anna.”

  “Oh, wow. Thanks!”

  “I like you,” he blurted out.

  “Thanks, Bucky. I like you, too.” This was the wrong thing to say. It just encouraged him.

  “You know how this is going to go, don’t you?”

  “No. What are you talking about?”

  “This. Us. How we’re gonna go: On our first date, I’ll take you out for a nice dinner. Done. You can check that off. On our second date, I’ll make you dinner back at my place. On our third date, you can help me pick out a cat. On our fourth date, we’ll go to Target and you can help me pick out some things for my living room. It needs a woman’s touch. On our fifth date, we’ll go to a pool party at my brother’s house where I’ll introduce you to my family. And, on our sixth date, we’ll get married. Simple as that.”

  Bucky just did a love lockdown on me! I haven’t even decided what I’m going to do in the next hour and he’s already decided on our future children’s names. In the time it took to do two shots, he’s put a deposit down on our honeymoon vacation, listed me as his emergency contact at work, and tweaked his will to make sure that I am the sole inheritor of his prized baseball card collection. Talking to him is like watching the final montage sequence of Six Feet Under where we see how all the characters die. Slow down there, dude. His rush to lock me in as his future bride was giving me whiplash.

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “No! This is how it’s totally going to play out. It’s fate. Don’t you think? If you hadn’t said hi to me, none of this would be happening.” It’s flattering that he’d like to be legally bound to me in holy matrimony, but his zealousness rocketed from enchanting to alarming in record time. Oh, and I’m totally not helping him pick out a cat.

  Our date went on from there. It was nothing to write home about. It was kind of forgettable, to be honest. We finished dinner and while we were waiting for our check, he told me that it was the best night of his life. I should’ve known something was up, but I pushed my reservations aside and tried my best to enjoy our time together.

  I was on the fence because there were some good things about him. His manners were impeccable. When he asked me out again at the end of the night, I said sure. I figured I’d give him another shot. The fact that he worked up the courage to kiss me good night was admittedly sweet. Maybe the clunky marriage proposal was a tequila-induced fluke.

  I invited him over the next week for dinner, and then we could have some drinks and go out dancing. He showed up looking like a British schoolboy in the sixties. Honestly, he looked good. Really good, which I was pleased to see. Dinner was fine; I made us fancy raviolis I’d picked up from Trader Joe’s. He brought over a nice bottl
e of wine. Our second date was going pretty well. But when we got out to the club, he started slamming beers, one right after the other. I think the combination of second-date jitters and overall nerves got to him, because he got trashed.

  “You think you should slow down there, bud?” I hinted.

  “What? I’m fine. I’m better than fine. I’m amazing. I feel fantastic.”

  “Really? Because you look pretty hammered to me.”

  “Anna, I have something to tell you.” He got very serious all of a sudden.

  “Okay,” I said, bracing myself.

  “I think I’m falling in love with you.”

  “Bucky. You’re drunk.”

  “I am drunk, but I’m also falling in love. You’re the perfect girl. I mean, I love you!” He started laughing. “I love you! I want this whole room to know it. I don’t even care. I love Anna Goldfarb.”

  “You don’t love me. You barely know me.”

  “I know that I love you. This is the best relationship I’ve ever had. You’re my first girlfriend. Did you know that?”

  I didn’t say anything. I just watched him spin around the room like he was a nine-year-old boy who got a Nintendo for his birthday. He was going to be super-embarrassed tomorrow when I made fun of him for saying all that stuff to me.

  That was when he started to cry. “I just, I just love you so much.”

  “All right, Bucky, I think it’s time we left. Let’s go home. You can stay at my place. I’ll make you some food when we get back.” I grabbed our coats and pushed him out the door.

  I don’t even know what happened. He’d shown up at my house looking like a million bucks. But through the magical powers of shotgunning cans of PBR and downing several shots of Jameson, he’d transformed himself into a blubbering mess. In the time it took me to sip my vodka soda with a twist of lime, he catapulted past the good-timey “lampshade on his head” party guy into drunk, slurring David Hasselhoff territory. He somehow managed to break his glasses on the dance floor, he gave the finger to the bouncer on the way out, and he smashed a party photographer’s camera. After rolling around in traffic for ten minutes, he yelled at a cop and tossed a beer can at a passing car. Then he charmingly left his cell phone in the cab.

  When we got back to my house, he knocked over my CD tower and kicked over the coffee table, sending the nachos I’d just made flying onto the carpet.

  And, as a shit cherry on top of my shitshow night, he stripped off all of his clothes and started puking in my toilet. Yes, I had a naked guy puking in my bathroom.

  After a while, when the yakking subsided, I poked in to see if he was okay. He had his head resting on my toilet seat. “Get out of here! Don’t look at me. I’m hideous,” he wailed, his arms hugging the toilet bowl.

  “Do you need anything? A glass of water? A stomach pump?”

  He let out a low, guttural noise from the depths of his soul, the kind Chewbacca would make if you asked him to take out the trash while the Super Bowl was on.

  “Ughhhhhh. I feel like I’m going to die,” he moaned.

  There wasn’t much I could do for him. He passed out on the cold tile floor. In the middle of the night, I sneaked in and put a blanket on him. Poor Bucky.

  In the morning, I made us breakfast and he emerged from the bathroom rubbing his head.

  “Where are my glasses?”

  “You smashed ’em.”

  “Where’s my cell phone?”

  “You left it in the cab.”

  “I’m so, so, so sorry for how I acted last night.”

  “You wiped out. It happens to the best of us. Here, have some breakfast.” I pushed a plate of scrambled eggs toward him.

  “You’re the best girlfriend ever.”

