Pop! Goes the Weasel

POP! GOES THE WEASEL / Margret Kerbaugh M ANDY'S MAMA DIDN'T like weather. She didn't like it hot, cold, wet, or dry, but above all she didn't like it stormy. Mama was very cool and tranquil, and she expected the weather to follow suit. She did not approve of storms. If the truth were known, she was afraid of them. Not that she was afraid of anything else. "Juliette, you have got to stop smoking those damnable Lucky Strikes," Great-Aunt Lilly would say, shaking her finger at Mama, from whose palely sculpted lips blue smoke drifted upward languidly. But Mama didn't care. Or "Juliette," Aunt Lilly would bark, "you have got to call a halt to those moonlight parades down the alley in those damnable transparent pajamas." But Mama looked so uncommonly good in transparent pajamas, and besides, they were pink. "Why, Lilly, you are so right," she would drawl softly, her eyes luminous with sincerity. Then later, when Lilly had gone home, "Horsefeathers!" Mama would snort. "Lilly is afraid of everything. She's afraid of vampires in the trees." Mama herself, of course, wasn't afraid of anything but storms, which Mandy thought was very much the same thing. But that was how Mandy happened into the Andromeda Galaxy. In addition to not liking storms, Mama also did not like GreatUncle Isom. Uncle Isom was Aunt Lilly's husband. There were many good reasons not to like him, a substantial number of which had forced themselves upon Mama's not entirely unwilling attention. Chief among these was that since he had by some unjust quirk of fate inherited Cousin Fern's money—every last cent of it—and bought the house next door, eleven years had passed, during which time Uncle Isom had not put in his teeth. Mama was a forgiving woman, but Christian charity can be stretched only so far, and Uncle Isom had long ago exhausted hers. He would sit in his drooping Bermuda shorts at her immaculately appointed breakfast table, his varicose veins poking in all sorts of knotty directions out of his skinny legs, wearing a thin limp undershirt stained yellow around the armpits with tobacco sweat, his hair stringing across his big bulging skull over his big bulging brain—Uncle Isom was very smart—and in that condition he would The Missouri Review · 29 gum Mama's Bavarian brickie cake. This was not particularly difficult for him to do, since where his teeth ought to have been, Mandy's Uncle Isom had a ridge across his mouth as hard and sharp and pointed as a snapping turtle's. Harder and sharper, in fact. Although she did not have a satirical bent, Mama had offered odds that if anybody could produce a brontosaurus, Isom could chew it up. If Uncle Isom had been Mama's own uncle, she would have had him out of the neighborhood long ago. But he was Daddy's uncle, and Mama was elaborately solicitous of Daddy, who was elaborately solicitous of Uncle Isom. This solicitude of Daddy's was undiminished by that fact that in eleven years Uncle Isom had never bought a single Lucky Strike, but had mooched them off Mama in their thousands, on the theory that he smoked less that way, which Daddy thought sounded entirely likely. And Daddy's solicitude survived the further fact that every night when he and Uncle Isom sat down to their game of dominoes, Uncle Isom cheated. It was all right, Daddy said philosophically, since Isom, being so brUliant and mathematical and all, would win even if he didn't cheat; and so there was no point in making an unChristian issue of it. And then, too, it was not just a question of Daddy's feelings in the matter. It was also a question of the weather. Uncle Isom, as luck would have it, was a walking weathervane, and Mama had come to depend upon his meteorological prognostications . This was especially the case after Roy, the weatherman on channel 6, got a divorce and went to pot and didn't predict the pumpkin-sized hail on July 14th of the year that Uncle Isom...