Their Father’s Princesses
or
Hoops, I Did It Again
In the kingdom of Vannaleigh, every little girl was raised with one goal in mind: to be a princess. There were always a number of openings for that job, since the royal family seemed to produce prodigious numbers of princes generation after generation. Still, there was typically only about a one-in-a-couple-hundred chance of becoming a princess, but these were considered odds worth taking.
While boys were being taught to farm, or read and write, or cook, or build things, or home economics, girls were sent to charm schools, salons to get nose lifts and small feet, and voice studios to learn the proper tones for everything from talking down to servants to throwing proper hissy fits. There was a small but growing minority of mothers who did substitute a more humane schooling for their girls; they learned icy stares and condescending phrases instead of shouts and demands.
Joanna and Nonna had no mother, and their father had been trained as a hoop maker. Unfortunately, just at this time women were wearing bustles with the skirts gathered around the legs rather than hoops, so his services were not much in demand. This meant he spent much of his time trying to convince people that they needed very large lamp shades, or bird cage covers, or other such things that hoop skirts might look like, and so had very little time for cooking and cleaning, like every man should be doing.
So Joanna and Nonna learned to do men’s work instead of going to princess school. Their neighbors would prance by in their ball clothes to dance classes, or practice tittering at and mocking the boys they might some day have to marry if they didn’t land a princess job, or have a rollicking time beating the servants with gilded canes or expensive leather purses. Joanna and Nonna would sigh mournfully as they watched them, and on those rare occasions that father was home to hear them, he would say to them with a squeeze, “You’ll always be MY princesses, if that helps.”
It didn’t.
Nevertheless, they became quite adept at men’s work, cooking expertly, cleaning privies so well you could eat in them and think you were in a booth at a five-star restaurant, bandaging wounds, balancing accounts, reading for ladies who couldn’t be bothered, and caring for and diapering babies. Their father was sorry that he couldn’t provide them with a more well-rounded education, but they had to be content with learning to argue on their own, and struggle to treat others with disrespect, and make laughably botched attempts at flirting with any of the various princes that happened to come within eyeshot of them.
Joanna and Nonna also learned the family business, for what it was worth. They made the strongest hoops, and wove the finest cloth, and stretched it smoothly over the frames, and hoped more than anyone else that hoops would come back into style. They didn’t. So their father’s princesses went out to see what they could do with their wares like their father had for so many years.
Resourcefulness is one of those things that, when you have a lot of actual resources, you rarely develop - kind of ironic. Joanna and Nonna had only hoops and cloth as resources, so they resourcefully went in search of those who had resources, to convince them that they really needed to have hoops and cloth among their resources as well.
To their surprise and dismay, it turned out they already did have them. They just didn’t call them that. The hoops they called wheels. The cloth they called towels, or serviettes, or curtains, or any number of other things. Of course, all these other things were provided by men who specialized in those wares, and the things Joanna and Nonna had to offer were not needed.
So, instead, they went to look for people who didn’t even have hoops and cloth at all - those with no resources whatsoever. Some they found in poor areas, where Joanna and Nonna would use all the men’s skills they had learned to help the people fix broken things, and generally improve their lots. In turn, those they helped would share food with them, so they and their father never went hungry. Others they found along the highway, broken down and stranded, waiting for a man who could fix their wheel, or relight their lamps, or put a cover over their carriages to keep the rain off of them.
Joanna and Nonna became well-known throughout the kingdom, at least by reputation. They were called “The Angel Men”, because they did men’s work out of charity, and because they were actually quite beautiful outwardly as well as inwardly. They wouldn’t have believed that if they were told it, of course, because the only one who had told them that was their father, and he thought they were princesses, after all!
One day, they came upon a terrible accident. The royal horse had thrown a shoe, which hit the royal driver, who had whacked the royal horse hard with his whip as he fell from his royal driver’s seat, and the royal van, containing all of the royal males, had been pulled sideways into a boulder, broken a few wheels, rolled over several times over the royal-tapestry-covered canopy, and thrown the royal princes all over a rocky ravine. As Joanna and Nonna went from prince to prince, they discovered with horror that the potential princess job openings had, in one fell swoop, been reduced from more than twenty to only two.
The king, who had been saved from grievous bodily harm by the several layers of royal gowns and royal fat which he wore at all times, watched form the ground (Joanna and Nonna had already tried unsuccessfully to raise him to a more kingly position) as they carefully tended the remaining heirs. Joanna bandaged Prince Stephen’s head with a strip of brocaded organdy with a fleur-di-lis pattern, set his arm back in its’ socket, and reattached his unfortunately long nose with small, tender stitches. Nonna realigned Prince Andrew’s spine, trimmed his broken fingernails, and repaired his torn clothing with portions of pink silk and purple thread.
When the princes opened their eyes to see what was happening to them, the girls smiled at them with no trace of flirtatiousness at all - it was somewhat disconcerting for the fellows, as they had never encountered this kind of selfless behavior from girls before. They didn’t have to endure it for long, however, since they girls proceeded to leave them so they could fix the wheels on the van and re-shoe the horse.
When Joanna and Nonna had completed all the repairs they could on both persons and property, they came back to the king. They helped him shed a few layers so he could be propped upright, and then bowed to him and asked his permission to go home.
“Absolutely not!” he exclaimed. Joanna and Nonna were abashed. “Actually, yes, “ he blustered, “But the home to which you must come and which shall hereafter be yours is mine - you will be the new princesses!”
Joanna and Nonna looked at each other for a moment, and then spoke a truth they had not realized until then, “Your Majesty, we have no desire to be princesses. Or, rather, we are already princesses to our father, who needs us much more than you do.”
The king was as disconcerted as his sons were before. “Uh, I’m the king, uh, I’ve got to do SOMEthing for you...” he trailed off.
“There is ONE thing you could do for us, your majesty!” they cried together.
Several months later, when the princes had recovered enough to dance again, a great ball was held, and Joanna and Nonna were invited as the guests of honor. They put on their finest gowns, and were accompanied by their father in a snappy set of tails with a lacquered walking stick and tall hat. They danced, whirling bells amongst a sea of bells, all made by their father and themselves. You see, the one thing they had asked the king to do for them was to make the hoop skirt the current fashion.
Naturally, the girls married the princes, and they wound up being the princesses of the kingdom. But they were always their father’s princesses first.
The End
