Howard was anxious about going to Daycare on Monday. Aside from the embarrassment of having everyone treat him like a little boy, Anita had promised to blister his fanny if he screwed up and revealed who he really was. Anita had to open the door to the Suburban for him when she loaded up the van. He had shrunk so much that he could no longer reach high enough to open the car door. Once the door was open, he saw that the elevated floorboard of the van was much too high for him to clamber inside on his own. The running board between the fenders that was intended as a step into the van was at the height of his chest. He looked up at her helplessly and waited for her to assist him into the van. Anita saw his difficulty immediately. She bent down, put her hands underneath his arms, lifted him up and sat him in the back seat. Then she buckled his seat belt for him and closed the door. She went to the front door of the van, opened it and got in the drivers seat and drove them to her company. Howard fidgeted in boredom and apprehension as he sat in the backseat. He was so short that he could barely see over the top of the door’s tall frame and the babytalk that Anita forced him to use precluded any sort of adult conversation to pass the time. He wasn’t interested in the other cars on the freeway anyway. His only interest in other drivers had been the expressions on their faces as he left them in the dust. With Anita as the Suburban’s cautious driver, that pleasure had departed along with all his other adult diversions. All he could think about was how the workers at the Daycare Center would treat him. It was bad enough that Anita acted as if he was a toddler in fact, but he couldn’t stand the idea of having strangers care for him like a little boy. Howard sighed heavily in frustration; it was going to be a long, long day.
Anita parked the Suburban, then came around to the rear door to let him out. Howard had never been inside her company building. Security precautions had only allowed him to see it from the outside. The research that was conducted at company headquarters precluded any visitors from entering without proper clearance. Anita held his hand while they walked to the main entrance and turned left at the guard station to arrive at the company’s Daycare Center. When Anita pulled the heavy door to the Daycare open and led him through the portal, a waft of cool air-conditioned atmosphere scented with a slight fragrance of perfumed diapers struck Howard. He toddled in at Anita’s side, struggling to keep up with her long pace on his short legs. The receptionist smiled at the two of them as they walked toward her desk. Anita had dressed him that morning in a baby blue T-shirt with yellow duck print to contrast with his juvenile denim overalls and wide white toddler shoes. It made him look more like a three-year-old than the four years he ostensibly possessed. To heighten the effect, Anita had ordered him suck his thumb as they entered to exaggerate his already immature look. From the look on the receptionist’s face, Anita’s ploy had worked. She grinned broadly as they approached and waved to Howard patronizingly when they stopped in front of the counter. Anita spoke quietly to the woman for a few minutes and introduced herself. Once the receptionist had properly identified Anita and her adopted son, they were admitted to secured area of the Daycare’s interior to wait while one of the supervisors was summoned to formally enroll the child into their custody.
Howard was horrified to see that the Daycare’s small clients were no older than five years old at best, and that most of them were from two-to-three years old. Diapers were worn in lieu of pants by most of the children who played happily on the huge carpeted play area that lay behind the short wooden bars that separated the toddler’s play zone from the rest of the center. Mounds of building blocks were piled in a corner of the play area while the balance of the area was scattered with brightly colored children’s toys. He noticed that sucking one’s thumb appeared to be de rigueur behavior at the Daycare. Not a single child’s mouth whose hands were unengaged was free of either a thumb or a pacifier. They crawled and tottered about the carpet, moving from toy to toy without let or interference. Several members of the group of older children were dressed in nothing more than T-shirts and training pants. They played on their hands and knees among the younger toddlers without any embarrassment over their regressive method of locomotion. Occasionally, one of the ambulatory children would amble gaily across the area in quest of some fascinating toy, only to fall down and grasp the childish amusement the moment they reached their objective. One little boy, who looked like he was about three, was dressed in nothing but a diaper. He got up from where he had been playing and dashed helter-skelter across the room. When he reached the other side, he tripped over a toy and landed flat on his face. Immediately he began to keen in a high-pitched wail of surprise and hurt pride. Two of the attendants rushed over to see if he was injured. After a perfunctory examination, they satisfied themselves that he was unhurt and after helping him blow his nose, they left him where he was on the carpet. The little boy continued to weep for several minutes after the accident, sniveling over his imagined injuries.
