WHEN HEDDA MET DAPHNE

WHEN HEDDA MET DAPHNE 

It was barely daylight when we woke up. Home again. Or at least the next best thing.The morning sun had a soft and buttery feeling on our skins as it swept from the windowsill to our arms and shoulders, like a slow-moving paintbrush. There we were lying together, one human pretzel in the folding soft chair that had become our bed for the night, my white arms and legs wrapped around her smooth mocha torso. Hedda was not much bigger than a 10-year-old child. But she was already 35 or thereabouts (although she only admitted to 25). I knew better than to give her beaded dreads a yank, so I gave the swallow tattoo on her slender shoulder a nibble.

“Time to greet the dawn, girlfriend.”

Hedda wiggled out of my embrace and pushed her face into the pillow, the wooden beads on her braids rattling.

“Lex, Next time I’m gonna get me a woman who likes to sleep in, Christ!”

. 

Home. It’s is more than where the heart is. It’s the place where the weary arms and legs and cranky elbows and aching ass come to rest. 

Especially after the kind of night the three of us had had.

Yes, there had been three of us yesterday when it had all started at noon. Which seemed like an eternity ago.

Funny how three can become two without you even hardly being aware of the subtraction in action.

“Where’s Daphne?” Hedda asked. 

Where indeed. 

“She left on the red Vespa.” At least I had had enough energy to look out the window when I heard the noise.

“She doesn’t have a red Vespa; in fact she don’t have a Vespa, period.”

“Well, then, she left on somebody else’s Vespa. Should we worry?”

“ Hell to the goddam no. Ungrateful bitch.”

Hedda rolled out of the bed (ok mattress) to the floor and walked onto her hands and knees and grabbed my T-shirt off the back of the chair, pulling it over her head. On me it was a T, on her a nightshirt. “I need some caffeine, baby, with an extra bump. . Lex, when are you going to get a real human-sized bed?”

“Why bother when my girlfriend is the size of a third grader?”

“So I can feel like a doddamn adult when I’m here. You don’t think she’s gone, do you?

“Last time she was in one of her moods, she hijacked a Harley cafe racer right off the curb outside a biker bar. You know, babe. They only produced 3000 of them in the seventies.”

  Criminal but kind of awesome, I had to admit.  

“What's that part of your brain that warns you about extreme risk? Well, Daphne, she ain't got it.”

No, Daphne didn’t have it. Daphne had been an out-of-control latchkey kid, a feral fostered teen, and later a devil in a blue dress with OCD, ADHD, and anger management issues. And she was Hedda’s best friend. Hedda’s only friend, it seemed, sporting an identical swallow on her shoulder.

Where had we lost her last night? Was it somewhere between the grungy Captains Cove pub and that even grungier 8th Street open-all-night cafeteria with the greasy counter and the squeaky counter stools that smelled like mountains of French fries cooked in the same oil year after year?  At least Daphne had wheels wherever she was. Not hers or mine but some poor loser’s Vespa. But Daphne was feline. She always landed on her feet. So far.

“Here. Make yourself look..human.” Heddda handed me my hoodie and turned me toward the mirror. “Nice tits. Bad back alley haircut. ”

The bell rang downstairs. Not once but twice. The second time, someone was holding it down with force. 

“Shit.” 

“Landlord? Cops?” Daphne?

“Call down and ask who it is. Put some pants on first.”

“Who is it?” I shouted into the intercom.

“Adele”

“Adele who?”

“Adele, you fool. Daphne’s sister, Lex. Let me in.”

“Daphne doesn’t have a sister.”

“Sure, and rats don’t fly. Let me in. I’m cold and hungry.”.

“What do you think? I turned to Hedda, who gave me that why-are-you-so-helpless look. Maybe it was Daphne playing another prank. Maybe she did have a sister?? 

If she had a sister, was this Adele as crazy as she was, I wondered as I reluctantly pulled on sweats, shoved my feet into slippers, and headed down the stairs, cursing under my breath.

It wasn't what I expected when I opened the door. Well, in truth I didn’t know what to expect. Who would, living in the world of Daphne and Hedda.

Hanna and I had only been together a couple of months when Daphne had crashed the party from out of the blue and attached herself to us like velcro. It was a demonic attachment. Hardly a weekend went by without some police-skirting drama stirred up by her. If not criminal drama, inconvenience. Like the big slobbering Siberian husky she adopted (or stole off the street) and left with us while she disappeared on yet another misadventure. Or the credit card she swiped from my jeans while I was sleeping and managed to lose. Each time she left, I prayed that she would never come back, that she might even get arrested and spend a little time in the cooler. Where she belonged.

What had Hedda found so compelling in this whirling dervish? “ Hedda and I had met at a party on the Lower East Side a few years ago…

”.I know she seems a little out there, but she was a real sister to me” Hedda had said, giving me those moony little girl eyes. It usually worked.

But this? 

The Adele at the door was the spitting image of Daphne, a younger version. Christ, now there were two of them! 

Adele had that same crooked Daphne smile on her face that said “danger”. But there were some differences. Unlike tomboy-from-the-hood Daphne, Adele’s gold-streaked curls were piled up on top of her head like an old beehive from the sixties with chopsticks stuck in on either side. She was wearing skin-tight leopard-print yoga pants and an off-the-shoulder jersey, and she had those pointy dragon lady nails that would have been an accessory too far even for completely out-of-the-box Daphne.. Worse, she had a fully loaded backpack over her shoulders, A backpack that probably held a month's worth of clothes.

