The Princess and the Peep

There was once a prince, and he wanted to find a princess to marry, but he was a rather stuck-up and entitled prince – he was a native of New Holstein and not one of the rare nice ones – so the princess needed to be a real Princess. With an upper case P. He travelled right and left and up and down and all around to find his Princess bride, but there was always something wrong. There were plenty of princesses, but he always had questions regarding whether they were real princesses. Every single one of them had something that was not quite right about them. Here’s an example: There was a princess who lived in New York…so you would think that just by being cool enough to live in New York, she stood a good chance of being a real Princess, but no, you would be wrong… Her problem was that she smelled like a goat. Literally. She showered or bathed daily and used flowery-smelling soap. She also washed her hair at least twice a year. Oh wait. That was the problem with her. She didn’t have any sense when it came to hair. She didn’t realize you had to wash it at least every few days. So she smelled like an extremely dirty goat.

When the prince arrived in his black limo at her apartment building in SoHo, the driver double-parked and then got out and opened the door for the prince, who exited the limo very slowly and ceremoniously. After tiptoeing across the sidewalk, making sure not to step in the garbage spilling out of a torn plastic bag sitting next to a light pole, he pushed the unlocked building door open. When he took a look at the dark, dank stairs he would have to climb up – ten stories, no less! – to get to the princess’ apartment, he sighed with a heavy sense of annoyance and entitlement. Why couldn’t this building have an elevator? He would have to see about getting one installed if this princess turned out to be THE Princess. But no – why should he waste time and money on installing an elevator in this building if the Princess would be moving out to live with him at his parents’ castle after their wedding?

However, he was wasting time contemplating possibilities that might not even occur if this princess was not a Princess with an upper case P. He sighed again and climbed slowly and ceremoniously up the stairs to the tenth floor, which left him out of breath and sweaty, which princes and anyone else from New Holstein do NOT appreciate. Things were not boding well for this princess, upper case P or not. He stood on the tiny tenth floor landing before the door of the princess’ apartment and pulled out his perfumed silk handkerchief. He then slowly and ceremoniously wiped the sweat off his forehead and cheeks. He stuffed the now worthless handkerchief in his pocket and pulled the hand mirror out of his man purse. As he turned his face from side to side, gazing at his reflection, he started to worry about the mottled red color of his cheeks and the drops of sweat threatening to drip from his stiff moussed bangs. Would the princess notice the sweat, red cheeks and general discomfiture he was displaying? Who cares, anyway? He tossed his head slowly and ceremoniously and watched his reflection to make sure the head toss looked sassy and classy. He then put the mirror back into his man purse and knocked on the door.

When the princess opened it, she was feeling fluttery excitement – she was expecting the arrival of the prince and although she was certain he would jump at the chance to marry a New York princess, still. What if he didn’t like her for some reason? Her question became a self-fulfilling prophecy. She watched as the prince took one whiff of the miasma surrounding this supposed princess, and then gagged but didn’t vomit. She wondered what was wrong with him. She obviously had been used to her own stink for her entire life and had no idea why everyone – including this prince – made faces and gagged whenever they came within two feet of her. She had no friends – no one had ever again wanted to get physically close to her after meeting her for the first time. Also, her parents had died when she was a baby, so they had never been around for her to ask why people didn’t want to be near her. And her grandparents, who had raised her, had both lost their sense of smell while working in an asbestos factory. They had retired together on the same day, when the princess was eighteen years old. And then they had died within one day of each other, just ten days after retiring. They had left their rent-controlled apartment and all their savings – quite a bit of money, actually – to the princess. She had been living off her inheritance for over ten years now, so she had never worked and she lacked for nothing. Except for people to hang out with who might have had the courtesy to tell her politely that she stank – her hair stank, specifically – and that she needed to wash her hair more than twice a year.

How was it that she was even a princess anyway? The story behind why she was a princess is a long one and since she was not going to be selected by the prince for marriage after all, there’s really no point to telling it here and taking up a lot of space on something that has no relevance to this story. Suffice it to say that this princess was a princess based on imagination and sorcery. But she was not a princess with an upper case P.

