I walked into the entryway, where muted sunbeams phantomed through the dirty leaded glass, I knew I had been there before. The first time I stepped inside the front door I was 13. When we knocked down the walls in the dining room that had been erected to provide more apartments, we found a lost shoe, a punctured inflatable floatie, boxer shorts, a baby shoe. All we had were the makeshift walls, the rickety fire escapes, the room in the attic that was now a kitchen, broken lattice on the eaves, bottle caps and broken glass in the lawn. “For, you know…”īut whatever had gone on inside the house during its fraternity years or before, we didn’t really know.
They had brought in a goat, Rhiannon told me. After my family moved in, my friends, children of the professors who lived nearby, told me stories of the debauchery in that house. Maybe it was hopefulness, Harvard, Yale and Dartmouth Street leading to the University on the dusty prairie, in the town where high school students rode tractors to prom and the Ben Franklin five-and-dime persisted, even though the college-bound notebooks and packs of Extra gum were covered in dust.
Although I don’t know why, it is customary in small college towns to name streets after Ivies.
The house was across the street from the University of South Dakota, on Harvard Street. The house was three stories, with gingerbread-sided gables and a porch in need of rescue that seemed to cling to the walls. I used to live with ghosts in a house on Harvard Street.
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