In Slingtown, there lived a young woman named Slaughnir, but nobody called her that because nobody could pronounce it. Even her mother, who had found the name in a book, didn’t know what it sounded like. So for the first few years of her life, everyone called Slaughnir “Baby”.
Slaughnir’s mother died when Baby was about five, and for a year or so after that, everyone called her “Poor Thing”. Her father remarried a widow who had two daughters older than Slaughnir, and this worked out very nicely. Everyone could call Slaughnir “Baby” again, since she was the youngest.
Slaughnir grew older and taller, though, and it eventually became ridiculous to call such a strapping young woman “Baby”. People made attempts to call her by her given name, saying “Slogner” or “Slofnear” or “Sla-OOO-ner” or some other variation. Slaughnir decided she did not care to be called ANY of these things.
“I wish they wouldn’t call me anything anyhow,” she told her stepsisters. “They always want to stop me and talk, and I have so many things to do.”
“You are a deeply disturbed child,” said her stepsister Jessifer, peeling a grape. “Don’t you like that nice young oxcart driver at all? He just wanted to talk about the weather for a while, and you told him you had to go wash the mirrors.”
“I did have to,” Slaughnir said, deftly catching the grapeskin Jessifer tossed to the floor. “You keep kissing your reflection.”
“She really would rather wash dishes than talk,” said her stepsister Tarmi. “I think she’d rather wash dishes than eat, or wash clothes than wear them.” She reached out to select a chocolate from the bowl. “I think everyone should just call her Soapsuds.”
Slaughnir threw her head back and laughed. “Well, no one could say you called me a dirty name.”
So Jessifer and Tarmi started calling her Soapsuds in place of Baby or Slaughnir. This was hardly the sort of name a person would want to put in the family newsletter at new Year’s, so their parents utterly forbade them to call Baby “Soapsuds”. Of course, everybody called her Soapsuds ever after.
As Soapsuds got older, she was able to find more and more chores to do around the house: some cooking and sewing, but mostly washing and cleaning. She polished the doorknobs, dusted the clocks, and swept cinders out of the chimney so no one would burn their feet stepping in them. This left her no time whatsoever for a social life, which didn’t bother her at all. It DID bother the rest of the family.
“It is just not natural, Mother,” said Tarmi, as everyone sat around the fire one evening, telling stories. (Everyone except Soapsuds, of course. She had noticed the poker was sooty, and had carried it away to scour it.)
“Do you know what Soap, er, Slopnor did this morning?”Jessifer demanded. “Mrs. Ruck invited her over to tea with those three nephews from out of town. But Sloffner said she had to come home and polish the mousetraps.”
“No!” Tarmi looked as if she might faint. “Bad enough that she didn’t want to meet those nice boys. But to let everyone know we have mousetraps!”
“Most people have mousetraps,” her mother informed her. “Now Mrs. Ruck knows that ours are shiny. Never mind. This year Sloognir is old enough to attend the Prince’s Ball with us.”
“What?” Tarmi sat up sharply. “All three of us? Oh, we’ll have to go in all three at once! It’ll be stunning!”
“If I don’t have to sell one of you to buy dresses for the other two,” said their stepfather.
This was totally the sort of thing he WOULD say, so he was totally ignored. Anyway, they knew the dresses wouldn’t cost much because they could buy quite ordinary ones and Soapsuds, who was very clever with his fingers, could make all the alterations and add the trimmings.
That was just what happened. Tarmi had a white dress with lots of tiny black stripes, but once Soapsuds sewed on hundreds of black and silver sequins, it was positively dazzling. Jessifer had a rather drab red dress. Soapsuds cut it back a little here and pleated it there, and Jessifer declared she had never worn a more beautiful gown.
Soapsuds helped her sisters dress on the night of the grand ball. “Now you’d better hurry and put your own dress on,” Tarmi told her.
“Oh!” Soapsuds put a hand to her mouth. “I forgot all about it! I haven’t done a thing to my dress since I tore out all the stitches! It isn’t fit to wear at all!”
“Wear the blue one, then,” said Jessifer. “The one you wear Sundays.”
“Yes, I…..” Slaughnir’s hand spread all the way across her mouth. “Oh! I forgot! Tarmi spilled trout paste on it two Sundays ago and I haven’t got the stain out yet. There’s been all the work on your dresses to do, and all the cleanng….”
Her father knocked at the door. “I don’t suppose anybody’s ready yet.”
Tarmi and Jessifer rushed out in tears to tell him what had happened. Their mother came along and, hearing the story, just sighed. “Well, Slagneer will have to stay home this year, I suppose. Next year, we’ll see to it that she has time to tend to her own clothes as well as yours.”
But as they were leaving in the coach, she whispered to her husband, “We’ll have to get the doctor in to look at Slavneer. This isn’t normal.”
“Very strange,” Soapsuds’s father agreed. “Very strange indeed that she should have time to clean everything except her Sunday dress.”
In truth, Soapsuds had done it all on purpose. For weeks she’d been looking forward to her annual chance to sneak into her stepsisters’ rooms and scrub the floors. As soon as the coach was out of sight, she ran to fetch her favorite sponge and her best pail. When the pail was full of soap and water, she rolled her work dress above her knees so she could get down on all floors and scour the boards.
