InDigest: Narrative - Samuel Osterhout

On a Christmas Eve in Hutchinson, Kansas, a while back, a tornado came and destroyed the mall. We were all there when it happened—my whole family. Casey, Greg, Pete, Jill, Andi, Sam (that’s me), and my little brother Hank, who was only 6—all there. We all had jobs out there, even Hank. Nobody said it, but we all thought the mall was indestructible. It never occurred to me that something so fixed and normal and big could be so easily destroyed.

The tornado touched down in the parking lot outside J.C. Penney’s. People said all of the cars started moving around on their own, silently. They said the cars looked like they were waltzing with each other. Wish I’d seen it.

My mother got a job at Casual Corner out at the mall when my dad lost his mind. She worked with this woman named Eileen. That Christmas Eve, I caught Eileen stealing a fully clothed mannequin from the back of the store.

She said, “I’m taking it home to fix it.”

I said, “What about all the clothes it’s wearing?”

She said, “Those I’m stealing.”

Eileen was a thin and raspy forty-eight year old woman. In terms of color palate, she was an autumn. Her hair was colored a muted orange and sat well above her head, like spun glass. She wore mostly browns and creams and gold, and her skin was rough and spotty. She reminded me of one of those angry trees in the Wizard of Oz that throws apples at Dorothy. She called me “lover.”

My color palate was winter. I was twelve and had three things in common with Eileen: 1. We both worked at Casual Corner. My mother had gotten me a job taking out their trash everyday after school. I got $2.50 per load, and there were usually two loads. 2. Eileen and I both enjoyed categorizing people’s skin tones into seasons, and 3. We were both stealing from Casual Corner. She was stealing fully clothed mannequins and I was stealing colorful bejeweled belts.

My family was like the mall: big. And, like I said, we were all employees of the mall. Casey, Greg, and Jill—the oldest three and, coincidentally, all autumn palates—worked at Dillards. Greg sold shoes, Casey sold women’s professional wear, and Jill sold shitty jewelry. Pete, 17, and Andy, 16, were both spring palates and both worked at Sbarro’s. Me, 12—the only winter in the whole bunch—I worked at Casual Corner. And Hank, 6, another spring palate, picked up cigarette butts outside the movie theater. He got a penny per butt. I’m pretty sure all of us were stealing from the mall, except Hank, of course, who was only six and had no access to anything stealable. Nonetheless, I’d seen him down at the middle school, where I went, selling the longer butts to my classmates. Hank always loved nice things.

And I loved those bejeweled belts. They were long enough to wrap around my small waist twice, because most of the women who shopped at Casual Corner in Hutchinson, Kansas, were not only rude to my mother and Eileen, they were fat-assed. The belts shone red and green and pink and gold and plastic glass. I stashed them in my closet and counted them at night like beaver pelts. There was a cheapness to the belts’ sparkle that I found dazzling. Of course, I would never wear them. I was a winter.

For the record, there was nothing overtly bizarre about my belt collection. Some kids collect baseball cards. That makes less sense to me than the belts. When the bottom falls out of the baseball card market, how are those kids gonna keep their pants up? And what is a collection, anyway? Just something you can pretend to control.

I had three bejeweled belts dangling down my pants leg that Christmas eve. My mother knew about the belts. But what could she do? Greg came home with a new pair of shoes after every shift. Pete and Andy had amassed twenty-five complete Sbarro’s place settings, including serving trays. Jill had two rings for every finger. Casey went to school in a different pants suit every day. And Hank started wearing thick gold chains and tiny Air Jordans, bought with money gained by selling cigarettes to minors. Bejeweled belts belied some deeper problem, as far as my mother was concerned, of which she was afraid to approach. We all tiptoed around real emotional conditions, because of dad. So I was free to steal as many belts as I could fit down my pants at one time, which happened to be six. Don’t judge me.

We were all collectors. Not just us, either. Almost everyone I knew at the mall collected something stolen. People want to own something, to hold something and to control it. When I see someone with a big collection, I imagine that the rest of his life must not be under his own control. And my collection of belts was huge.

Ten minutes before the mall was destroyed, I was standing in the back room at Casual Corner, talking with Eileen, with the three bejeweled belts in my pants. She was holding her fully clothed mannequin underneath her arm.

“You’re stealing the clothes,” I said, “why not just keep the mannequin, too?”

“Don’t need a mannequin, lover,” she said.

“But you need a peach pants suit?” I said, “You know as well as I do you can’t wear peach.”

“It’s a gift for my daughter. She’s a spring,” she said. I knew her daughter. She worked at KG Men’s Store. She had a huge collection of stolen mustache combs. I had her pegged as a summer.

Just then the lights flickered. This was a warning sign that the mall was about to be destroyed, but we didn’t know it. Nobody did. People who saw the tornado touch down said that the cars in the parking lot moved around on their own—they said the cars shuffled themselves. They said it was like they were waltzing. But they weren’t waltzing. They were just out of control.

A minute later the lights flickered again and then cut altogether. The windows in the food court blew out and the roof over JC Penney’s peeled away and all the bedding was sucked out. People ran around in chaos, but also in silence, clutching at their collections. The walls eventually folded in and collapsed and there we were.

It didn’t take them long to rebuild the mall. But by that time, dad had disappeared into the Pacific Northwest, and all of my brothers and sisters had scattered—except for Hank, who had moved into bootlegging Disney films and was doing quite well. And me. I was still there in Kansas.

Optimists would say that the destruction of the mall that night marked a new beginning. The Kansas motto, Ad Astra per Aspera, means “to the stars, through difficulties.” Very nice. The optimist might say those difficulties led to better times. I don’t know. But I don’t think so.

When I think about the tornado that destroyed the mall, I see me and my brothers and sisters; I see my mother working so hard, and my father sinking quietly into that whirling storm. And in my mind we’re all there, at the mall, and we’re silently waltzing around each other. But, you see, we weren’t really waltzing.