Esther the Wonder Pig

by Steve Jenkins

  We have to get rid of her.

  I curled up in a ball on the floor, bawling like a baby. Shelby came over and lay next to me, and one of the cats climbed on top of me. Derek joined me on the floor, both of us crying, with all the animals crowded around us.

  I don’t know how long we were there.

  I just know it felt like someone was dying.

  Here’s the funny part—not funny ha-ha, obviously, but funny unexpected: That point, that lowest of lows, was exactly what inspired us to keep Esther. The destruction she left in her wake made us miserable, certainly. It just couldn’t go on like this. But that was nothing compared to the thought of actually getting rid of her. That idea was devastating. As bad as it had been, we needed to find a way to work it out, because we knew we just couldn’t live without her.

  So we needed to find a way—some way, somehow—to live with her.

  We were going to fix this or die trying.

  Thus the new housetraining plan. We got rid of the litter box and decided to take Esther outside every twenty minutes. Even if Esther didn’t have to go. It didn’t matter. Twenty minutes on the clock? Esther goes out.

  And yes, I know that sounds like an insanely inconvenient solution, and you’re damn right it was. But like I said, we were going to fix this or die trying. Even if the smart money looked for a while to be on the “die trying” side.

  We started rewarding her with a treat whenever she peed outside. And she tried to help us help her. She’d go to the door and let us know that she had to go. Of course, we’d reward her if she did her business. But even if she didn’t have to go, we’d still take her out at that twenty-minute mark.

  But then she got smart and started to play us: If I go out and squat and pee, I get a little treat. So twenty minutes started to become ten minutes—she’d go outside and pee just a tiny bit, making sure not to let all the guns fire at once, if you catch my drift. She could milk it and get yummy snacks every ten minutes if she played her cards right. And we went along with it for a while, because she was doing her business outside and that was the ultimate goal.

  Then she got cocky.

  She’d go to the door and wail like she had to pee. We’d take her outside, she’d squat and pretend to pee, and then she’d look up at us, pleased with herself and expecting her reward. (She’s always been very smart.) Most of the time we just laughed in her face because it was so funny, but it was also frustrating. Especially if it’s three in the morning and Esther has a hankering for a cookie, so she wakes you up and you go outside for a garden tour in your underwear, only to realize she’s doing a fake-out. So we stopped the reward plan entirely and ultimately, thankfully, she got the hang of it.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I know it sounds like the perfect gay stereotype, but Derek and I always took a lot of pride in our home. It was by no means a mansion, but we kept it very neat. (Okay, Derek kept it very neat.) We decorated with a fun and funky style, we kept our gardens maintained impeccably, and we had the nicest lawn on the street (although my neighbor Rolph would—wrongly—argue that point with me). We lived in a manner that ensured that, should anyone stop by unannounced, our home was in presentable-enough shape that we wouldn’t be scrambling to tidy up. The house was always ready for entertaining, and we loved to entertain. We had a very active social life, and the small menagerie we had assembled prior to Esther’s arrival had an established routine, so we were used to being able to come and go as we pleased.

  But as Esther grew, it became exceedingly clear that things would have to change. We had to learn along with her what she could get into and how we’d need to adjust things. And by “things” I mean the entire layout of the house. One day a lamp would go flying off an end table, and it would be clear that there wasn’t room for a lamp (or an end table) there, because Esther needed that space to turn around. We basically “redecorated” as we went along based on how large she was at that time and thus what she could knock over. And it was fine; change is good. We’d never been really attached to “stuff,” so having to rearrange didn’t bother us. It was just a “learn as we go” process that kept repeating itself. Every time we thought we’d found a workable layout, Esther would find a way to prove us completely wrong. Eventually, we realized it wasn’t about a lamp here or an end table there: We needed to completely Esther-proof the house.

