Pigs in Heaven

Pigs in Heaven Summary | Chapter 1 Summary

Alice is sixty-one and has been married to Harland for two years; however, she is preparing to leave him because he is extremely uncommunicative. "His idea of marriage is to spray WD-40 on anything that squeaks," she thinks. He runs a paint and body shop during the week, but watches the Home Shopping Channel on cable TV endlessly when he is home. The house they live in, which was left to Alice by her first husband, is filled with Harland's collection of antique headlights.

Her neighbor, Hester Biddle, keeps Vietnamese miniature potbellied pigs and they often invade Alice's flowerbeds. Today, she picks up a flowerpot that Harland has ordered from HSN and throws it at them. She reminisces about the pig farm she grew up on in Mississippi and ponders where she will go when she leaves Harland. Her mother died some years ago and the farm was sold to pay off debts. She has one daughter, Taylor, a tall and pretty young woman who lives in Tucson; she also has a cousin, Sugar, who spent time living with Alice's family on the pig farm in Mississippi during the Depression. Alice reconnected with Sugar in 1955 when she saw her picture in a Life magazine drinking a can of soda pop and standing in front of a sign that read Welcome to Heaven, a small town in Oklahoma where she now lives. They kept in touch for several years, but eventually the correspondence stopped.