'Well, the babies each use about seven diapers a day,' Christina began, stepping into the closet, the urine test cups on a shelf near her head. 'It averages out to that. Seven diapers a day multiplied by twenty-seven is one hundred and eighty-nine diapers per baby until the next shipment comes. So, for the eight babies, it's one thousand, five hundred and twelve to last them the whole twenty-seven days.'
Christina paused. She knew her math was right; it always was.
Miss Metzger nodded importantly. 'Okay, I understand.'
'But two more babies arrive in two days, and even assuming that they arrive with a few diapers each, you'll need twenty-four days times seven, times two, which is three hundred and thirty-six diapers. Fifteen-twelve plus three-sixteen is eighteen-forty-eight. The jumbo packages of newborn size you have in there have thirty-two diapers in each. To cover your requirements, you need fifty-eight packs of the newborn size. I count only fifty-four.'
Miss Metzger stared dully at the wall of diapers.
'But it's more complicated than that. Three of those babies are almost three months old. They're ready to start wearing size small in, say, two weeks. If the diapers are too tight, then it's-it's a rash of diaper rashes. So, for those babies, you need three babies times seven diapers daily times thirteen days, which is two hundred and seventy-three size small diapers. I see you have there eight packets of the smalls, which contain twenty-eight diapers each. Eight times twenty-eight is two hundred and twenty-four. So, if you bump those three babies up in two weeks, then you're forty-nine size small diapers short.'
Miss Metzger stepped toward the wall of diapers, frowning to herself, and that was exactly when Christina pocketed one of the urine test cups.
'But if you order more size smalls, we can subtract the two hundred and seventy-three diapers from the original total requirement of eighteen forty-eight newborn size, which leaves fifteen seventy-five newborn. That number divided by thirty-two, the number in each packet, comes out to forty-nine-point-two size newborn packets. You have fifty-four. So, if you reorder size small, you'll definitely have enough size newborn.'
'I see,' said Miss Metzger uncertainly.
'But if you don't order more size small, then you'll be forced to use size newborn for all the babies all the time. And with the new babies coming, you'll run out. Let's see-you have fifty-four packets and you need fifty-eight. That's four times thirty-two, which is one twenty-eight. At ten babies-three of whom probably have diaper rash because their diapers are now too tight-times seven diapers a day'-Christina glanced at her watch, remembering the problem with Soft T-'seventy diapers every twenty-four hours… and you're one twenty-eight short… it's the early afternoon now, so you'll run out of diapers sometime in the morning of the twenty-sixth day. One day short before the truck comes.'
'Oh.'
'Of course, you could ration the diapers, Miss Metzger. But you'd have to get all the women to cooperate and agree not to use more than six a day, or, more precisely, thirteen in a two-day period. But if they count wrong, or cheat, or are too sleepy in the morning to remember how many times they changed the baby, then you could still end up with ten babies with no fresh diapers for twelve or fifteen hours twenty-seven days from now. It's close, either way. All this is assuming you don't get a kid or two with diarrhea. You could also ration the diapers so successfully that you run out of them at exactly the time the truck is due, but there's a problem there, too.'
'There is?' asked Miss Metzger worriedly.
'Yes. I've noticed that the delivery truck arrives between ten in the morning and two in the afternoon, with no real pattern to-'
'So?' Miss Metzger interrupted.
'So let me continue.'
'There's no need to be rude.'
'My point exactly.' Christina switched the mop to her other hand. 'Now, it also happens that the truck will be delivering paper napkins in bulk, for the meal room, where they claim they feed us something they call food. The napkins are on a six-week delivery cycle, okay? I know because I've worked in the kitchen. The cycle corresponds to every third diaper delivery. Same provisioning company, same truck, same driver. Sometimes it's diapers, sometimes it's napkins, sometimes both. But the kitchen loading dock is closer to the main gate than we are, here in the nursery, and so that's the first stop. They load the truck that way, too-napkins at the back of the truck, first to unload. The driver of that truck is Puerto Rican and he likes to bullshit with Luis, the guy in the kitchen, about Cuban baseball players, what the best dance clubs in the city are, how nasty their girlfriends are-wait, are you nasty, Miss Metzger?'