So the prince took a whiff of her stinking miasma, gagged but didn’t vomit, and clattered back down the ten stories to the ground floor, where he flung open the door to the building, jumped out on to the sidewalk on tiptoes, and then waited slowly and ceremoniously for the driver to get out of the limo and open the door. He climbed into the back seat and sighed in annoyance because he was sweaty again. His perfumed silk handkerchief was already practically dripping with sweat and he hadn’t brought another one.

“Home, James!” he shouted at the driver, whose name was not James.

The prince sighed loudly and repeatedly to no one on the drive home. James who wasn’t James couldn’t hear him sigh because the prince had immediately closed the window between the driver’s area and the back passenger area upon entering the limo. The prince also gazed in a brooding fashion out at the people rushing here and there on the sidewalks of the busy city. He had expected to find a real Princess in that ten-story walkup in SoHo, but no. She smelled like a goat. He felt like it might be time to give up on finding a real Princess, at least in the northeastern part of the United States. It was time for him to come up with a new plan. He felt very sad and pouty because he wanted a real Princess so badly. He returned home to the castle in Mahwah in New Holstein and sighed and shook his head in sad resignation when his parents – the king and queen of Mahwah – asked him if he had had any luck with the princess of SoHo. He explained about how the supposed princess stank like a goat. He then went to his bedroom to brood and make a new plan. But before he could even finish brooding and start working on the new plan, fate intervened. His mother the queen may have been of some assistance to fate as well. She and the king were old – older than dirt – and they were both sick and tired of waiting for their son the prince to get off his high entitled horse and find a princess already. They were even beyond caring if she was a real Princess with an upper case P or not. Except they did understand about the prince’s most recent princess rejection – the SoHo princess who smelled like a goat. You just can’t smell like a goat.

That evening there was a terrible storm; it thundered and lightninged and the rain poured down in torrents. It was a really awful night. But not that different from many other nights in New Holstein. It seemed like it was always raining or snowing or sleeting or something there. It was April, though, so to be fair, it was not at all unusual for it to be storming. April showers bring May flowers and all that. It was also the week before Easter.

When the storm was at its loudest and scariest, someone rang the bell at the castle gate, and the old King himself went to open it. James the driver, whose name was not James but who was also the butler, had already gone home to his hovel at the very far back edge of the castle grounds, so he didn’t hear the gate bell ringing. The king put on his huge rain cape and boots, trudged the half mile down the driveway from the castle to the gate, removed the giant skeleton key from the inside pocket of his rain cape, inserted it into the gate lock, slowly twisted it until the lock released, and then pulled the huge, heavy iron gate open, but very slowly. The king did everything very slowly. His son the prince had inherited this tendency to do everything very slowly from the king, but the prince had added ceremoniousness to it.

The person ringing the castle bell turned out to be an alleged princess, but she was in a terrible state from the rain and the storm. The water streamed from her hair and her clothes; it poured into the tops of her shoes and out at the heels. She looked like a drowned rat. But she peered through the sheets of rain slashing across her face to tell the king that she was a real princess.

“Good evening, King Mahwah, I am a real Princess,” she said. “With an upper case P.” The old king said nothing, mainly because he was kind of deaf to begin with and the wind from the storm was shrieking so loudly that it made it basically impossible for anyone to hear anything. But he held the gate open for her to enter and then slowly pushed the gate closed and locked it. The so-called Princess waited for the king to finish locking the gate and then followed him up the winding driveway to the castle.

The queen was holding the front door open and when she saw the wet, bedraggled girl, she had her doubts that this was a real Princess. The queen hadn’t told anyone else, but she had put an ad in the Mahwah Craigslist “Connections” section, describing what her son the prince was looking for in a princess. She had received an email that very morning from a young woman claiming to be a Princess with an upper case P. The queen had emailed the castle address to the alleged Princess right away and told her to come that evening after seven o’clock. She had also told the Princess to explicitly say that she was a Princess with an upper case P as soon as someone opened the gate to let her into the castle grounds. The queen had not looked at the weather report for the day, and she hadn’t known this terrible rainstorm would be lashing and soaking everything for miles around. So she felt kind of bad for this alleged Princess, but here she was, so what can you do?

