Tacoma in November: dark, cold, wet. You notice the trees—laurels and firs, especially. How heavy they are in November! They engulf houses. Evergreen? Ever-growing is more like it. They grab the evening light greedily. They soak up rain and mist and fog. You walk by them, breathing vigorously during your vigorous exercise, and they seem to know exactly what to do with your white clouds of carbon monoxide. Last week I tried to tell Roberta this; I thought it would be a light, ironic way to begin the session: "knowledgeable tree waits for vigorous walker to pass by." But Roberta wasn't having any of it.

"What are you really trying to say, Nancy?" she asked.

I had gone into the session feeling pretty good, but she brought me right down with that one. What was I really saying? Christ, who can answer that? I was really saying that I hated to wear skirts in November. I was really saying that walking at evening in Tacoma is like walking in a cave. I was really saying that one of my favorite meals is boiled shrimp dolloped on steamed white rice. What was I really saying, Roberta? You tell me. Jesus, sometimes I wish I'd chosen the only man in the clinic. Maybe he would have smiled and said, "I've often thought the same thing about evergreens." Is it so tough just to agree with somebody? I have a lot of anger, as Roberta would say.

Anyway. I head up Fifth Street and then down Yakima Avenue. Glorious Yakima! Pregnant with trees, ladies and gentlemen. Huge maples, for example. Elms. Now they are bare, like giants stripped to the waist.

The cars rip by, too fast as usual. At each street corner I pause like a foreigner, glancing four ways, crossing the street only when I can guarantee safety. "What does that say about you, Nancy?" The trouble with going to a psychologist is that her voice perches on your shoulder like a squawky parrot. A bright green questioning bird waiting in the trees.

Anyway, again: I promise to move us down Yakima: here we go. We are almost to Sixth Avenue. We are down by some huge old brick apartment house. We look up, and we see a bald man in a white sweater fiddling clumsily with his blinds. We see the yellow, cracked paint on his ceiling. We imagine the rest: a tea kettle steaming in a cramped kitchen; a small television murmuring; a cat sleeping; magazines we would never read, on a chipped coffee table; clipped coupons in a drawer.

But we are on the move. We can see the bright Shell station, lit up in the gloom. Cars on the rack, cars already fixed, cars at the pumps. Customers paying. Greasy hands giving change.

We—pardon me, I—decide on a whim to go into Wasserstrom's Flower Shop. It has vases and pots in a display window and a jungle of flowers and plants between me and Mrs. Wasserstrom, crouched at her cash register, reading T.V. Guide. Again there is dandruff on her blue polyester blazer.

"Yes! Can I help you?"

"Yes! Do you have mixed bouquets?"

"Well, yes! We have some and we can make some up. We can mix carnations and baby's breath with a few roses, for example, or daisies and carnations and a few other things, and we start at $17.50, of course, with two dollars for delivery, but they're very special, and we can make up almost anything you like."

"Fine, the $17.50 will be fine."

"There's a card over there."

I fill one out for my co-worker Dennis Campion, who is leaving the firm to go back to Australia.

We'll miss you, I write with the grimy felt pen on a small pink card with a dash of flowers in the corner. I am surprised that the card reminds me of those things they hand out at funerals. All pre-printed except for the name of Our Dearly Departed. Then I write, I'll miss you. Good luck! Nance. I watch the ink in my name dry from gleaming to flat. Then I seal the envelope and give it to Mrs. Wasserstrom. I hear myself sounding efficient.

"If you could deliver it on Thursday."

"Oh, yes, I'll write Thursday down here, and I'll make it a very nice mixed bouquet for your friend"—she reads the card—"your friend Mr. Campion."

"All right," I say, finishing the check. "Is today the nineteenth?"

"Oh yes! The nineteenth!"

Wonderful Mrs. Wasserstrom, still energetic, full of verve at nearly five for flowers and plants and customers and billing and salesmanship, good old-fashioned salesmanship.

Out the door I go, with a ring I hadn't noticed going in, stocking cap reapplied to head. I cut down Third instead of going all the way to Sixth Avenue, my first mistake.

I walk past the Lutheran Outreach Services building, and see, appended to the sign, a smaller sign that says, "Mental Health Services Upstairs." I look up at the only lighted window and there is the head of Regina Hauser, a co-worker. Her head is talking grimly to an unseen counselor. Sturdy Regina: not her, too?!

I make my second mistake. I allow myself, there in the dark and the cold, to have a mild anxiety attack. A brief turn of the stomach, an ad hoc gathering of perspiration at the small of the back.

My third mistake is to decide to smoke a cigarette to counteract the anxiety. I turn my back on the Lutheran Outreach Services building and bring out a pack of Kools and light up, taking menthol down to my toes.

It helps. I watch the traffic, listen to water hiss under rubber tires, pay attention to Tacoma going home.

My fourth mistake is to calm down. Regina fairly ambushes me. Suddenly she's on the street and coming around in front of me.

"Nancy! I thought it was you."

She looks—well, drawn. That run-through-the-mill look I must have after a visit with Roberta.

"What are you doing here?" she asks.

