The Pigman

Lorraine narrates this chapter. Lorraine knows she shouldn’t have let John write the first chapter. He always exaggerates—she’s not “about to have a thrombosis.” She’s just eager to describe the odd past few months they’ve had. She wants to write it all down before they forget it. And John doesn’t really swear that much, it’s just that he always has to be doing something quirky. And he gets away with whatever he does since he’s so handsome, though Lorraine hates to admit it. He’s six feet tall, and he has long brown hair and big, blue eyes.

An “analyst” would say John’s problems stem from his family—that he drinks and smokes to rebel. Lorraine’s tried to tell John that smoking is dangerous, and she’s even shown him one of Freud’s case studies that’s similar to John’s history. But John wouldn’t listen, even after Lorraine showed him a pamphlet about smoking that Lorraine’s mother, a nurse, brought home that featured a photo of damaged lungs. Anyway, both John and Lorraine have difficult families, but that’s a story for another time.

Lorraine returns to the subject of John’s “distort[ing]” and lying. In their Problems in American Democracy class the other day, Mr. Weiner asked what kind of houses early American settlers lived in, and John answered “tree huts,” just to rile everyone up. Lorraine suspects that John “used to distort things physically,” like he did with the bombs; now he just distorts things with words.

Like with Miss Reillen. She’s really a nice lady. And it’s true that her clothes are too tight, but it’s not because she’s trying to be sexy or anything—it’s just that she probably outgrew them. But who knows what she’s got going on in her personal life? Maybe she can’t afford new ones, or maybe she has a sick mother, like Miss Stewart, the typing teacher. Lorraine knows about Miss Stewart’s mother because she dropped off some typing papers at Miss Stewart’s house one time and saw Miss Stewart’s mother there. Lorraine feels bad when she thinks about Miss Reillen—who’d want to marry someone whose sick mother is always camped out in the living room?

The biggest difference between John and Lorraine is that Lorraine “ha[s] compassion.” Still, the fact that John is friends with Lorraine, who isn’t all that pretty (even by Lorraine’s mother’s admission—Lorraine’s mother is constantly calling her fat and slouchy and unattractive) must mean that John has some compassion in him—and he’s certainly gotten more compassion ever since he and Lorraine met the Pigman. Lorraine thinks it was probably John’s secret compassion that convinced him to introduce himself to her and invite her for a beer in the Moravian Cemetery where he always goes to drink beer. It’s kind of strange to drink beer in a cemetery, but not really, once you understand John’s situation—John’s father was a mean alcoholic and set a bad example for John. Now, John’s father has sclerosis of the liver and doesn’t drink, but John does.

Lorraine moved into John’s neighborhood at the start of their freshman year. When she met John at the bus stop, she was feeling pretty depressed because nobody was talking to her. She noticed his big blue eyes and knew he was special. Then one day, John sat down next to her on the bus and started laughing, completely out of the blue. Lorraine even looked out the window to see if she’d missed something (a magazine article she read about “mental disturbances” would call this “paranoia”).

Lorraine thinks she has paranoia—she always thinks people are laughing at her. Lorraine turned to John then and asked him not to laugh—people will think he’s “a lunatic.” John calmly replied, “I am a lunatic,” and then he resumed laughing. Lorraine, irritated and embarrassed, decided to laugh to teach John a lesson, but then she couldn’t stop, and then she was actually laughing. The two of them sat there laughing all the way to school, and the entire bus thought they were crazy.