The supervisor came and introduced herself to Anita, pointedly excluding Howard from the adult conversation. Anita gave the supervisor various papers granting the Daycare permission to treat in an emergency as well as a signed contract for their childcare services. Howard looked in askance at Anita while she talked with the supervisor and thought, “How could she do this to me? There isn’t a hint of adult stimulation here! I don’t even see a TV to watch cartoons on! If I remain here for any length of time, I’ll become as mindless as the tots over there!”
When the supervisor made a statement about how cute he looked in his outfit, Anita patted him on the head and said how proud she was of her little boy. Anita noticed that Howard’s nose appeared to be running and withdrew a kleenex from her purse. She bent down and wiped his nose remarking that many of the children appeared to have the same problem. The supervisor chuckled and said that it was normal for small children to have runny noses until they reached school age. She assured Anita that there wasn’t anything communicable going around the Daycare Center and excused herself after having delegated one of her workers to see to Howard’s needs. When he grew restive and attempted to break away from Anita’s grip, she scolded him and held him in place by his suspenders while she talked with the attendant. Howard ground his baby teeth together in anger. First Anita forced him to dress like one of these toddlers, and then she treated him as if he was one of the sniveling infants he saw arrayed in play in front of him. “What’s next?”, he thought to himself.
A muted cry issued from one of the back rooms as in answer to Howard’s unvoiced question. Howard tentatively identified the noise as the muffled wail of a very young infant. It made Howard shiver as if someone had walked over his tomb. He was preternaturally sure that the sound was some sort of omen presaging his ultimate fate. The sound repeated itself and then was taken up by several unmusical voices that bawled discordantly in unison. The origin of the sounds was suddenly clear. It was the distressed mewling of several infants from a nursery that was just beyond his range of sight, but whose doorway was clearly marked with a full color cutout of a crawling diapered infant. Howard decided that the Daycare must have a nursery for inhabitants who were too young to be allowed free reign in the play area for toddlers. The idea disquieted him in a way he could not fathom. It wasn’t so much that he felt that the babies’ cries were bad, but he was bothered by the fact that they had a special room for clients who were so helpless that they needed to be confined to cribs and playpens. He had the feeling that the wails were a sign of some unknown evil that impended, threatening his doom. Howard felt like the happy cries of the toddlers playing only yards from where he sat were only a cover for some greater evil that lay lurking beneath the surface. He would have run away if he could have opened the heavy hydraulically-loaded door separating the Daycare from the outside hall. As it was, the pit of fear in his stomach that threatened to overwhelm him made him want to pee. A minute later, he tinkled in his training pants. Howard looked down at his pants to see if there was any discernable sign of his childish accident. There wasn’t. Only the faded indigo color of his second-hand denim overalls was to be seen. No one had noticed what he had done. He was safe for a time. Nonetheless, Howard was struck by the unshakable impression was that he was soon to be imprisoned in a pediatric purgatory from which there would be no return.
Anita sat him on a toddler-sized chair to wait while she discussed the particulars of his care to one of the Daycare workers. Howard was horribly embarrassed when she reached in the brown paper bag she was carrying and pulled out two pair of neatly folded training pants. Anita explained that he wasn’t fully potty trained yet and could be expected to have at least one “accident” during the day while he was there. The worker nodded and took the bag from Anita’s hand and asked if he just wet himself or whether his “accidents” were “messy”. Anita explained that she was actually Howie’s aunt and that with his mother in the hospital, he could be expected to regress in his toilet training to some degree. She chuckled and told the woman, sotto voce, that Howie was having difficulty adapting to his new “mother” and occasionally referred to her by her first name. She patted him on the head condescendingly and said that “little Howie” tried his best, but sometimes he childishly forgot and pottied on the spot.
Anita told the worker that Howie could be quite precocious at times and sometimes astonished adults by his apparent adult speech. She said that although he was very intelligent, little Howie had a retiring personality and tended to be very reserved around unfamiliar people. Anita went on to tell the crèche worker that she had dressed him in toddler’s snap-crotched pants for that reason. If he signaled that he needed to go potty, he would probably have to go in the next few minutes or he would lose control. The worker laughed and said that most of their older children were at that stage of potty training and that they had prepared for that eventuality. She pointed to three plastic potty chairs next to the wall and told Anita that once Howard signaled them he was ready to go, they would immediately open up the snaps on his pants and remove his training panties while rushing him over to sit his bottom on the potty. The worker cautioned Anita that if he repeatedly had messy accidents in his pants, the Daycare rules required that he be diapered until he was fully potty trained. The worker was pointed in saying that the Daycare couldn’t be expected to do more than public schools and that elementary schools had their own problems with older children who weren’t potty-trained.