After entering the big door into the foyer, the Princess greeted the old queen by kissing the air next to both of her cheeks. Which made the queen’s cheeks wet and also made her somewhat annoyed.

“Hello, Queen Mahwah, I am a real Princess, with an upper case P,” said the Princess, and she curtsied. But her dress and petticoats were so soaked with rain water and her shoes were so wet that she slipped on the slippery marble floor of the foyer and fell down hard, landing on her butt. It looked like she was wearing enough petticoats to cushion her fall and when she said, “I’m okay,” it was clear she hadn’t broken her butt or anything.

The old queen looked down her and said, “Well, we shall soon see if it is true that you are a Princess.” She helped the girl get back up and took her into a bedroom. She took all the bed clothes off the bed, lifted the mattress up, and laid a single peep on the box springs. You know, one of those marshmallow peeps that only come out of hiding and appear on store shelves before Easter. The queen then took twenty mattresses and piled them on top of the peep. How the old queen was able to lift, carry and pile twenty mattresses on top of the peep and the box springs is as perplexing to me as it is to you, but that’s what happened. The queen then piled twenty feather beds on top of the mattresses. This was where the Princess was going to sleep that night. As she watched the queen lay the single peep on the box springs, and then pile all the mattresses and feather beds on top of it, she thought very hard about something. Once the queen finished with all the piling of mattresses and feather beds, she bade the Princess good night and shut the door of the bedroom.

The Princess went into the bathroom adjoining the bedroom and took off all her clothes. She examined her butt and thighs in the full-length mirror hanging on one of the walls. Yep, she was covered in dark bruises from her fall in the foyer. She had a strong feeling that these bruises would lead to a life of fortune and joy, although she wasn’t exactly sure how or why. She knew it had something to do with the peep lying under all the mattresses and feather beds, though. She took one of the fluffy towels and dried her hair as well as she could. She then opened several drawers in the bureau in the bedroom until she found a soft, warm nightgown. She put it on and climbed up onto the bed, using a tall ladder that had been conveniently placed next to the now very tall bed.

In the morning, the Princess climbed down, put on her still damp clothes, brushed her hair, which had dried in crazy loops and curls, and went downstairs to the castle dining room. The prince, king and queen were eating breakfast, and the prince wouldn’t even look at her. He was brooding on the question: What if she isn’t a real Princess? The queen asked her how she had slept.

“Oh terribly badly!” said the Princess, fluttering her long eyelashes and covering her cheeks with her hands. “I hardly closed my eyes the whole night! Heaven knows what was in the bed. I seemed to be lying upon some hard thing, and my whole body is black and blue this morning. It is terrible!” Of course, it was actually the fall onto the marble floor of the foyer that had caused all the bruising of the Princess’ butt and legs, but this Princess knew what she was doing. She wanted to marry the prince – not because of any silly reasons like he was handsome and good. He wasn’t. He was kind of fat, in a moist, squishy way. And he was ugly, with pimples that oozed pus at inopportune moments, and he had buck teeth. He was also not a good person. He was from New Holstein, remember? But he had a lot of money and lived in the Mahwah Castle. And the money and the castle were the targets the Princess had her sights set on.

After breakfast, the queen accompanied the Princess back to the bedroom to take a look and verify the bruising. Based on the dark bumps on her butt and legs, the queen saw at once that this must be a real Princess because she had obviously felt the peep through twenty mattresses and twenty feather beds, and it had done quite a bit of damage to her butt and legs. No one but a real Princess could have such delicate skin. I mean, you could maybe understand if it were a hard, dried up pea under all the mattresses and feather beds that caused the horrible bruising of the Princess’ butt and thighs. But a peep? A soft, squishy, sticky peep? Well, “there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” as Shakespeare said. In other words, nothing should surprise anyone at all, ever. This is why the queen’s test of the actual Princessness of the Princess was a good test. Only a real Princess with an upper case P could be bruised by sleeping on top of a peep stashed under twenty mattresses and twenty feather beds.