  That moment of clarity occurred the day I decided, in all my wisdom, to leave Esther alone when I went shopping. It wasn’t to be a lengthy excursion—just a quick hop down the road to grab a few things at the grocery store. I’d been home all day, and Esther had been behaving quite nicely. I’d been able to clean the house, do some work in the yard, and clear a lot off the “honey-do” list. And feeling entirely too good about myself (and Esther’s apparent domesticity), I wanted to run out for a few things I’d need to make a nice dinner for Derek when he got home. That would be the cherry on top of the sundae that was my very well-executed day.

  It was pure bravado on my part.

  So I took my leap of faith and went shopping. I headed back to the house feeling great. As I pulled into our driveway, Derek’s car wasn’t there, so I knew he hadn’t returned from his outdoor magic shows that day. I turned the key and opened our front door, and what I would find soon thereafter made me think Derek must have been sneaking magic lessons to Esther when I wasn’t looking. Because she was now a bona fide Houdini.

  But this wasn’t an immediate realization. In fact, I’m embarrassed to say that in the initial moments when I walked into the house, arms full of shopping bags, I took a minute to admire how clean and shiny I had made our house.

  Then it hit me. That wasn’t the magnificent sheen of an expertly cleaned home—it was oil. Vegetable oil. One hundred and twenty-eight ounces of Mazola Vegetable Plus! Cholesterol Free cooking oil. Everywhere.

  I’m not sure how she did it, but Esther had found a way to get into the gigantic jug of vegetable oil—one of those huge ones, basically a vat with a handle—and the entire kitchen, hallway, and walls were covered in it. The walls were literally dripping oil. Our house looked like the vegetable version of the Exxon Valdez had passed through. The massive jug had been demolished, and she’d somehow splashed and spread the contents onto everything imaginable. There was evidence everywhere: This would be the easiest case in the history of CSI, especially because Esther—who had apparently fled the scene of the crime and gone on the lam—had made a point of rolling around in the stuff. The corners of the dining room and kitchen had clearly been slicked by her rubbing herself on them. What fun.

  As I stood there dumbfounded, surveying the damage, my heart sank. We had been doing so well. We’d had such a good day. And then the ominous question popped into my head:

  Where was Esther?

  I dropped the groceries on the counter and followed the oil trail out of the kitchen, down the hallway and to the bedroom door. (Suffice it to say you don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to track down a suspect whose hooves are coated in oil.) Outside the door, I closed my eyes for a moment and thought to myself, Please don’t let her be on the bed, please don’t let her be on the bed, please don’t let her be on the bed.

  I opened the door.

  You can probably guess where she was.

  She’d put some real work into it too, having rolled around for a while to ensure every inch of the sheets was nice and oily. And she was sleeping. All greased up and shiny. Perfectly content with that sweet little smile on her face. And snoring. I could almost feel guilty for trying to wake her. Until I actually tried.

  Pig wrestling is a thing. People, usually kids or young adults, enter a fenced-off mud pit and try to grab mud-slicked pigs, which proves to be challenging and, apparently, entertaining. Imagine that with oil in the place of mud. True, Esther was stationary in this situation—hell, she was still out cold, and snoring away to boot. But she is a very large lady, so my trying to grab and move an oil-covered Esther from the bed while standing on an oil-slicked floor was a comedy
of errors.

  It started with the look she gave me when I had the nerve to interrupt her beauty sleep. Then she didn’t much appreciate my trying to roll her off the bed while my own feet were slipping out from under me. She grunted and went back to sleep.

  And to be clear, we had the very definition of a “ticking clock” in this scenario, just like in movies where the heroes’ quest is made all the more challenging because they’re running out of time: Work fast before the asteroid hits the earth. Work fast before the bomb goes off. Work fast before the building collapses under our feet.

  Work fast before Derek gets home.

  It might not sound as dramatic as the other scenarios, but to me, it sure felt like a life-and-death situation. The house was a disaster, I hadn’t even started dinner, and Derek was due home soon. And here was Esther, dreaming her piggy dreams, snoring away, completely oblivious to the damage she’d caused and the fact that every passing second made my anxiety shoot up like a magic beanstalk.