  I didn’t say anything; I just stood in the kitchen, mouthing the word fuck. I didn’t want to be his girlfriend. What started as a casual hookup was getting too serious way too fast.

  That was when it occurred to me that, holy shit, I was going to have to dump this guy. Sure, there were plenty of reasons to give him the boot from how he’d acted the two times we’d hung out, but it wasn’t just one thing that made him unappealing; there were a lot of little reasons sprinkled in, too. I listed them in my head:

  He hates sushi even though he’s only had it once.

  He screamed like a girl at a cockroach we saw on the street.

  He calls soccer “football.”

  He’s never seen The Wire.

  He constantly cracks his knuckles.

  He is a loud chewer.

  The fingernail on his pinky is a little too long.

  He didn’t know that the USSR doesn’t exist anymore.

  He texts me stupid shit at random times like I’m bored or Thinking about making dinner.

  After he had a few bites of the food, he cleared his throat. “By the way, I’ve already told my family about you and they can’t wait to meet you.”

  “You did?”

  He nodded. “I told them that I met my dream girl.” He grabbed my hand and kissed it. I gave him a half smile, then looked away.

  Oh, lord. I had to dump him before this went any further. I hoped he’d just forget about having a crush on me. I tried to communicate this to him psychically by completely turning my face away when he tried to kiss me, but maybe he didn’t pick up on it. I wished there were some document I could sign letting him know that I’m totally okay with him blowing me off, but alas, this wasn’t the case. I was going to have to step up to the plate and dump him properly. I had never done this before. I was scared, so as soon as he left I called Kat for backup. That was when I promised her the margaritas.

  I had settled on the line “I don’t see this working out. We’re looking for different things.” Dialing his number was so hard. It was worse than doing my taxes. He sounded so happy to hear my voice, too.

  “Hey, Anna!”

  “Hey, Bucky. Do you have a minute? Is this a good time to talk?”

  “Of course. I always have time for you.”

  I took a deep breath. “Listen, I don’t see this working out. We’re looking for different things.”

  “What do you mean? What are you saying?”

  I stuck to my line. “I just don’t see this working out. We’re looking for different things.”

  “What? Why?”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t want to hurt you.” He didn’t say anything. But I heard his nose sniffling. Oh God! I had to wrap this up. “You take care now, okay?”

  “Did I do something wrong? Whatever I did, I can change it.”

  “No! You didn’t do anything wrong. You’re going to make a woman very happy one day, I promise.”

  “I can’t believe you’re breaking up with me.”

  “Well, technically, we only went out twice. This isn’t a breakup. Don’t look at it like that.”

  “Wow, I went from having a girlfriend to having an ex in one day. I can’t believe this.”

  “I’m not trying to split dating hairs here, but come on! This isn’t a breakup. It’s just, you know…a moving-on thing.”

  “You were my girlfriend. Of course this is a breakup, right? So you’re not breaking up with me? Then why am I crying?”

  “We’ve only been out twice, and for about twenty-five percent of the time we were together, you were puking! Take care, Bucky. I’ve gotta go. Good-bye.” I hung up the phone. I’d just ripped his heart out of his chest. I needed a fucking beer.

  I didn’t see Bucky for several months. It wasn’t until I ran into him at a party that things got weird: He introduced me as his ex to his new girlfriend.

  It irritated me to watch him rewrite our dating history so flagrantly. Germany didn’t win World War II, Mexico didn’t land on the moon first, and I never thought of Bucky as my boyfriend. You can’t mess with historical facts! What’s next, is he going to tell me dinosaurs never existed? Or that Gigli was a good movie? It’s madness!

  I pulled him into a corner and hissed, “I’m sorry to break it to y
ou, but, Bucky, you are not my ex. Do you know what the word ex means? It’s shorthand for either ex-boyfriend or ex-girlfriend. You were never my boyfriend, and I certainly was never your girlfriend! We barely dated. We saw each other twice; that doesn’t magically make me your ex-girlfriend.”

  “I don’t know why you’re being so difficult about this.”

  “I’m not your ex, Bucky. Just say that I’m your friend. If you have to communicate to someone that we went out in public together on two occasions, just say that we were seeing each other. Okay?”

  He put his head down and walked back to his girl.

  I’m not sure why he’s so interested in being my ex anyway. There aren’t any perks being in that club. It’s not like he gets coupons to local establishments or a free sub at Subway. Really, it’s no big whoop.

  Now I run into him at the worst times. I’m not sure if he has some kind of premium iPhone app for showing up when I’d least like to see him, but without fail, he crash-lands on my fun planet at the stupidest possible second.

  I’ll be giggling up a storm with a dude I just met, and just when he takes my hand and asks me to dance, I’ll see Bucky’s face staring at me through the crowd, glaring at me all wounded like I just ran over his cat with my car.

  Or I’ll be yelling my phone number in another guy’s ear and I’ll look up to see Bucky leaning against a wall with his arms crossed, shaking his head. My new guy won’t even notice it, but I’ll feel Bucky’s stony stare searing into my skull like a shitty laser. Why does he always have to magically appear when I try to get my swerve on? Did he affix a tracking tag under my skin when I wasn’t looking? Is he a bloodhound, following my scent around the city? Sometimes, Philly just feels too small.

  After a few months of his stare-a-thon antics, he worked up enough courage to come over to me.

  “Hey, Anna! It’s so great to see you.” He leaned in to give me an awkward hug.

  “Yeah! Hi, Bucky! You look well.”

  “Why, thank you. As do you. I saw you from across the room and so I wanted to come over and say hello. Gosh, can you believe that it’s been two years since we went out?”