When the queen and the Princess returned to the dining room to report on the bruising from the peep, the prince did his best to get rid of the annoyed look on his face. He was annoyed because he hadn’t had a chance to get a good look at the alleged Princess the night before. Water had been literally pouring from her hair, clothes and shoes, and any makeup and hair products she might have used had all been washed away. She had looked like a drowned rat. This morning, she looked much better, although her clothes were still damp and wrinkled, and her hair was loopy and curled in strange directions. But the prince noticed that her hair was blonde and her eyes were kind of twinkly blue. There appeared to be some hope here after all. When she passed behind his chair to get to an empty chair, the prince surreptitiously sniffed hard. What if she smelled like a goat? But no. She smelled a bit like cheesecake, actually. The prince loved cheesecake and ate some whenever he could get the baking servant to make it.

A look of cheesecake delight transformed the prince’s face, making him look slightly less ugly, and he decided to ask the Princess to be his wife, based on his mother the queen’s certainty that they had found a real Princess who was worthy of her son’s princeliness. Also based on his mother the queen hissing into his ear, while simultaneously pinching it, “You better marry this Princess if you know what’s good for you, you good-for-nothing annoyance of a child.” The prince’s smile of cheesecake delight wobbled only slightly as his mother pinched his ear, but as soon as the pinching was finished, the prince beamed at the Princess.

“My dear Princess with an upper case P,” he whispered.

“What?” squawked the Princess. Her thick blonde curls were heavy and unless she pushed them behind her ears, she couldn’t hear very well. She gathered the heavy hair covering her ears, pushed it back, and smiled uncertainly at the prince. Then, in a quieter voice, she said, “I’m sorry, what did you say?”

“Ahem,” said the prince and then continued in a normal tone. “My dear Princess with an upper case P, I would like to ask for your hand in marriage.”

“Oh!” exclaimed the Princess, even though she had been expecting this question ever since she had examined her bruises in the bathroom mirror the night before. She blushed and continued, “Oh, well, yes, I would like to give you my hand in marriage.” And she thrust her hand, which was kind of dry and callused, into the prince’s rather moist, fatty hand. Ew, she thought to herself. This prince is moist and squishy. Yuck. But then she turned her gaze away from his cheesecake face, which she didn’t realize was a cheesecake face – it just looked like he was grinning strangely with his eyes half closed – and took a long look at the fancy china plates and real silver silverware, the huge chandelier hanging over the table, the marble floors and walls, and all the fancy furniture and paintings and stuff. This would all be hers soon. So she took a deep breath and didn’t pull her hand out of the prince’s moist grip. At least not right away. She forced herself to keep her hand in his until it was an opportune time to pull it away.

The queen was rattling on about something to do with the wedding date and the Princess finally stopped gazing in rapture at all her future fancy stuff and paid attention. Oh yeah. First they had to have a wedding before she could get her hands on all these things and claim them as her own. It was time to start participating in this whole wedding planning thing.

The prince was still smiling a cheesecake smile, which, to a person unaware that his smile had something to do with the deliciousness of cheesecake, looked like a slimy smirk. Suddenly, the smile slid greasily off his face, his mud brown eyes opened wide, and he stared at the Princess for a second.

“But – but – I don’t even know your name!” he screeched. The Princess looked over at him and shook her head in annoyance. Why in the world did he have to screech like that? Whew – this person she had agreed to marry was either going to have to change his ways or just stay away from her. Stay away from her would be best, she decided. She would figure out some way to keep him busy and away from her. But until they were married, she had to try her best to pretend to at least like him.

“Oh!” she uttered softly. “Sorry – my name is Brayline Barter.”

“Lovely!” replied the prince, the slimy smirk returning to his face as he imagined giving a name to the next cheesecake he would order the baking servant to make: Brayline. He then went off on an imaginary tour of a table topped with hundreds of delicious cheesecakes, all named Brayline and all for him.

