Here's to Tali, Mali and Gali

The empty beermug at the end of the bar, right next to the large jar of salty roasted peanuts and the tray with clean glasses just out of the dishwasher's wrinkled pink hands, and in beside the ashtray where the waitresses kept their cigarettes burning, is the most important thing in the place for the girls.

It's a large beermug, chipped on its lip and never used to serve a drink. In it, the tips are poured, the coins the same colour as draft beer, the paper bills piling up on top like foam. The waitresses' earnings are from the tips, and the tips come from the customers. To earn those tips they more or less put up with hopeful fawning or arrogant jesting, quick cute patter or crude and lewd remarks.

Tali is tall, high-breasted and dark. She wears pants and a tight blouse. Mali is darkhaired, slender and pale. Her dress sways one way as she sways the other, carrying the drinks out and the empty glasses in. Gali is almost a redhead, almost a ringer for Molly Ringwald, who is a gum-chewing Valley girl who Hollywood and then Time magazine discovered and called the new Rita Hayworth. She hasn't been heard of that much, since.

All three girls are new to the job, new to the city. If Tel Aviv were Los Angeles, they might have arrived one day from Iowa on a Greyhound, with a dogeared copy of the senior play programme in which they had the lead female role.

To Tel Aviv they come from places much closer geographically, but in a way just as distant as Iowa is from Hollywood.

Tali came from Beerhsba. Mali from Kiryat Gat. Gali from a Galilee moshav she says nobody ever heard of. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of them in the city. They share apartments, with each other or with boyfriends.

Some, like Tali, are saving up for the big trip abroad, "to see the world a bit and then I'll know what I want to do with my life." She doesn't want to end up like her olde sister, married with three kids at 27, a husband who will never take be able to take her out of Beersheba and with an ache so familiar she no longer feels it, for an adventure she never had.

Others, like Mali, hope to become models or actresses, "to take courses and then, yes, try to find my way into the business. I know it's difficult but I think I have talent and I think I have some natural attributes." What makes her think so? "The way the men look at me."

And Gali. There are many like Gali. Already in school, university, night courses and day courses, gobbling up whatever knowledge about whatever subject she chose, so that she can never, ever have to go back to that Galilee moshav that nobody ever heard about. "I never, ever want to hear again the sound of chickens clacking in the middle of the night." Tel Aviv is glamour and glitter, night scenes and excitment, fun and danger and a place to make it, whatever it may be. And in a way they already have made it, because they work in a place that is popular because the waitresses are young and attractive and the barman is a professional, remembering the regulars' favurite drinks, especially if they are celebrities, whose presence brings other customers who don't have regular drinks.

It's in Tel Aviv that Tali and Mali and Gali learn to be suspicious of strangers in ways that in the moshav or Kiryat Gat or Beersheba they never learned because nobody is a stranger in those places, which was one of the reasons they wanted to leave those places.

But in these night places they learn to watch out for men as stray as the lonely cat which lives in the pub's backyard. Themselves like the cat that skitters away from any approaching person, Mali, Tali and Gali are hesitant to respond to anyone who starts a conversation whether on the job, on the street, or on the beach.

They are waitresses, paid in cash, which they count out together at three in the morning, sitting down for the first time all night, pouring the silver and copper and paper bills onto a table and dividing it up.

They are new to the job but they learn quickly that they depend on each other, for the tips are communal, divided up three ways.

If they last, the dependence becomes friendship for some, and those friendships spill into a network that includes the rest of the bar workers and some of the regulars.

The friendships wrap them in a humid warm belonging, which i the first step to making it in Tel Aviv, where the strangerness of the people makes a young pretty woman suspicious of anything out of the ordinary even though that's so much of what they came to the city looking for.

Tali counts the silver. Mali counts the copper. Gali trades the neat piles of coins with paper bills from the cash register. The copper becomes silver, the silver becomes paper. On some nights they might each take home as many as ten tenners. But that's because it's a popular place. Three nights like that a week can be enough to get by on, to save a little too, especially if the rent can be divided up three ways and if you work in a restaurant or pub, you can eat for free.

Some only last a few days. Others last a few weeks. A few last a year or two or three, becoming part of the scene, girlfriend to the bartender, marrying the owner or a regular customer with a small business or a good job. Some become what their ambitions promised them. Others disappear into squat shikunim of Bat Yam and Holon.

Ten years from now, if they make it, they'll remember the eight hours on their feet, the napkin poetry penned to them by romantic admirers or the fast and sometimes ugly come-ons by worn out single men with nothing to lose at two a.m. It will become a romantic nostalgia, and maybe they'll long for the late summer nights when the weather was changing and they slept late and woke late and had dreams of lives grander than the ones they had known before they came to Tel Aviv.

But by then, they'll be mothers, perhaps, unable to leave home without arranging a babysitter, who usually has to be home by midnight. And the fun at such places only begins after midnight. Nobody dances on a table before two in the morning.

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