The sound of the foghorn blowing low floats up the Mississippi, carries along the creek behind our house, and reaches me in my room where I am counting my earrings and staring at the blue-lighted flip numbers on my clock radio, each minute clicking over getting me closer to leaving this small town forever because at sixteen all I can think about is being somewhere else. And I call up my best friend Katie down the street because every time we hear that foghorn we’ve said we’ll call each other, the phone cord tethering me to the bed, its curlicues flattened out from being stretched into my bathroom because we never want to hang up. We are majoring in telephone, we are minoring in boys, riding around in my grandpa’s 1969 Plymouth Belvedere with a rope for a door handle, playing Jackson Browne’s The Pretender on the 8-track plugged into the cigarette lighter, unused because we don’t smoke. We are good girls with a bad-ass side. We are living better in our imaginations, looking for love in all the wrong places, with our Maybelline eyes and our tube tops, our Dr. Scholl’s clapping down the school halls, our hips learning how to sway, thinking this is the new game, the new Easy Bake Oven, and what do we know about babies and how they are made? Our mamas can’t bring themselves to tell us. It’s something like immaculate conception, rare as a lightning strike, that’s what we think, until one night the foghorn blows and the phone doesn’t ring and Katie gets pregnant.
Beth Tillman has practiced estate planning law in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, for 30 years. She grew up in Natchez, Mississippi. Her work has appeared in Creative Nonfiction, HAD, Complete Sentence, and Literary Mama, and she has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She holds an MFA from Fairfield University and won the James Baldwin Review’s 2022 Graduate Student Essay Contest. She has attended the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and has been in residence at Millay Arts and VCCA. Her memoir-in-progress examines how decades of conversations about death have shaped her understanding of how to live. More at www.bethtillman.com.
Image Credit: Flickr Creative Commons/Robert Claus
