It started with a grapefruit fork.

Alone on a Tuesday afternoon, poring over her silver, Doris paused in her polishing to consider the object in her hand.

"A grapefruit fork," she said aloud, and the sound echoed off the silent air of the house. "What the hell is a grapefruit fork?" She regarded the delicate flowered pattern at the end of the handle, the light of the chandelier glinting off the tiny tines, and a little laugh escaped her.

"Hh-hah!" She startled herself with it. The bottle of silver polish sat open on the table; a soft rag, black with tarnish, was still clenched in her manicured hand.

"Fumes," she decided, and putting her little burdens down, got up to open a window.

Doris Langley liked to surround herself with shining objects. Keeping them shiny was a special prerogative in her housekeeping ritual. Vacuuming was every three days, dusting, every two. Besides ordinary wipe-ups, she scoured the bathroom once a week, and swept the front porch on the same day, whether it needed it or not. Dishes, of course, were daily chores, routine. And what with Larry and the kids, the laundry piled up so that it was almost a daily job.

But besides ordinary housekeeping rigors, Doris had her collections. The silver, the china, the crystal. The little glass animals, not quite enough to constitute a menagerie. A score of candlesticks, lined up in neat pairs in a glass display cabinet: silver, pewter, gold plate, Lenox porcelain, Waterford crystal, brass, Royal Daulton china, and 13 other patterns and materials, most notably, an uneven dried clay pair, painted crudely in pink and purple by her daughter, Lisa, age six. Doris had tried not to weep when her daughter handed them to her on Christmas. "I know these are the toys you like, Mommy," she’d said. Her perceptiveness had developed early; the handmade candlesticks followed only a month after Lisa had added the first carnivore, a tiger, to Doris’ crystalline zoo.

November. Doris’ birthday. She had turned thirty-five. She had given birth to her first child, Robbie, at 24, Rachel at 26, and Lisa at 29. Now she was done, and her evenly-spaced offspring were springing off in all directions. When the last had entered school two years ago, she had begun collecting in earnest. And with collecting, came more cleaning.

Tuesday was for silver; Wednesday she cleaned the crystal. On Thursdays, she meticulously hand-washed each piece of china; Friday was her time alone with the candlesticks. The glass animals got dusted daily: the last thing she did before the kids raced through the door.

Thus, her schedule on a typical Tuesday looked something like this:

6:00 a.m.: Rise. Yoga, 20 Minutes.

6:30 a.m.: Shower.

6:45 a.m.: Wake children and Larry.

7:00 a.m.: Breakfast.

7:45 a.m.: Drive kids to bus stop.

8:00 a.m.: Do breakfast dishes.

8:20 a.m.: Coffee, paper. Moment to self.

8:45 a.m.: Start load of laundry.

9:00 a.m.: Vacuuming [Tuesday was a vacuuming day].

9:30 a.m.: Switch clothes to dryer…

And it went on like that, an endless procession of chores, mapped out to precision. At least, until it reached 1:00 p.m., which, on every day’s schedule, read "Miscellaneous," and went on a mysteriously long two-and-a-half hours, right up until the kids got home. That time was hers, to polish, to a mirrored perfection, her little treasures.

"What’s this ‘miscellaneous’ block, honey?" Larry had asked her lightly a few weeks ago, upon spying her schedule on the sideboard.

Doris had frozen, and blushed, without really knowing why.

"I…you know, watch my soaps, sometimes I iron, or mend, or…whatever. Miscellaneous. That’s what that means, you know. Ha." A nervous giggle issued from her pinched throat.

"Huh. Just curious, cause I see all your other tasks are in 15- or 20-minute increments." Larry winked at his wife, whom he appreciated for her fastidiousness, while also constantly teasing her about it. "For you, that seems like an awful lot of unstructured time!" He smiled warmly at her. "You know, we should really hire you down at the office. We could use a real iron fist." He kissed her cheek, which was still warm and pink. "You feeling okay, hon?"

"What—of course, dear," Doris smoothed her dress, her apron, her hair, in quick succession. "Just fine."