  I attempted to move her more forcefully, leaning into her, trying to wedge my arms under and around her ample body. But then she decided we were playing a game. We genuinely started to wrestle. The writer George Bernard Shaw reportedly once said, “I learned long ago never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.” Truer words were never spoken.

  There I was, wrestling with Esther, and in the middle of it all I just started to laugh at how ridiculous my life had become. I wasn’t angry. She hadn’t meant to do anything wrong. But I was literally trying to wrestle a giant, oil-covered pig off my bed, in my bedroom.

  I finally got her off the bed and was racing around like a madman to clean the house before Derek walked in. We’d been doing so well; I didn’t want Derek to know we’d had another setback. Besides, what were the odds this would happen again? I just needed to clean it up and pretend it never happened. I had to turn this from a crime scene into a photo shoot for Better Homes and Gardens before Derek reached the front door. It was Risky Business crossed with Ferris Bueller’s Day Off crossed with… hell, Godzilla.

  The kitchen was the first priority. Then the hallway, the walls, the bedroom. The sheets agitated in the washing machine while I cleaned the kitchen. I put a clean set of sheets on the bed and tidied up the house. I honestly amazed myself when I realized I’d done everything I had set out to do before Derek got home.

  Well, except for one thing… I didn’t actually have time to make the dinner. Which was the whole reason I’d gone out to begin with, thus leaving Esther alone and giving her the opportunity to submit her application as a Tropicana nightclub dancer circa 1975. But at least the house was clean.

  Determining Esther’s worst kitchen disaster would be a highly competitive contest, but the vegetable oil tsunami would certainly be a finalist.

  Someone needed to be home all the time to make sure Esther was taken outside to pee. (Doggy doors are one thing, but a piggy door is an impracticality.) And the idea of having guests over changed entirely. We always had to plan in advance to deal with the daily effects of “Hurricane Esther” to the house. We ended up making a little checklist to review before anyone could come over, something to keep our guests and their possessions safe. We went from relaxing with friends and a glass of wine to a state of hypervigilance, lest Esther start exploring any stray bag, purse, or backpack that had the misfortune of being within her reach.

  It was a lot to handle, but we took most of it in stride. As much as we realized that having a pig in the house was new for us, we also knew that being a pig in a house was new to Esther. And all the while, she was growing up and learning how to manage her new surroundings. And when I say manage, I mean manipulate. So we had to take a lot of extra precautions, especially pertaining to food.

  The trash cans were attached to the cupboards with bungee cords so she couldn’t knock them over. We tried baby gates. We had to tape the freezer shut (and still do to this day). Because she could open the stove and drawers with ease, we had to find other places to store things where she couldn’t get at them. But there was always that moment when we’d close a cupboard and it wouldn’t quite latch and we wouldn’t realize it. But Esther sure did, and the next thing we knew there would be twenty-five dollars’ worth of cereal dragged out onto the floor.

  If she gets into the dry goods, whether it’s oatmeal, snacks, you name it, whatever she has is now hers. You can’t take anything away from her once she’s taken possession of it. She’s like a dog with a bone. A big, strong, clever, and very emotional dog with what she considers a hard-earned trophy in her mouth. This isn’t something you want to interfere with. You just have to clean around her, because the minute Esther thinks you’re going to take something away from her she panics. She’ll take off, parading around the house with whatever it is in her mouth, accidentally shaking its contents out everywhere. There is no stopping her.

  At first, the added anxiety for us was a lot to deal with. Not that anything Esther did in itself was all that terrible. A chair knocked over, drinks spilled on the floor—nothing too horrible in any single incident. But over time, the incidents added up.

  I dealt with it a little better than Derek did. He had come from a home where everything was always immaculate. His parents had set very high standards, and he took a lot of pride in following their lead. The home was always tidy. Broken things were repaired quickly (and properly—no slapping on some duct tape just to get by). You could eat off the floors of that home. So for Derek, the change was a lot to deal with.

