Free Fate and Ms. Fortune by Saralee Rosenberg Page B

finger in my face. “I’m like a movie director. I want action! Now are you going to help me find Marvin or not? I hear he has a very good-looking son who’s a doctor.”
    “I wouldn’t care if he was the goddamn surgeon general. How could you even ask me for help? Daddy may be weird and crazy, but he’s my father and I love him.”
    “Fine. I’ll find him myself.”
    “Just tell me this. After all these years, why now?”
    “You know what the famous Rabbi Hillel said. ‘And if not now, when?’”
    “Nice quote, mom. But it’s doubtful he was talking about divorce.”
    “You interpret it your way.” She raised her glass. “And I’ll interpret it mine.”

Chapter 7
    O NE OF MY FONDEST childhood memories was of spending summer days with my grandpa Danny, building miniature rocket ships that could be launched from his backyard in Brooklyn. I was maybe four at the time, too young to be able to do anything other than help Grandma Rita serve the cookies and lemonade. But my age gave me a distinct advantage over Phillip.
    Since he got to help Grandpa with the assembly, I got to push the button that set the launch in motion. And nothing beat shouting out the countdown. “Three…two…one…blast off!”
    As the rocket soared, smoke billowing from the base, Phillip and I would cheer, pondering the mission’s fate. Would the shuttle reach new heights and the parachute open over Ocean Parkway, or plummet into Grandma’s blackberry bushes?
    Mind you, even at four I knew the rockets went no farther than the neighbor’s backyard. Or perhaps the rare one traveled as far as the A&P parking lot. Who cared? It wasn’t the rockets we loved. It was the fantasy.
    Funny that for a memory so grand, it took thirty years to recall, and that the prompt came from my mother lighting a marital match, revealing her decades-old union for what it was. A steadily worn down vessel that was imploding due to hairline cracks in the relationship caused by extreme pressure in the master bedroom, and one partner not fully committed to the program.
    It got me wondering. Was not every marriage born of heat and energy, launched with great fanfare in the hopes of assuring a long, happy trajectory? Yet who among the invited guests believed that love and passion were all it took to fire up a successful mission? If that were so, then why did so many marriages crash and burn?
    It couldn’t always be attributed to stress and disappointment. Both sets of my grandparents’ marriages withstood war, the Depression, and disease, yet they orbited happily for decades until first one, and then the other, lost their spark.
    And take Phillip and Patti. They began their wedded life on shaky ground, zigzagging through religious differences until finally wealth propelled them to their suburban sphere, where their biggest battles centered around kitchen renovations and which Lexus to lease.
    On the other hand, for my friend Rachel, she of the Psychics-R-Right club, the score was a surprising ex-husband, one, her and her kids, nothing. And at work, it sure seemed as if everyone was divorced, except for Benitez, who had been with Angelina for thirty-two years (theirs would have been a great marriage if they’d ever exchanged vows). Simon was on his third wife. Gretchen was divorced from her first husband, though I’d heard rumors that she had been married once before him, to a high school sweetheart she dumped when the network discovered her doing the weather at a local affiliate in Charlotte. And now with she and coanchor Kevin riding theinfidelity train, it was likely the next stop for Kevin and his wife, Anne, was divorce court.
    My marriage, though accompanied by a lavish Manhattan sendoff and an all-expense-paid honeymoon to Aruba, clearly had fatal flaws. The relationship was shoddily constructed of dishonesty and recklessness, and anyone who examined the workmanship closely would have been able to predict our demise.
    But of all marriages, the one I