Since the Princess was an orphan and had no real home to return to – just a horrible apartment in the bad part of Ho-Ho-Kum – or parents to pay for a wedding dress and all the other accoutrements that accompany a wedding, the king and queen agreed to let the Princess move into the castle immediately. They would also pay for everything having to do with the wedding. The Princess returned to her yucky apartment only to turn the keys in to the nasty super. She left all her clothes and belongings. “Let the next tenant have it all. Maybe she will also want to be a Princess with an upper case P and the vibes I am leaving behind will help her seal her fate the same way I have,” she thought as she climbed into the back seat of the taxi that was waiting to take her back to the Mahwah Castle.

The queen and Princess had fashion designers and seamstresses come to the castle to measure the Princess and display expensive fabrics and sequins and stuff for her to select the materials for her dress, veil and train. Caterers and wedding planners came to present foods and decorations to select from. Teams of butlers and maids came to clean and buttle and turn the rather dark castle into a light, airy palace.

Once all the decisions were made and the castle had been turned into a beautifully decorated palace, the day finally arrived. The Princess slapped her phone alarm into silence at five o’clock in the morning and climbed down from her extremely tall pile of mattresses and feather beds. She hadn’t ever actually felt the stupid squishy, now probably rotten peep – wait, do peeps ever get rotten? Who knows? Who cares? – underneath that huge pile of mattresses and feather beds, but she had gotten quite clever at keeping her butt and thighs bruised as if the peep were at fault. She found a rubber mallet out in the horse stables one afternoon after going for a canter around the castle grounds, and she had hidden the mallet in her underpants until she could get it up to her room. She stored it in one of the bathroom drawers and beat herself about the butt and thighs every evening with it. It didn’t hurt too, too badly, and really, the pain was such a minor thing to put up with in comparison to all the chandeliers and silver and money she would soon own.

The Princess finished her long climb down from her bed, waltzed into the bathroom and turned on the hot water to fill the tub. She poured in some drops of bubble bath and used the toilet while she waited for the tub to fill. Her butt and legs were in constant, though minor, pain and she was looking forward to not having to show her bruises to the queen every morning. Even if the queen insisted on making sure the peep was still bruising the Princess every night as she slept after the wedding, the Princess would simply enlist the aid of her prince husband and force the queen to stay out of her bedroom. But wait. The Princess and the prince would not actually have to sleep in her bedroom on that stupid super tall bed anyway. She would move into the prince’s bedroom as his wife, right? Right. The Princess stuck her tongue out at the pile of mattresses and feather beds, shut the door to the bathroom and lowered herself into the hot bubbly water. Ah. This was the life.

After the Princess finished scrubbing every nook and cranny of her body and she was squeaky clean, she put deodorant on all the places on her body that could start smelling bad, and hoped the prince was doing the same. He always smelled kind of damp and squishy, so it was possible he didn’t know you could use deodorant in places besides just your armpits. But she would teach him this and many other things about smelling and acting nice. Also about seeing a dermatologist to get rid of his zits and an eye doctor to get some blue or green contact lenses to cover up the mud brown color of his eyes. In the meantime, she had to put on her robe and let the cosmeticians and hairdressers into her room to get to work on her appearance. She spread flowery-smelling lotion all over her body and winced at the pain from her bruises. Soon. Soon she would be able to stop pounding herself with the mallet and just live. She tied the belt of her purple satin robe and opened the door to the murmuring and curtsying mob of women standing in the hallway. They all entered with their cases and bags of makeup and hair products. The Princess sat down at the dressing table and gazed at herself in the oval mirror.