  I think the biggest problem was that he never got a respite. With Esther in the house, there was almost always something going wrong. One day she’d surprise you and be a perfect angel, good as gold, and you’d think, Wow, she’s getting it! And then bang: twenty-five kilograms of basmati rice gets flung wall to wall in the kitchen. For months afterward we’d still be finding grains of rice, kind of like Easter eggs. One day we’d be cleaning the house and would randomly find grains atop a picture frame (hanging on the wall!) from one of Esther’s episodes weeks earlier. We tried to teach her how to live in a house. Our teaching methods could also be filed under “trial and error.”

  The truth is, we were being played the whole time. Esther is ridiculously intelligent and one hell of a manipulator. If you had to describe her in two words, you couldn’t go wrong with smart… and opportunistic. People always say pigs are smarter than dogs or cats. The truth is, it goes way beyond that. When Esther realized that stealing food got her in trouble, she didn’t stop stealing food. Instead, she devised a whole new method of larceny that made it easier for her to get away clean: She’d do it in steps. Esther’s schemes were brilliant: International jewel thieves could learn something from Esther.

  The first time we realized she was up to something, we were sitting in the living room watching TV. There’s a little half wall between where we were sitting and the kitchen, so I couldn’t see Esther, but I heard some rustling, so I peeked over to see what she was doing. I watched as she opened a cupboard, then turned around and walked out of the room. I was intrigued, so I sat and watched. A few minutes later, she went back into the kitchen, so I got up and walked around, being careful not to follow her but making sure I could get a glimpse of what she was up to. By the time I got to the kitchen, she had pulled out a basket of food, but she didn’t take it with her—she was leaving the room as I entered. I figured she had seen me coming and escaped before being caught. I put the basket back in the cupboard, closed the door, and went back to my chair.

  About ten minutes later, I heard a noise again. I looked over and sure enough, the cupboard was open, and Esther was leaving the room again. I called Derek over, and we both sat where we could see everything. Esther waited patiently, then came back into the kitchen, pulled out the very same basket, and left the room again—still empty-handed, or empty-hooved, or whatever.

  Derek and I just looked at each other. What was she doing?

  So we waited. After about fifteen minutes, Esth
er returned, as nonchalant as could be. She just ambled into the kitchen as though she didn’t have a care in the world and then… BOOM! She snagged a bag of pasta from the basket, spun around, and hauled ass down the hallway.

  Derek and I stared at each other in disbelief. Had our pig just executed a three-phase plot to steal some penne?

  We’d had pets with us since the day we got together, but never anything like this. Dealing with Esther was not like training a dog—she was a far more intelligent creature with feelings and personality, an animal who actually challenged us at every turn. And as maddening as it was sometimes, she was proving to be an admirable opponent, one you had to respect.

  She really plays every part to the hilt, the diva actress, chewing the scenery, playing to the cheap seats—our porcine version of Jessica Lange on American Horror Story. For example, she does this thing where she sucks the floor. It’s her go-to habit when she has a mint in her mouth: She bows her head and presses her snout to the floor like it’s attached by suction. During her elaborate food heists, she’ll do this and just kind of hang around like nothing is going on. La la la. I’m just a pig hanging out and definitely not getting into any trouble. Don’t mind me.

  That’s our baby. Huge pain in the ass at times, but we’re constantly amazed by her genius. Which she usually exercises by being a huge pain in the ass. And despite the little headaches she would give us throughout the day, afterward she always came looking for a cuddle. That reinforced for me that no matter how annoying Esther’s presence in our small home could be, she was still this adorable little piglet that loved nothing more that lying beside you and tucking her face under your arm while she slept. I melt when she does this. How can you not? She really is just a big baby who wants attention and affection. And when we thought about the alternate life she would have had without us, it really made us focus on giving her the best life we could and concentrate on the big picture and not the annoyances. Esther wasn’t just another dog: She had been destined to become someone’s dinner. All the little headaches were nothing compared with saving this incredible being, this member of our family, from that fate.