"Good." Larry kissed her again, more tenderly, on the mouth, then put his hand on the small of her back and drew her to him. She resisted; the kids were just out back, playing. They could come in at any moment. It was only 5:30, a late Wednesday afternoon. He smelled a bit stale and sweaty from work.

"Come on, Dodo, it’s been ages since we did it in the afternoon…"

"It’s been ages since you called me Dodo," she said with dry lips. He fiddled with the string of her apron until it fell untied, then went for the zipper of her dress. At last Doris sighed a little, tilting her head back toward the back door as Larry kissed the hollow of her throat. Satisfied that the kids were absorbed, she let him lift her tiny frame the way he used to when they were first married, and carry her off to their room.

And now she was sitting there, on a Tuesday, smack in the middle of that unstructured time, staring in rapt attention at a grapefruit fork. Or was it a grapefruit spoon? It was really like one of those "spork" things you got at Wendy’s, or was it Dairy Queen? Anyway, someone had had the nerve to patent it in plastic, though some demented silversmith with a lot of time on his hands had already invented it, crafted it with intricate gold inlay on the handle, called it a grapefruit spoon and decreed it an instrumental instrument in any collection of fine silverware.

Essential.

When Lisa was about two and Doris and Larry had been married nine years, Larry had bought Doris a fancy new microwave. This was in ’82, when they were really just becoming popular. She was a crackshot in the kitchen, he’d said to her, but he wanted, as he put it, to "lighten her load."

She had been wanting a microwave and was pleased with the gift, but it was their anniversary, and she had been sort of hoping for jewelry, or even something as simple as flowers and a romantic dinner.

That same year, on his birthday in May, she bought him a new circular saw. He was thrilled with it, but upon reflection noted, "It’s odd, isn’t it? You can tell you’ve been married awhile when you start buying each other things you need instead of things you want."

Things I want, she thought. True, on their second anniversary Larry had just gotten a big promotion, and he bought her a trip to Bermuda. For Christmas that year, she bought him a monogrammed gold pocketwatch.

Did she need a microwave? Or a grapefruit spoon?

It was 2:26 p.m. according to the Waterford clock on the mantel. Doris reassembled the polished silver in its velvet-lined drawers and went to the kitchen sink to wash her hands.

She looked out the window above the sink at the inground pool they’d had dug two years ago. April. Before she knew it, it would be time to open it. The kids would be home all day. Larry would need to show Robbie how to clean the pool this year; he was old enough now. And Lisa would need to get over her fear of the water.

Need to.

The grapefruit spork kept coming back to mind. In a way, Doris thought, it had a beautiful kind of utility. In fact, if it wasn’t quite so fancy, it would make a great all-purpose eating utensil for camping. That, a tin pot and a half-decent Swiss Army knife would do fine.

When she was a child her father used to take them on camping trips; Doris, the eldest, would keep careful watch over the twins, Michael and Christopher, who were four years younger than herself. Her father had brought them all up as best he could after their mother died in childbirth. They didn’t have much, but every year they took a vacation that always served to make them more thankful for what they had at home.

Her father had been a devotee of Thoreau, Yeats, and the Transcendentalists; when they went into the woods to camp, they went. He chose the most obscure, remote campgrounds and came with the barest supplies. They carried no electric grill, no flashlights, no air mattresses or Igloo coolers full of soda. They went with what they could carry on their backs: a four-man tent, sleeping bags, flint and tinder, a compass. Matches, tins of beans and tuna fish, dried fruit, some aluminum pans. There was one notable concession to modernity in their packs on those annual jaunts, however: toilet paper.

Out in the woods their father taught them how to fish and hunt, how to find edible plants and recognize poisonous ones, how to make fire without lighter fluid. Doris, as the oldest, was the first to learn how to shoot, and also learned how to prepare the gamiest of meats in a way that pleased the palate, adding wild herbs and roots to squirrel and venison and rabbit stew.

When they returned from these trips into wild simplicity, her brothers would always run, first thing, and turn on the television. Doris would go to her room and meditate for a while, in a kind of culture shock, the tiny rose-petals dancing on her downy comforter.