"Oh—out for a walk. Good for the heart, you know." Then I make a lame joke—an ironic pitch for cigarettes as cheap nervetherapy. It hits Regina all wrong.

"Nancy, I—I hope you won't tell anyone about—about my counseling."

"Counseling?"

"Come on, Nancy, let's not be cute." Sturdy Regina! "You see the sign and the only light on."

I recognize the over-aggressiveness that a fresh tussle with a counselor will induce, and I find it rather cute, even though Regina tends to be aggressive anyway, and even though she has directed us not to be cute.

"Now, why would I tell anybody? What's to tell? It's your affair."

"I'm sorry. You're right. It's just that so many people still think you're nuts if you even think about going to a counselor, let alone go."

"Some people are wrong. Don't worry about it. I won't tell a soul."

"All right. See you at work. Enjoy your walk."

My walk. She leaves me to ponder my little white lie (not mentioning my own appointment) and to wonder whether I look as tightly strung as Regina when I emerge from my sessions with Roberta.

My cigarette would die a quick natural death on the wer sidewalk, but I crush it out anyway, and then proceed on my way, ostensibly to the session. It is 4:37. I have 23 minutes.

I don't want to make a fifth mistake, but I do want to stop by the Carmen Brothers' grocery, which lies between me and Roberta's office.

The practical reason is that I am down to four Kools, forlorn in a crumpled pack. But more, the Carmens' grocery is a glorious place on dark Northwest evenings because the older folks in the neighborhood stop in then. They are immensely patient and infinitely interested in what they buy. They have time for life again, unlike the rest of us. They can stand for a full fifteen minutes in front of the cheese, neverminding other shoppers or the passage of time. They go slowly. They mistrust their carts. They study lists. Bless them, I say. It is a neighborhood amenable to older folks, and they reward the neighborhood with their persistence, with all the years they have lived, with all the things they are now able to ignore, with a certain light in their faces and eyes.

Inside, I see one of the checkers greet a customer, a slender white-haired woman whose glasses have fogged.

"Mrs. Duffy," the checker says. "Let me wipe your glasses." And the checker takes the glasses from the woman and polishes them with her handkerchief; meanwhile, Mrs. Duffy's face looks somewhat embarrassed, revealed. But Mrs. Duffy is waiting.

"Thank you. Thank you, dear. Now I can see."

"You have your list?" asks the checker.

"I have my list."

She has her list. She chooses her cart.

Mistake Number Five is when I don't stride boldly toward Roberta's once I get back outside. I pause. I linger in front of the grocery: cars going by, shoppers going in, coming out, the incomprehensible Northwest sky raining, everyone in the city, it seems, not in the proper place and needing to be somewhere else. Fast.

When I do start walking, I find myself at the corner of Tacoma Avenue, and you don't have to know Tacoma to know that I have a choice there, and that I choose left over Roberta.

"Not tonight, green bird," I say to the fowl on my shoulder.

"Squawk!" I can hear Roberta saying as she scribbles "No Show" on my card. "Squawk! What are you really saying?!"

I light a Kool, hunch my shoulders, and head up the hill, up Tacoma Avenue toward home. Near the top of the hill, I see a terribly round man—the novels would say portly—in a thick wool coat, with a wool hat on his white head and water glistening on his red, jowly face. He is wheezing from his car up some steep steps to his house. His wife, with nothing on her head, greets him halfway up, takes his briefcase and says:

"Come inside. It's awful out here."

When I reach home, I let the cat in. Guilt hugs me like a husband I no longer love. I toss my coat on a chair and give the guilt a peck on the cheek. I turn the thermostat up and hear the furnace grumble in the basement.

It is 5:01. I am officially late. What I have done is walk myself away from Roberta. I have walked past knowledgeable trees with green birds in them, and I have pieced together a dream of Tacoma, in which a friend's troubled head appears in a window, in which an overworked checker pauses to polish a pair of fogged glasses and a woman without a coat or a hat helps her husband up concrete steps he used to take two at a time, in which a woman mystified by her own efficiency writes a check for a mixed bouquet.

At 5:07, mischievous spirits unravel the cat, and she leaps in the air, twisting her spine and YEOWing at the apex of the jump. Then she shakes her fur and, with perfect posture, walks back to the kitchen.

At 5:14 I sit down with a glass of red wine to take inventory. First I read on the front page of the newspaper that last night a man walked to a gas station, pumped 94 gallons of fuel onto the pavement around him, sat down, lit a match, and burned himself up. I put the newspaper down.

"Mrs. Wasserstrom," I say out loud. "And Regina the Sturdy. And Dennis Campion, whom I will not see—ever—again, whom I could have fallen in love with, easily. And Mrs. Duffy and the checker, and the man with the red face and his wife. And the people in the cars and on the street. And the customers and the mechanics."

By this time the cat is back in the living room and listening.

"Margo," I say to her, "you and I need to get to an airport or a train station. Fast."

"What am I really saying, Margo?" I ask. She plops down, purring.

I watch myself get up, sipping wine, and walk to the kitchen to prepare a modest meal and to mull over the ways in which I might speak to Roberta. I could be contrite, or I could be cold, or I could have a lot of anger. And it all depends, I know, on what I think the green bird really wants to hear.