My Five Little Pigs Story

The Christie novel brings back wonderful memories of revenge

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I just read the Agatha Christie novel Five Little Pigs.  I think it’s one of her best — read it.  There are no spoilers below.

Five Little Pigs is about the murder of a famous painter which took place sixteen years before the book begins. The painter’s wife was convicted of poisoning him and sentenced to life in prison, where she died. But did she actually do it? At the behest of the couple’s daughter, a child at the time of the murder and now a young woman, the famous Hercule Poirot investigates. He interviews the potential suspects: the dead painter’s mistress, his two good friends, the family governess, and the convicted woman’s sister, Angela, who was an adolescent at the time and lived with the family. Many critics find Christie’s nursery rhyme analogy of the five little pigs to the five potential murderers to be a stretch. I didn’t mind it.

It is Angela who interested me the most. She didn’t like her brother-in-law, and she especially didn’t like him at the time of his death because he wanted to ship her off to boarding school. To show her dislike for him she did things like salt his drinks and put slugs in his bed. I loved the slugs in the bed. What a good prank to play on a terrible person.

In the summer of 1988, I lived in a beach house with seven other people — three women and five dudes altogether. I was almost 19, the rest of the people in the house were in their early 20s. It was a disgusting house, with a leaking fridge, moldy bathroom, and a septic tank in need of a visit from a septic tank expert.

One of the guys was a giant slob. The other guys were not great, but he stood out. Interestingly he was also the best and neatest dresser.

Prior to living in the house, I knew everyone (we went to college together) except the big slob, who was childhood friends with one of the other guys, and one of the women, who was sisters with another. The other woman in the house was a good friend of mine. All the women cleaned a fair amount, just trying to make the filthy house bearable. I don’t mean that we spent the entire summer cleaning, but we were the only ones to deal with the bathroom, and we washed other people’s dishes a lot just because it was easier than wanting to vomit every time we went into the kitchen. The sister was a mixed bag. She could be alright. But she was devoted to her brother and this made her tiresome. My friend and I really tried to like her but could not. Her lack of a backbone was hard to take and no doubt reminded us of our own failings standing up to men.

We told these guys they needed to clean up more or else – or else what, you ask? Well, exactly. They basically laughed at us. Sometimes they promised to be better. The guy with the sister was the nicest of all them, but at the end of the day, he was also a guy living with four of his best dude friends and he didn’t give a shit what we thought of him. I had already started to hate guys like him more than all other guys, guys who nice to everyone but would never take a stand about anything because they didn’t have to.

So one day I came home and the sink was full of dishes, again. There was a greasy frying pan and a plate with egg yolk on it. “Whose are these?” I asked the sister. She said they belonged to the biggest slob, the slob whose madras shorts were always wrinkle free but was nonetheless a fucking slob. I asked if the big slob was around. He was not, he had made himself breakfast, put the dishes in the sink, and gone to work or the beach.  

We’d talked about washing dishes right after you used them. Many many times we had discussed how this might keep things in check, what with eight people sharing a house. Many times all the members of the household had promised to do this. Then the woman had done it, some of the guys did it sometimes and the big slob did it never. We talked about it again. His behavior had persisted. So I took the dirty pan and plate and put them on his bed and pulled up the covers.

That night I was reading in my room when I heard him cry out. He appeared in my doorway shaking with anger and shouted at me. “How could you do something like this? I can’t believe you – this is so, so fucked up!”

 Well, I said, I guess I feel the same way about you, except you do the fucked up thing every day.

“You put dishes in my bed,” he screamed.

“That is correct,” I said. “And if you want to keep not washing your dishes I will keep doing it.”

“You’re crazy,” he told me. “Has anyone ever told you you’re crazy?”

I said I didn’t think so but that I thought this was a sensible thing to do, in fact, one of the best things I’d ever done.

All the guys were so mad except the one guy who was the biggest nerd who thought it was secretly funny. The sister was mad and her reasonable nice brother was super mad, which was almost better than the big slob being mad.  “You went too far,” he said to me, shaking his head like my dad.

Oh, I thought, wow, you actually can get upset. Fascinating.

“I told him a million times,” I said. “I was done telling him!”

 I wonder what these five little pigs’ take on this story would be years later.

I remember this: my friend was equally delighted about how mad they all were. We took a bunch of mushrooms and swam to the middle of a lake and laughed about it for hours.