Getting Peggy back

Getting Peggy back
by David Benjamin

MADISON, Wis. — We’re getting my sister back.

We began to lose Peg, my previously bossy big sister, when her body was taken over by a merciless mystery called lupus. It invaded her kidneys, eventually devouring them. She got a replacement kidney, named Steve, from a young man who lost control of his motorcycle. But even with Steve, Peg was trapped in a downward spiral of illness, infection, cancer, brain damage, a thousand drugs, and a case of sometimes comical but ultimately tragic dementia.

As she approached the end, Peg was present. But she wasn’t there. This Wednesday, despite her strength and sheer obstinacy, all that stuff finally killed her.

We started recovering Peg that morning, right over her dead body.

Rosey was there, Peg’s sidekick since they met in Mrs. Schober’s third-grade class at St. Mary’s School in Tomah. Rosey was one of Peg’s first fortresses.

Peg built bastions against the chaos and unfairness of life. While our mother and dad were waging war and breaking up, Peg found refuge in Rosey’s house on Superior Avenue, with Rosey’s mom and dad as her backup parents. She found a refuge there of humor, intelligence and unconditional welcome. In return, she built around Rosey and herself a social circle, of giggling grade-school girls, that gentle Rosey could have never gathered on her own. All those girlfriends, who served to flummox and fend away the intrusions of her two barbaric little brothers, were another of Peg’s fortresses.

The love affair of Peg and Rosey survived even when Mom forsook Tomah, hauled us to Madison and ruined Peg’s dreams of a teenage social paradise at Tomah High. Rosey and Peg’s sisterhood stayed true then and down the years.

Rosey remembered, reminisced and helped us to get Peg back.

Junko was there. She lost her own sister, to cancer, 24 years ago. By marrying me, Junko got a new sister, one who shared her wanderlust. Peg loved uncomfortable adventures. She traveled to China before there were any decent hotels. She slept in tents in the Amazon. She hiked up mountainsides in Switzerland. She traveled with us often — to Paris, to the Loire valley and to Brittany. She and Junko would slip together into girlish symbiosis, building a fresh fortress — against me. Wherever we were, they would take over the kitchen, building one of Junko’s gourmet dinners, holding me at bay and sharing jokes at my expense. I was used to it. I’d been staring up all my life at Peg’s battlements.

Junko remembered Peg’s sheer pleasure in discovering new places, her willingness to try almost everything. She recalled our stay at a winery in the Touraine, where we sat by the pool feasting on our hostess’ paella, where the family dog, a giant Dane named Gaspard, nosed immensely up to Peg hoping for a handout. Peg, fearless, summoned up her high-school French and, with ladylike formality, said, “Asseyez vous, s’il vous plait.”

Gaspard, obediently, bowed his great head and sat at Peg’s knee. We all laughed.

Junko remembered that. We all laughed. We were getting Peg back.

Patty, one of my my high-school friends, was there with her husband, Oren. They had only adopted Peg in recent years, when Junko and I circled back to Madison. They knew Peg more when she was ill than when she was the cool career woman whose office — at a Milwaukee law firm — was a fortress of efficiency. Patty knew a Peg who, in her weakened state, was sweet and solicitous. Patty was part of a small society that Junko and I created in Madison when Peg was too ill and too alone to form her own circle. Patty and Oren were two of the turrets in Peg’s last fortress. Peg told Patty secrets she would never share with me. She looked lovingly at Oren the way she could not see me, her lifelong adversary.

Beside the room where Peg had died, Patty and Oren celebrated their late-life bond with Peg, thanked me for adding this small burden to their experience. We remembered things Peg said — wisdom, memories, non sequiturs — and smiled, as we got Peg back.

Bill, our brother, arrived from Tomah, too late to join the brief vigil that preceded Peg’s death. We consoled him for that. We suspected she had passed quickly to spare us the anguish of a prolonged death watch. Bill, like me, remembered Peg’s fortresses. He reminded me of Peg’s bedroom in our Madison apartment. She had a room to herself, while Bill and I shared ours. Peg’s room was inviolate. We were forbidden the back door because it was in Peg’s room. She checked daily for signs of intrusion. She lived in an oasis of feminine neatness while Bill and I ran amok, loud, profane and trailing crumbs.

Bill’s arrival reminded me: He was the drummer in a teenage rock band called the Lordes, which I — always eager to mock a sibling — called the Lordies (because of that superfluous “e”). Prior to one of the Lordes’ biggest gigs, we were all present, including Rosey, at a rehearsal. Bill asked if Peg had a request. In one of Peg’s rare unguarded moments in the presence of her bestial brothers, she chose the Beatles’ simple, moving ballad, “And I Love Her.”

Recalling that, I also remembered that Peg — who was constantly listening to WLS Top Forty radio in Chicago (with special devotion to immortal DJ Dick Biondi) — force-fed rock ’n’ roll to her unwilling brothers. Driven, perhaps, by all that subliminal suggestion, Bill became a drummer, playing down the years in a half-dozen bands. I became a music maven with an encyclopedic memory of the hits I hated because Peg loved them.

But remembering that moment in a basement on Simpson Street in Madison sometime in the Sixties, as we all listened to Bill softly drumming and Pat Noles torturing Paul McCartney’s lyrics, I saw in my sister Peg a deep strain of romance that she rarely exposed — at least to me. It has lingered in me, a tie that binds us. More profoundly, it’s a force that has sustained Peg, miraculously, through an ordeal that would have shattered, embittered and swiftly destroyed almost anyone else.

I realized, thanks to brother Bill and the Lordies, that Peg’s tenacious romance is a fine, subtle madness that we’ve shared as a family all our lives, a source of foolish strength that keeps me going. More important, it helped me, on the morning of her death, to get my sister back.