Even as a child, Nixon dressed in patchwork colors and layers. He was rather skinny, like a scarecrow, and his face was plain. He played tourism office by himself. Perched on an upside down bucket in his room, he held up travel brochures to an imaginary audience, and spoke in a praising voice of foreign marvels such as gazelles and the steppe. The room had the same dirty rose wall-to-wall carpeting as every apartment in the neighborhood.
Nixon's half of the closet had a sliding door that slipped off its hinges unless you pulled it a certain way. When playing tourism office, Nixon wore a dishcloth on his head so that it hung down to his shoulders; he tucked it nonchalantly behind his ears, in mimic of his schoolteachers' short hair. On his nails he wore red paperclips. In church he loved the soaring hymns, such as "How great thou art." The organist regarded him with suspicion. During the peace-be-with-you, Nixon was too shy to give strangers his hand. When he grew older, he pretended to have a cold every Sunday, so that people would automatically avoid his handshake.
If you woke Nixon in the middle of the night and asked, "How many hundreds in a million," he could not answer right away. He had to think about it every time. He was nervous when his father was home, because he was likely to get quizzed. He loved to come along to the Mack truck offices which his father cleaned, even or especially on schoolnights. There was a security guard, there, who ate a small boxed apple pie called "Table Talk" every night. This office was Nixon's source for paperclips.
Posts
