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| Ice Cream by Evelyne Axell |
He was wondering all through lunch whether Diana was going to say anything about her husband, when, finally, just after he ordered two bowls of ice cream for dessert—she loved ice cream, so every week he always made sure to order it when he took her to lunch—she said, “Teddy doesn’t quite look like himself lately,” so he gently asked “In what way?”
(yes, he had already been informed about the situation, but he had hoped to hear about it from her)
and she answered by saying, “He’s a woman!”
(which was exactly what he’d been told—that Diana believed that another woman in the locked memory unit where she was living was actually her husband, the one who had died three years ago of Covid 19, and that Diana would sit on the other woman’s lap and kiss her and caress her face)
so he said, “Maybe it’s just someone who reminds you of Teddy?” and she replied, “Oh, no! It actually looks like him,” and then she went on, “You see, I found out what happened—he fell down and was injured, and the injury messed up his glandular secretions and he turned into a girl….”
(and it could have been such a beautiful story, he thought—that Diana found love again in her late eighties—this time with a woman—except the other woman—the one Diana believed was Ted—was very distressed by Diana’s attention and Diana became angry and violent with the staff when they tried to separate her from her “husband,”)
“and he might have gone back to normal eventually,” she goes on, “because that happened to him before, but the doctors decided to change his whole neurological system so now he’s a girl permanently—it actually makes me so angry what they did to him—I’m grinding my teeth just thinking about it—and they won’t even let me call him Teddy—they keep telling me what his name is now but I can’t remember that name—and sometimes I take myself to the Lord and I say, ‘God, why?’ and then Diana starts to cry
(and there had been other angry outbursts and violent behavior at the facility, and she was refusing to take any medication to help with that, so now, even though he wasn’t even Diana’s relative—Ted was a distant cousin—the situation had become his problem because Diana was alone now, with no close family, so as the trustee of the trust her husband had set up, he was doing his best to look after Diana now—it was he who had moved her far away from the assisted living facility where she was living in Virginia to facility near him so he could visit her more easily—and now he was being asked to become her legal guardian so he could authorize having the meds she was refusing added to her food)
but by then the server comes with their ice cream, and Diana’s face beams in childlike delight when the server sets the bowl down in front of her and when she spoons up her first taste—vanilla is her favorite—so for a few moments he just watches her eating her ice cream, a slender, fragile old woman, with pale skin, flushed cheeks, and short wispy white hair, her wedding and engagement rings loose on her slender left ring finger, and then he starts eating his ice cream, too.
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