Anita agreed to the conditions and asked what they would be serving for lunch that day for the children. The woman told her that they had carrot sticks for the midmorning snack, quartered peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on whole wheat for lunch with tangerine wedges for dessert and raisin-oatmeal cookies for the afternoon snack. She went on to tell her that a half pint carton of whole milk was provided for each child with every meal or snack. If the mother desired it, chocolate milk could be substituted for whole mike for the child’s afternoon snack. Howard frowned at the mention of carrot sticks and milk for his midmorning snack. He hated carrots and could not abide milk as a drink! She went on to say that a TV was provided in another room reserved for the entertainment of the older children, but tots in Howard’s age group could not be trusted not to throw something at the TV and break the picture tube unless an attendant could be spared to watch them constantly. Howard would have to be restricted for safeties sake to the toddler area of the nursery. The attendant assured Anita that there were plenty of toys in the toddler area for Howard to divert himself with so he wouldn’t miss his cartoons on TV. Howard was not looking forward to his experience at the Daycare. He took his thumb out of his mouth momentarily and looked at it. The skin on his thumb was white and wrinkled. If he continued to suck his thumb the way he had been ordered, the skin on his thumb would begin to deteriorate from the humid environment of his mouth. As much as he hated to ask, he needed his pacifier. He looked up at Anita and asked soulfully around his thumb, “Binkie, Mommy?”
They two women smiled at the sound of his high pitched voice and turned to look at him. Anita said, “Is your thumb getting sore, Howie?”
He looked at the women and admitted as a runnel of drool coursed its way down his chin to land on his T-shirt, “Uh-huh.”
Anita turned to the attendant as she reached in her purse to get out Howard’s pacifier and said, “You know I’ve tried and tried to get Howie to give up his binkie, but he insists on sucking either his binkie or his thumb. His poor little thumb gets so irritated from the constant sucking that I’ve given up on trying to break him of sucking his pacifier. Maybe when he gets older, he’ll stop on his ownÖ”
Anita punctuated her final sentence by inserting the pacifier in his mouth. Then she pinned the ribbon which was knotted to the pacifier’s ring to the bib of his overalls with a diaper pin. He groaned inwardly when he saw the decorative head on the diaper pin; it was a yellow duck head and matched the pattern on his T-shirt. Howard was completely humiliated by the byplay with the pacifier and the duck-headed diaper pin. Anita had managed to twist his simple request into a testament to his infantine immaturity. He’d be lucky if the minute Anita left the Daycare the attendants didn’t strip him of his clothes, then diaper and drag him off to spend the rest of the day in a crib in the infant’s nursery.
Anita picked him up and kissed him goodbye on the forehead like an affectionate mother, then handed him over to the attendant. Anita handed the attendant his blankie and a large yellow plushie duck while informing the attendant that the duck was Howie’s favorite toy. She finished by telling her it was okay for little Howie to have chocolate milk in the afternoons. The daycare worker turned him around so she could put her arm under his bottom to support him then she turned away to carry Howard to the playroom to mingle with the other toddlers. The last he saw of Anita that day was the sight of her going through the door to the Daycare while he looked over the attendant’s shoulder.
For the rest of the week, Howard was taken to the Daycare center as his body continued its slow regression into infancy. His life at home continued petty much as it had before; as long as he obeyed Anita’s orders to the letter she was as loving and kind to him as if she had been his own mother. As the week passed, he began to have fun at the Daycare Center in spite of himself. He delighted in constructing miniature buildings and towns with the wooden blocks the center provided and he discovered that finger painting was a pleasant diversion although his deteriorating dexterity caused him to get the paints everywhere. He got used to having his wet pants changed by strange women and didn’t make a fuss when they checked his temperature rectally each day after weighing him on the doctor’s office scale they kept next to the nursery door. Howard found he chocolate milk he was given with his cookies each afternoon at the center to be cloying at first, but after the third day he became quite fond of the chocolatey drink. His incontinence steadily worsened every day until he began to have occasional dirty “accidents” in the training pants as well as frequently wetting them. At least his regression seemed to be slowing; his body only shrank slightly during the week.