Tarmi’s room would be quicker, so she started there. Tarmi ate a lot in the bedroom, leaving apple cores and nut shells all over everywhere, but Jessifer simply threw everything on the flor. All that would need to be picked up first, and would take longer.
There was a bit of picking up, and sweeping up too, to be done in Tarmi’s room, of course. Soapsuds had to get down on hands and knees to scrape up a lump of bubble gum. Next to the bubble gum, she found a shoe she’d never seen before. In the shoe was a foot.
Looking up from the foot, she found a small, rounded woman whose dark eyes were surrounded by dark rings. Those eyes looked hard at Soapsuds, as if expecting something.
“H-how did you get in?” demanded Soapsuds, sitting up. “Who are you? And did you know your hem is coming out? My needle is right over….”
“Pause, please.” The woman raised one hand. “I am Elisabeth McPixie, your fairy godmother. I am here to see that you go to the ball.”
“Oh no!” cried Soapsuds, pulling back so sharply she nearly upset the pail.
“Yes!” said the woman, now raising both hands. “I have the power.”
“That’s what I was afraid of.” Soapsuds stood up. “I don’t want to go to the ball!”
The fairy godmother now raised both eyebrows. “Don’t want to go to the ball? Of course you want to go to the ball!”
“I didn’t even know I had a fairy godmother.” Soapsuds threw her sponge into the pail. “Do my sisters have fairy godmothers?”
“No, dear,” said the fairy.
“Why not?”
The fairy godmother shook her head in annoyance. “Heavens, I’m not in Distribution. In general, I must say, it is the youngest who has a fairy godmother; the youngest always seem to need extra help. Now, then.” She slid a long wand from one sleeve. “Off to the ball so you can dance with the prince.”
Soapsuds almost stepped in the pail as she stepped back even farther. “The prince? But…what if he falls in love with me, like in the stories? I’d be a princess, and have to sit around eating bread and honey all the time, or something.”
The fairy godmother shook the wand, held it to one ear, and shook it again. “You know, for two cents I’d mail this job to my sister, only what with postage these days, I’d lose on the deal. Everyone thinks they know a fairy godmother’s job better than she does. My roommate says it’s rough being a Tooth Fairy; I’d like to see her cope with you princess wannabes.”
“But I don’t wannabe!” cried Soapsuds, stamping one foot.
“Well, you’re gonna be, want to or not,” the fairy godmother snapped, stamping a foot right back at her.
Soapsuds bent to pull the sponge from the pail again. “If that happens to me, when are these floors going to get scrubbed? That’s what I want to know!”:
“Look.” The fairy put her hands on Soapsuds’s shoulders. “If you leave the ball on the last stroke of eleven, you’ll be home in time to get the floors nice and clean.”
Soapsuds wrinkled her nose. “Not if my sisters come home early.”
“You’re talking to your fairy godmother child!” the woman cried. “Leave that to me: they won’t be home before daybreak. They’ll kick off their shoes and you can get up early to polish all the scuffed leather, I promise. Okay?”
“Well, all right.” Soapsuds wrung out her sponge. “If I have to go to the ball.”
“You do,” said the fairy. “Now let’s see to your dress.”
When she wound up and swung the wand, Soapsuds’s stained work dress became a sweeping gown of deep blue with what seemed to be small stars sparkling through it. The very threadbare apron became a shimmering belt. “There!” said Elizabeth McPixie, “One of my better designs. What do you think?”
“Um,” said Soapsuds, tugging at the shoulders. “Isn’t the, er, neckline cut a little too low?”
“That’s the way they’re being worn these days. Stop that.” She pushed her goddaughter’s hands away from the collar. “Now listen to me. You be back here on the last stroke of eleven. Ot’s not that the dress will disappear: these spells last until midnight. But if you plan to scrub the floors, under the beds and all, you’ll need to be here by then.”
Soapsuds frowned. “How do I get to the palace and back?”
“Trust your godmamma.” Elisabeth McPixie waved the wand again. The silvery pail became a big, broad shining carriage. The whisk broom became a short-haired driver, while the broom and the mop became horses.
“But didn’t you say they’d stay that way until midnight?” Soapsuds protested. “How can I scrub with them like this?”
“I’ll fix it when you get back. Don’t fuss.” The fairy frowned. “And don’t think you’re carrying that sponge to the palace.” Another wave of the wand, and the damp sponge became a reticule, a dainty purse that matched the gown. “Now, off with you.”
The fairy godmother handed Soapsuds up not the coach and then whispered to the driver, “Don’t you dare stop anyplace along the way. She’ll probably try to polish every lamp post in the city.”
In fact, Soapsuds rode quietly all the way to the palace. The great building was awesome; she’d seen it from a distance all her life, but this was the closest she’d come to it. Everyone she saw, when she stepped down from the carriage, was grandly dressed, so grandly, in fact, that she wished she had talked her fairy godmother into letting her stay home and sweep the chimney.
Once she had been conducted to the ballroom, however, she was perfectly enchanted. Ballrooms, you see, are so huge, and so vast, that even with an army of servants, the best of them are never perfectly clean. Those spiral columns were loaded with places which needed dusting, and she saw cobwebs behind one of the tapestries.
She was pulling these out and rolling them up when a voice behind her inquired, “Wouldn’t you rather dance?”
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