In college Doris met Larry, Lawrence Donald Langley III, actually, the son of a paper-clip magnate. In 1969, exploring the revolutionary mindset of the generation rising up around her, she actually found Larry and his money rather boring, which of course made her even more intriguing to the young man, who was used to being greedily pursued.

His expensive gifts and stylish ways put her off for a while, but then he began wooing her with poetry, particularly that of Yeats, and with hopelessly bad serenades performed drunkenly beneath her window. After countless love-notes and hapless performances of "Volare," she saw through to a sweetness in him that she grew to love and almost pity, and a year after they graduated, she married him.

Her father, though he romanticized the simple life and was something of a revolutionary himself, couldn’t help but be pleased that his girl would be well provided for. Besides, he and his daughter both rationalized, Larry was going to build a business for himself, not just live off his family. Here was someone who would take care of her, and Doris’ father knew for damn sure she’d take care of him right back.

Her father had been dead almost ten years now. Doris was surprised to hear a drop fall softly, thup, onto the stainless steel of the sink, and realize it had come from her eye. In fact, she was weeping; the faucet, then the swimming pool, blurred in her sight as she lifted her eyes from the sink.

"I must be mad," she said aloud, pulling a paper towel impatiently from the roll hanging below the cabinet, next to the fridge, above the knife-block…everything in its place.

Memorial Day came and went without a hitch: Doris made salads and sides and slow-marinated the meat that Larry roasted on the grill and claimed for his own. They opened the pool, and the kids had their little friends from school over to swim. It was a day of pure American joy. There were paper plates.

When school ended at last the three children took their semi-annual jaunt south to Princess Anne, Maryland, where their grandmother lived. It gave Doris and Larry a welcome reprieve, and the kids a week of ocean swimming, crab eating and (rather grudgingly) antique hunting. This year, though, the trip happened to coincide with a big conference in the city, which Larry simply had to attend. It was four days in New York, all expenses paid, and Larry fairly pleaded with Doris to join him.

"Come on, honey, it’ll be fun!"

"You’ll be working all day."

"Yeah, during the day, but at night I’ll take you out, you know, The Four Seasons, a Broadway show—"

"Thank you, but you know I hate the city."

"No, I don’t."

"I told you, the last time we went. It’s loud, it’s dirty, it’s dangerous…"

"Honey, you’d rather be here, all alone? Don’t you want to see Cats?"

In truth, Larry had started worrying about Doris. Since Lisa had started school, she’d been…off. He didn’t know how else to define it. The house was always neat as a pin, even the things hidden in drawers and cabinets and closets. Something struck him as wrong about that, but even more wrong was a trend he’d noticed more recently as he puttered around the house on weekends: Doris had begun labeling things.

It started with appliances in the kitchen. Insignificant ones first: one Sunday morning after a great breakfast he’d gone to put the dry dishes in the cabinet and had seen, written in permanent marker on its stainless steel shell, the words, Waffle Iron. Then, when going to separate the Memorial Day ribs, in the same block letters: Electric Knife.

When he found among the usual notes magnetized to the fridge a small note that simply said, "Fridge," he started to panic in a small way. It was Doris’ neat capital letters each time; he knew she was organized and might have expected small labels to appear on cabinets, drawers or Tupperware, terse and efficient indications of their contents, glasses, dinner plates, meatloaf. But why label large, clearly identifiable objects? He thought of Alzheimer’s, that new memory disease he’d been hearing about. But Doris was far too young. Was she just losing her marbles? Maybe she had too much time on her hands; that two-and-a-half hour of "miscellaneous" on her darling little schedule came back to him. He had to get her out of the house. He had to.

But she wouldn’t go. She meant what she’d said—she hated the city, and further, she feared it. She had begun to think her very house was too big to navigate of late. How would she manage the huge, foreign expanse of New York? The landscape of her home had become a jungle to Doris, a wild conglomeration of objects that made no sense. She had begun naming them a few weeks ago, labeling them like she was Adam naming animals. The labels granted her some possession of these disturbing objects: popcorn popper, coffee grinder, vacuum cleaner, rug.

