Textile by Orly Castel-Bloom

Author:Orly Castel-Bloom [Castel-Bloom, Orly]
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781558618268
Publisher: Feminist Press at CUNY (Perseus)

3

IN ISRAEL THE DAY WAS COMING TO THE END OF THE TWILIGHT hour, and all its beauty was going to be over in a matter of seconds. Lirit came home after an exhausting working day at Nighty-Night, tanned as if she had spent two weeks in Eilat. In fact, she had gone straight from the pajama factory to the health club at Mikado, where she had obtained a spray-on tan, and now she was suffering from a guilty conscience for not going to see her mother all day. She imagined that she wasn’t doing too badly, and comforted herself with the thought that tomorrow she would go before work.

The tan looked terrific, authentic and even, Lirit said to herself as she examined her naked body in the mirror. Shlomi was right not to like nudity with color differences left by swimsuits. A swimsuit seemed to him an artificial additive. Lirit thought that she would return to their home in Brosh on the border of Te’ashur in two, maximum three days, and at the health club they told her that the tan would last up to a week.

Because of his views she made up her mind not to tell him how she had acquired the tan, but to say that she had sunbathed in the nude on the roof of the pajama factory.

She called Medical Frontline and someone who didn’t actually have a clue told her that her mother was sleeping after receiving strong painkillers.

Now Lirit looked like a typical Telba-North girl of her age: blonde streaks—which someone like that would have done herself for a few dollars or at the Mikado hairdressing salon when she had the time—thin but not emaciated, quite tall, and most importantly self-confident beyond what you would expect for someone of her age, as if the majority of her achievements were already behind her, and all she had to do now was go from strength to strength. Most of the inhabitants of Tel Baruch North, even if they weren’t twenty-two-year-old girls with blonde streaks, were self-confident to a fault. It may well be that the evergreen vegetation, together with the slightly exaggerated resemblance of the houses, whether multistoried or not, had in the end done the job, whether the planners had planned it or not: they had implanted in the inhabitants what was so sorely missing in other suburbs of Tel Aviv, the conviction that the place would survive a war.

She didn’t know if she was allowed to take a shower, and she called them to ask. They said yes she was, no problem. In the shower she felt flooded by pity for her mother, who had been buried for years in a place where there were only female workers, most of them ugly, and the only man who sometimes came there was the Singer technician, maybe the same one who had come onto her grandmother, and maybe also to the next generation.

Lirit dried herself quickly and took a big white T-shirt belonging to her father

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