Irina was also responsible for helping with the spiritual needs of the residents. Many of them who were from a religious tradition sought refuge in it, even if they had spent sixty years denying God, while others sought comfort in esoteric and psychological alternatives typical of the Age of Aquarius. Irina brought in guides and masters for transcendental meditation, courses in miracles, the I Ching, the development of intuition, Kabbalah, the mystic tarot, animism, reincarnation, psychic perception, universal energy, and extraterrestrial life. She was the organizer of religious festivals, a potpourri of rituals drawn from several beliefs, so that no one could possibly feel excluded. At the summer solstice, she took a group of the women to the local woods, where they danced barefoot in circles to the sound of tambourines, with flowers in their hair. The rangers knew them and were happy to take photos of them hugging trees and talking to Gaia, Mother Earth, and with their own dead. Irina stopped mocking them inwardly the day she heard her grandparents in the trunk of a sequoia, one of those millenarian giants that unite our world to that of the spirits, as the octogenarian dancers had been quick to remind her. Costea and Petruta did not have much to say when they were alive, and nor did they from within the tree, but what little they did convey convinced their granddaughter that they were watching over her. At the winter solstice, Irina improvised ceremonies inside Lark House, as Cathy had warned her of a possible outbreak of pneumonia if they celebrated in the damp, windy woods at that time of year.
Irina’s salary would barely have been enough for a normal person to live on, but her ambitions were so humble and her needs so modest that sometimes she could even save money. Her income from her dog-grooming business and as an assistant to Alma, who always looked for reasons to pay her more than they had agreed, made her feel rich. Lark House had become her home, and the residents, whose lives she shared every day, replaced her grandparents. She was touched by these slow, pallid old people with all their ailments. Faced with their problems she was infinitely good--humored; she didn’t mind repeating the same answer to the same question a thousand times, and she enjoyed pushing their wheelchairs, encouraging, aiding, consoling them. She learned to deflect the violent impulses that occasionally swept over them like fleeting storms and wasn’t frightened by the avarice or persecution complexes some of them suffered from out of loneliness. She tried to understand what it meant to carry winter on your back, to hesitate over every step, to confuse words you don’t hear properly, to have the impression that the rest of the world is going about in a great rush; the emptiness, frailty, fatigue, and indifference toward everything not directly related to you, even children and grandchildren, whose absence was not felt as it once had been, and whose names you had to struggle to remember. She felt tender toward their wrinkles, arthritic fingers, and poor sight. She imagined how she herself would be as an elderly and then ancient woman.
But Alma Belasco never fit into that category; she didn’t need looking after. On the contrary, Irina felt taken care of by her and enjoyed the role of helpless niece that had been allotted to her. Alma, who was pragmatic, agnostic, and fundamentally skeptical, wanted nothing to do with crystals, zodiacs, or talking trees; keeping her company, Irina found relief from her own uncertainties. She wanted to be like Alma and live in a manageable reality, where problems had definite causes and solutions, where there were no dreadful creatures lurking in her dreams, no lecherous enemies spying from every street corner. Hours with her were precious and Irina would willingly have worked for free. Once she had gone so far as to suggest it.
“I have more than enough money, and you don’t have enough. Don’t ever mention it again,” said Alma in that imperious tone she almost never used with her.
SETH BELASCO