The minute his foot plunged into the water, he was shocked by its warmth. It was startling and felt so good. It was as if he had been expecting a smack but had received a wondrous, delicious kiss. He hurried into the bathtub and sank into its great warmth. He had never taken such a warm bath before. The baths the children took once a month were always tepid and filthy.
He didn’t bother with why or how he was allowed to have such a treat. There was no time for logic right now. He just loved the feeling. He was at one with the warm water. The faucet looked like an elephant with its ears flared out. Elo?se screwed its ears and more warm water spurted out of its nose and Pierrot closed his eyes.
When he opened them again, he saw that Sister Elo?se had taken off her habit. She was wearing a thin slip. It was odd to see her hair. Even though it had been cut short, he could still see that it was soft and fair. It was like something one might discover in a milkweed pod. She shook her head, as though she had long luxurious locks.
“I’ll wash you,” she said.
Pierrot stood up and Elo?se began to vigorously move a bar of soap this way and that all over his skinny body. Her slip got splashed with water as she scrubbed and rubbed him. He could make out the shapes of her large round breasts under it as it became soaked. He couldn’t say why but he felt frightened.
The bottom of the tub was slippery under his feet and felt as insubstantial as a thin layer of ice. As though he might crash through it any minute and descend a hundred feet down into the cold waters that lurked just beneath him.
“Do you want to feel something strange but also really nice?” Elo?se asked.
Pierrot shrugged. Like any child, he was always up for experiencing new and possibly delightful things. Now, however, he hesitated. Although something prevented him from saying yes, he did not say no. In the future, he would always remember that he didn’t tell her no.
Putting the soap and washcloth on the side of the bathtub, she straightened up on her knees. She took his penis in her hands and leaned forward and put her mouth around it. She had just the tip of it in her mouth and was licking and sucking on it. His penis grew so quickly. He thought it would keep growing and growing. As if it were some magical beanstalk. He felt terrible, but so good.
He had the sudden urge to grab her head and ram his penis to the back of her throat. He tried to stop himself but his hands and fingers reached against his will. They just wanted to touch her silky hair with their fingertips. The moment he felt the hair, he couldn’t help himself. He took two fistfuls of it and pushed his penis deep into her mouth and it exploded. The feeling was so enormous that he didn’t know whether it was a good feeling or a bad feeling. It was more frightening than anything else. He also knew that it was something that he could easily spend the rest of his life doing.
His penis throbbed in her mouth. A tremor went through his whole body, as though he were a flag moving in the wind. She gagged and coughed. She pushed him back gently. She spit into the bath.
“You can go back to bed,” she said.
Pierrot climbed out of the bathtub. He dried himself off hastily and put his nightgown back over his head. He hurried back to bed, shivering now and on tippytoe. Freezing rain began to fall outside and it sounded like there were a hundred children running behind him. He had a chill and had to get under the covers so that he could go back to sleep and wake up out of this strange dream. He didn’t even know what they had done exactly. He hadn’t known what being sucked off was before then. But he knew it had to do with sex.
He was too young to be married to the nun. She was married to God! What would God say if He knew about this? And God knew absolutely everything, so He certainly would know about this. How could he have been so stupid, to go and upset God? He had been considering himself lucky of late, as he was no longer beaten like the other children.
He wept into his pillow. He didn’t know why he was weeping. The next day he began crying when he looked at his porridge. His big teardrops made the porridge tasty.
Sister Elo?se continued to wake Pierrot up in the middle of the night. It happened too many times for Pierrot to count. It continued to happen as the winter melted away outside. Once, he was concentrating so hard while Elo?se sucked him that it caused small buds to burst through the branches of the trees, and then the leaves unfurled when he came. The next day, he pulled his black turtleneck on to go outside. He had trouble getting it over his head and he sat on his bed and imagined he looked like a pawn in a game of chess. When he went outside, the spring wind had come back. It was telling the children about how it had gone in a ship to Paris, how it had taken a train to Italy. The children danced with the barefooted, carefree wind.