'Nasty?' The woman's carefully drawn eyebrows lifted, suspicious of the question. 'I suppose I am.'
'Oh, Miss Metzger, so am I!' Christina cried. 'Or I used to be. I used to be very nasty. And you know what?'
'Tell me, Christina, if you must,' the nursing administrator sighed.
Christina bent closer. 'I liked it, too.' She straightened up. 'Anyway, those he-men at the loading dock are, in our high-powered diaper supply analysis, enjoying the kind of intellectual discussion you get with guys who don't understand the importance of diapers, and so, on top of the twenty minutes of slow-motion unloading of kitchen napkins, Miss Metzger, you can add at least thirty minutes of chinga las putas and other learned observations, which, added up, is fifty minutes, minimum. So, if you, Miss Metzger, you, have rationed the diapers perfectly but now are sweating the last diaper or two on that day, the twenty-seventh day from now, and you are using an average of one diaper per baby every three hours when the babies are awake, then, with ten babies, that extra fifty minutes is, from a probability basis, going to require another three diapers. Three more tiny wet behinds while those guys sit on their thumbs.'
'You just figured this out?'
'I was passing the room yesterday and saw the diapers inside. You can tell by looking.'
'Oh,' said Miss Metzger, recovering herself. 'I'm sure we would have realized the problem.'
Maybe, Christina thought a minute later, but of course not. She walked briskly toward the prison hospital. She didn't have much time; she was due inside the hospital in fifteen minutes for more maintenance work that didn't need to be done. Good thing she liked sweeping, always had, for it calmed her. Outside the dispensary stood a long line of women waiting to be handed their daily dose of AZT, or methadone, or Prozac, or whatever else kept them alive. In the SHU they brought your medicine to you, if they remembered. The whole point was to punish. In the box you got a cot and a hot and no more-the rooms in the SHU were cement cells, zoo cages. Not much of a penalogical advancement from, say, eighteenth-century London, modern toiletry the only great difference. Twenty-three hours a day inside, one out. No television, no cooking for oneself, no books, no visits, no music, no work. Just time. Just time and picking at your fingernails and masturbating and listening to the soft rush of the plumbing system and cooking imaginary meals and telling yourself that your life was not over yet and wishing you had been nicer to your father and masturbating again and picking your teeth with a fingernail and doing a thousand sit-ups and hearing the girl in the next cell banging her head on her steel door. Soft T could deliver you into this vacuum. All he needed to do was scribble on his fucking clipboard a couple of times in a week and you were gone. He'd told Mazy that she had to blow him once a month, the first time being a minute from now behind the hospital. Soft T had a thing for big women, and Mazy, softly expanded by grief and exhaustion to more than three hundred pounds, excited all of Soft T's spittled sadism. The more immense his victim, the larger his conquest. He did not see Mazy's maternal gravity and private generosities, the loveliness hidden by the half dozen scars melted into her face decades prior by a drunken father holding an electric clothes iron. As for Mazy, the prospect of bending her bulk to the ground to service Soft T's quivering viciousness terrified her, and she'd confessed to Christina she'd never been able to do that to a man; the act made her sick. Something had happened with an uncle when she was a girl, and she'd never been able to forget it. What if she tried to do it to Soft T and started to weep? He'd become furious, maybe he'd hit her, maybe he'd put her in the SHU anyway. Watching Mazy, seeing the old, never-forgotten frenzy come into her eyes, Christina had decided. She'd take the chance. At first she'd considered a weapon-you could get a shank if you really needed one-but then she'd realized that Soft T would quickly overpower her, perhaps even beat her for her trouble, and then, having attacked a guard, she'd end up in the SHU for at least a year, unable to help Mazy or herself, for that matter. There had to be a better way, she'd concluded to herself, a trickier way, and in fact, there was.
Soft T was waiting in the hidden, shadowed space behind the hospital, his hands on his fat waist, the armpits of his uniform dark crescents of sweat. He looked up at Christina. 'Where's Mazy?'
