The Collected Short Fiction of Bruce Jay Friedman by Bruce Jay Friedman

Author:Bruce Jay Friedman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 1997-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Business Is Business

FOR TWENTY-FIVE YEARS, my father worked for a man named Schreever who was the president of Schreever Laces. He was a boyhood friend of my father’s and they started the business together. My father was not good at business manipulations. After a few years, he decided to devote himself exclusively to the factory and work on salary. It would be better that way since he would have fewer headaches. But as the business prospered, the factory expanded. My father had a dozen production assistants under him and about seventy-five women. He enjoyed being in charge of so many people. Even in his executive position, he was the first one down to the factory and the last one to leave in the evening. Everyone else on the street was certain my father owned half the business and he didn’t really deny it. It was a flourishing business. But privately, to us, he said he had less headaches not having anything to do with the business end of it and he was tickled to death he didn’t have to worry about those things. He invited me down to the factory once on a Saturday. I was in for the weekend from military school and it was a big thing for me because he’d never invited me down before.

The factory was deserted and my father switched on the lights. He took me around, showing me the piles of laces, rayons, silks, the sewing machines, patterns, and the cutting machines. “You really want to see something, kid?” he asked. He took a pile of rayon material in his hand and switched on the cutting machine. He slid the materials alongside the blade of the cutting machine and it sliced through the pile like a knife through soft butter. “What do you think of that?” he asked. I said it was pretty good. Actually, I didn’t see what he was knocking himself out about. If he hadn’t been my father, and if this hadn’t been the first time he’d paid any attention to me I’d have told him it was lousy and showed me nothing. My father went inside to the latrine for a second. I wandered out of the factory into the showroom where the finished laces were on display for buyers. They were under glass and I went up to the showcases and stared at them. My father ran up behind me and slapped me across the mouth. I thought I was too old to be slapped and for that reason I started to cry as he tugged me back into the factory. “You don’t ever go where you’re not supposed to go,” he said. “I brought you down here to see the factory. The showroom is someone else’s territory,” he said. Then he told me how many girls he had under him, where they worked and how they were always goofing off near the Coke machine and how he had to be strict with them so they would learn not to loaf.

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