“Mirror, mirror,” she thought. But she didn’t really want to ask it who was the fairest of all because that was the question asked by the nasty stepmother in that fairy tale. And she was not a nasty stepmother. Nor was she in a fairy tale. She was a Princess and she was going to marry the prince of the Mahwah Kingdom and someday she would be the queen. Who cares who was the fairest of all anyway? Once she was married to the prince, no one for miles and miles around would question her fairness. She sighed happily and watched as the cosmeticians and hairdressers did their magic. When it looked as if her fake eyelashes and the layers of makeup would threaten to pull the skin off her face, and the curls and feathers and flowers piled in her hair threatened to make the weight of her head pull her down onto the floor, she was ready. She couldn’t move very well under the heaviness of her head and its decorations, so the dressing assistance people came into her bedroom and very carefully put the wedding dress on her and attached the long train to the back. They then slowly draped the fluttery veil on top of her curls and decorations and pinned it to one of the flowers. She was ready to marry the prince.

All the inhabitants of the Mahwah Kingdom came to the wedding at the palace. Free food and drinks, right? The Princess had forbidden all the people she knew from Ho-Ho-Kum, where she had lived in that rotting apartment prior to the fateful night of the big storm, from attending the wedding. She had promised that she would make sure to have cakes and cookies and other wedding treats sent to her acquaintances from Ho-Ho-Kum, and threatened that she would poke their eyes out if she saw any of them within a mile of the palace. Fortunately, they had been appeased by the promises of desserts and the threats of eye maiming, and had not let their innate New Holstein sense of entitlement overcome their greed for the desserts and their fear of the maiming. They had all stayed at home, salivating as they anticipated the deliciousness of the wedding cakes and cookies that would soon be delivered to their houses.

So the wedding was attended only by Mahwah Kingdom residents. They were no better or worse than any other natives of New Holstein, and they had the same sense of entitlement. They also displayed the other personality traits typical of most other natives of New Holstein, opening their mouths widely and often to shout raucously, grabbing with sticky fingers at anything and everything that looked as if it could be eaten or drunk or stashed away for later consumption, and generally behaving as if they were entitled – yes, it was owed to them – to devour everything within sight. After the wedding was over and all the guests had stripped the tables and pedestals and stages of every flower, drop of drink, morsel of food, piece of decoration, and everything that wasn’t nailed down or too heavy to haul out of the castle, the prince looked over at his Princess bride and smiled avariciously. It was time to start the honeymoon. The Princess smiled weakly back at the prince and groaned inwardly. She still hadn’t figured out how she would avoid gagging at the moist squishiness of the prince when it was time for him to “deflower” her “maidenhead” as he insisted on wording this act that he would be performing on her that night. Oh well, at least she wouldn’t have to spend the evening beating her butt and thighs with the mallet to maintain the “proof” of her Princessness.

The Princess and the prince spent the first night of their marriage in the prince’s bed and no one knows how the Princess prevented herself from gagging at the prince and his moist squishiness. But the next morning at breakfast, the prince was beaming and the Princess wasn’t crying or moaning, so it was assumed that all had gone well in the marriage bed. The packing assistance servants finished packing the suitcases the prince and the Princess would be taking on their honeymoon to Atlantic City and stored them in the trunk of the limo. James who was not James opened the door for the Princess and prince and they got into the back seat. The king and queen waved as the limo rode slowly and ceremoniously down the driveway and out the gate of the castle grounds. I don’t know how the rest of the honeymoon went, but based on the baby prince who was born about nine months later, we can all assume that it went well enough.

As soon as the limo disappeared down the street, the queen and king stopped waving and smiling. “Well, that’s finally over,” said the queen. “Whah?” asked the king. “Nothing,” replied the queen. “That silly annoyance of a child is finally married and we can expect the grandkids to start popping out any time now.” The king nodded wisely, as was his wont, even though he really couldn’t hear a thing anyone said, even when it wasn’t raining and thundering and lightninging to beat all hell.

The king and queen went inside the palace to rest from all the chaos. Before going to the master bedroom, the queen went to the Princess’ bedroom, pulled down all the feather beds and mattresses, and took the now rotten peep – yes, peeps can rot if left under twenty mattresses and twenty feather beds – off the box springs. She put it into a display case at the Museum of the Mahwah Palace, where it may still be seen today if no one has stolen it. After lying in bed to take a short cat nap, she went to sit in her throne room to wait for grandchildren to be born.

This is a true story and everyone lived happily enough ever after.