A part of her miscellaneous time was now simply this—the reclaiming of objects with permanent marker or pen. She wrote on them directly in hidden places, or affixed small notes to the sides that faced the wall. One Wednesday she got in the car and, after inscribing Car Phone on the clunky object in the middle of the front seat, went out and bought little round stickers in blank white from one of the office supply stores her husband’s company owned.

On Thursday she gave the same treatment to her Lenox china wedding set—dinner plate, dinner plate, saucer, saucer, cup—and on Friday she labeled 19 pairs of candlesticks.

The following Tuesday, after polishing the silver yet again, she filled a whole sheet of 12 tiny circular labels with the repeated words: grapefruit spork.

By the time Larry was getting ready to leave for New York, Doris was having trouble hiding her efforts and her distress. The "fridge" note had been discovered and discarded; she was becoming more careless. During a game of hide and seek Lisa had found a post-it note stuck under the dining-room table. Doris heard the now-familiar sound of her youngest child reading aloud, disregarding the rules of the game in her wonderment.

"’Dining-Room Table.’ Mom, what’s this?"

After much futile coaxing, Larry finally finished packing and left for New York City alone, leaving three different numbers where Doris could reach him. He kissed her and she received his kiss. She watched his back as he walked to the car. She wondered if he’d noticed her tiny writing on the tag of his suitjacket, on the back of his tie, on the bottoms of his Florsheim shoes. As he got in the car, she pictured him naked. But the image quickly faded.

Thursday and Friday passed, and Doris realized she had almost completed her task. In the absence of others, she had filled the house with her scratchings, more indiscriminate now: the drapes and blinds were written across, the manteltop chotchkes, except for the pictures of the children, were littered with cramped script. The television had been her masterstroke: she had traced the shape of the screen on a piece of light cardboard, written upon it the two large letters, T and V, with a black Marks-A-Lot, and stuck the whole thing right over the screen with duct tape. The house looked like a Richard Scarry book gone haywire.

Yet as her project became more visible, so did its purpose. In her mind a catalogue was building of things she had not labeled. In her room a backpack stood open on the floor, waiting for them.

Larry came home late Sunday night and the house was dark. He stumbled through the door, having drunk a bit during the final party of the conference, happy he had made it home alive by crawling along slow in his boxy little Beamer.

Doris was in bed, and all he wanted was to join her there. Without turning on any lights, Larry climbed into their marriage-bed and wrapped her in his tired arms. She woke, slightly, enough to let him take what he needed from her.

The next morning he woke late; the bosses had taken the day off after the grueling weekend. He reached to embrace Doris, but she had already risen.

At first he thought it was the hangover. Then, slowly, Larry realized that what he was seeing all around him was real. All over the house, things labeled in all colors. Notes, stickers, or direct marks, every domestic object was tagged.

Except the ones that were missing, which included most of Doris’ more casual clothes, her toothbrush, Lisa’s clay candlesticks. The gowns remained in the closet, garishly identified, as though some alien culture, familiar with our language but not our mode of dress, was expected to find them and be summarily educated.

Going to the front door, Larry found a note, the only one with more than two or three words on it.

"Dear," it read:

There was no signature. Larry stared and stared at the strange missive, but the longer he looked at it the less the words made sense. Thinking it must be some kind of joke he began searching the house, as if she must be hiding, waiting to jump out and scare him. When he opened the hall closet a hailstorm of junk fell on top of him, all labeled. His big camping backpack and his hunting rifle, which Doris had bought for him and he’d never used, were two more of the few things missing. He felt his guts begin to turn insistently along with his head. Dizzily he ran to the bathroom, sickness rising in his throat.

When he’d emptied the contents of his stomach thoroughly, he looked into the bathroom mirror at the haggard, abandoned man staring back. The man seemed to have a little piece of paper stuck to his forehead, but whatever it said was written backwards; his spinning head could not decipher it.

But the sweat he’d broken in his purging served to loosen the sticky-note, and it fell, face-up, into the sink. On it was printed one word, in neat, black block-lettering. He read it aloud to himself, but that didn’t make it any more real.