“You must be Lex. Hi Lex” . She pushed past me, this mini-Daphne, like a stranger who was in her way, and dashed up the stairs two at a time. “What’s to eat?” 

For a moment, Daphne’s sister or not, I considered dragging her back outside, maybe by her beehive. Like the stray dog she seemed to me. How did she even get here? I didn’t see a car or a bike nearby. Who the hell invited her, and where the hell was Daphne? 

When Hedda and I had met at an LGBTQ fundraiser, it had felt star-crossed. She was a pretty smart but poor, struggling college dropout with no relatives except a brother who no longer talked to her, and I was a not-so-struggling post-grad with a bank account, a generous family, and an actual apartment that my folks insisted on paying for.

Then, when my favorite great-aunt Delia died and left me a few acres of property in the Catskills, Hedda talked me into taking a break, maybe six months off so we could “do fun things together”. I don’t exactly remember asking her to move in, but move in she did. She had moved in lock, stock, and barrel. That’s where the “fun things” started to slow to a walk for me.

A week later, Daphne arrived, and we were now a threesome, but not in a good way. And now this Adele person?

When I got back upstairs, Adele and Hedda were hugging like they were long-lost siblings. Adele had thrown her bag on the bed, and in minutes she was in the kitchen, Our kitchen, checking out its contents, even sticking her finger in a small bowl of leftover tuna salad,

“Jesus, stop that! Did you grow in a pigpen? How old are you anyway??”

“Seventeen.” Adele glared at me and went back to hugging my girlfriend.

“:Well, since you're Daphne’s sister, you must know where the hell she is?”

There was silence. Adele went back to the bed and started unpacking her backpack, putting her pants and sweaters and underwear in neat little piles as though she had just signed the lease on the apartment and was settling in.

“Dunno where she is.” Adele pulled the chopsticks out of her hair and screwed up her face like a kindergartner being reprimanded. “ She’ll be back”

“Well, she isn’t staying here anymore, and neither are you.”

Adele wrapped her arms around Hedda. “Why is she so mean…?”

Hedda snapped up her jacket, slipped on her sneakers, and grabbed Adele’s hand, giving me a WTF look as they left the apartment, clattering down the stairs. 

“Let’s go for a walk, honey.”And off they went. My girlfriend and her bestie’s bestie.

It couldn't have been more than 20 minutes when the bell rang again. 

“Who is it?” I yelled into the intercom. I felt the blood pounding in my ears. I didn’t like to be in the middle of out-of-control situations. And this was becoming just that.

“Daphne, Lex. Come on, let me in. I need some money for the meter, and I haven’t had lunch. Where is Hedda?”

“ She’s taken Adele for a walk. “

“Who’s Adele?”

Who’s Adele? What kind of game was this anyway?

I pressed the buzzer. My hands were sweating. 

Within minutes, there she was—Daphne. The woman I had hoped I would mercifully never see again. With bedhead, her shoelaces untied, shirt misbuttoned. What had Hedda ever seen in this loser?

“Adele, your sister. She’s here, Daphne. Why is she here?”

“I need food, Lex. You never have anything in your fridge.” Daphne marched in reached behind my back, and slipped my wallet out of my back pocket, extracting a credit card from it in one smooth sleight of hand and handed it back. A slick maneuver she had no doubt practiced more times than I wanted to contemplate.

“This’ll do. Right back. Ring me back in.”

I looked out the window and down at the street. . It looked like a shiny new black Fiat 500, at the curb/, or so it looked at a distance. Undoubtedly something she had “borrowed” or stolen or..? I really didn’t want to be harboring a criminal.

I was beginning to wonder how much I actually knew about Hedda.

Daphne bounded back up the stairs, 20 minutes later. How much did I know about Daphne besides the fact she had thrown a monkey wrench into what was once a budding relationship.

That was when Hedda and Adele walked in, arm in arm, like old friends. 

“Mom,” the girl who called herself Adele cried, running over to Daphne.

“

And then, as if on cue, Hedda joined them, wrapping her arms around the two of them.

“Lex, this is our daughter Eve. Daphne is my ex. Sorry we didn’t tell you sooner.”

“And that Fiat down there? Which one of you Thelma and Louises stole that?”

“Oh, that? “Daphne looked at me like I was some ignorant ogre. “It was a gift from Eve’s sperm donor dad.”

Before I could digest this bit of news, Daphne had sidled over to me and put her hand on my shoulder and rested her head. Her other hand still wrapped around Hedda’s waist.

“He’s even given us, Eve and me, our own place, Lex, so you and Hedda can be a couple again, just like before.”

“And who is this magnanimous sperm donor dad, if I may ask?”

“Oh, I guess he never told you. It’s your Magnus, Lex.” Daphne gave me that crooked bad cat smile.

“ 

“Who’s Magnus?”

“Magnus, your brother!”

“I don’t have a brother.”

We went for a ride in the gift Fiat, a long ride until well after dark, so I could hear the whole story from start to finish, beginning when Hedda met Daphne.

I didn’t believe a word of it.

“ 

It was m midnight when we —--Me and Rufus –finally made it home.