Once Rose and Davy moved into their new house, she didn’t bother to dress him in more than his customary diapers unless there was a reason. If the house was cool, Rose would dress him in either shortalls or onsies to play on the carpet of their family room. When they went out together, she would put snap-crotched overalls on him and stuff a pair of diaper doublers in the front of his diapers to provide extra padding so she wouldn’t have to change him until they got home. Unless it was cold, she let him sleep in nothing more than his diapers with his blankie to keep him warm.
Davy’s adult mind returned after two months, but he didn’t use it. By that time, he had lost interest in the adult world. His personal concerns remained at the level of a two-year-old. He was happy to be a little boy again and spend his days waddling around behind Rose in his diapers to see what she was doing. He liked taking morning and afternoon naps and having his diapers changed by her. He became too used to having Rose take care of him to expend the effort to take charge of his life. His mother talked to the judge who married them and easily convinced him to declare that Davy was incompetent. After a perfunctory interview with the judge in his chambers, where the judge got to witness Davy suck his thumb, babble, make bubbles of spit and pee in his diapers, Rose was granted full power-of-attorney and given guardianship of her mentally-ill husband. As far as the State was concerned, he was an infant and Rose was legally his mother.
After two years of nursing, Davy developed an acute case of pyorrhea and extensive carries from the constant bath of sugar-laden formula and fruit juice over his teeth. After Rose took him to a female dentist, Rose was told by the dentist that he had to have all his teeth extracted. The dentist used a combination of anaesthetic and nitrous oxide to eliminate the pain of surgery and was sympathetic to Rose’s pleas for a prescription for powerful painkillers. He spent the next two weeks in a semi-conscious condition as Rose laced his formula with painkillers. Rose noted with maternal delight that the mind-numbing drugs had an unexpected effect; his behavior which had hovered at the toddler stage suddenly regressed until he acted like a nine-month-old infant. The drugs made him so unsteady on his feet that he stopped walking around the house and began creeping on all fours on the floor. His speech was so slurred by the painkillers that he gave up trying to communicate altogether. Instead, he would sit on the floor and babble to himself while he played with his toys. Most of the time, he slept.
When the swelling of his gums went down again, Rose wasn’t surprised to discover that his drooling had become so uncontrollable that his wet dripping chin became a permanent feature of his face. Without his front teeth, he slobbered continuously, streaming strings of saliva on his chest like the merest infant. After he stained two of his best lapped-shouldered infant style T-shirts, Rose made some velcroed-tabbed drooling bibs from some old towels and made him wear them around the house whenever he wasn’t sleeping or eating. She continued to bib him for his meals in his regular adult feeding bibs that Ruth had bought him. Since he had no teeth to cut and grind his food, Rose changed the type of baby food she fed him. In order to protect his still tender gums, she bought a number of latex rubber-coated, baby-feeding spoons to use when she fed him. Once the change in routine was made, Rose began spoon-feeding him the finely pureed “First-Stages” baby food in tiny spoonfuls until the jar of food was empty. Gradually she reduced the amount of solid food she gave him, replacing the nourishment he got from baby food with infant formula. Within a month, most of his calories came from the vast amounts of formula he sucked down every day.
Davy spent the rest of his life playing with building blocks and toy construction equipment at Rose’s feet while she knitted and watched TV. If he was good in the morning, she’d let him watch cartoons in the afternoon after his nap. She bought a DVD of big construction equipment for him to watch for his twentieth birthday and he watched it over and over, clapping and bubbling in glee at the huge machines as they went about their business. It was fortunate that video tape had been replaced in the late nineties with DVD technology. He’d have worn out a video tape in no time. DVD disks had an estimated service life of one hundred years of normal use. Davy would use every minute of his disk’s life before it had to be replaced.
