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the violins,”
    “The minute you guys come home for a visit, it's a Pills-bury Dough Boy festival.”
    “Is he deprived or what?” said his brother.
    “You never had to use old encyclopedias where the most recent president was Harry S. Truman,” he continued.
    “And we didn't get a watch for our twelfth birthday, either,” said his brother. “Just sit on it.” “Lighten up!” “Give it a rest and help set the table.”
    “That's woman's work.”
    “I'm telling! Mom!”
    The voices were deeper. The bodies were larger. But the dialogue was from the mouths of the same people who were at the same dinner table fifteen years ago.
    It was a performance staged especially for parents. Next to Chorus Line and Oh/ Calcutta!, it enjoyed one of the longest runs in the history of modern theater. It was all coming back to me.
    “Mom! Make her stop,” said a voice flatly.
    The silence was still deafening. “Make her stop what?”
    “Humming.”
    “I don't hear anything.”
    “You never hear it. She's humming just so no one can hear it but me.”
    I leaned over, my hair resting on her lips, and listened. Nothing.
    “Look at her neck,” her brother commanded. “You can see it moving.”

Unknown
    I felt her neck to see if the veins were warm. Then I commanded her to stop.
    “Did she do it?” I asked my son.
    He smiled triumphantly.
    Sibling Rivalry was invented by psychoanalyst Alfred Adler in the early 1920s. Up until that time parents used words like “They're killing one another” and “For God's sake, Larry, don't turn your back on 'em.” Adier said it was a “phase” children went through in which they competed for their parents' attention. They had it. They just didn't know it.
    As the silence of the table returned, I said to the “baby,” “Why don't you say a prayer before dinner?”
    The other two exchanged knowing glances like the first two cuts in the Miss America pageant.
    He bowed his head and began, “Bless us, oh Lord, and these thy gifts which we are about to receive from the Brownies ...”
    “Not Brownies, dork,” interrupted his brother. “You mean bounties.”
    “Bounties is something you get for bringing in an outlaw,” said his sister.
    “No, you're thinking of the ones who bring in prisoners in Canada. They're Mounties.”
    “You're thinking of Monty, which was a nickname for General Montgomery during the big war,” said their father.
    “Monty!” said our daughter. “They were the sisters who wrote Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre.”
    “That's Bronte,” I said.
    “I thought Bronte made chicken,” he said.
    “Jerk, that's Swanson,” said his brother.
    “No, that's Colonel Sanders, the man with the little white beard and the white suit.”
    “You are obviously thinking of Mark Twain.”
    “Wrong,” said their father. “It was Mark dark and he was not a colonel, he was a general during the big war.”
    “Is he related to Dick dark?” asked our son.
    “Who's Dick dark?”
    “Maybe he's related to Petula dark.”
    “What's a Petula?”
    “Isn't it like a cuspidor?”
    “That's a tooth like a molar.”
    “A mole is a little animal that ruins your grass.”
    “No it isn't. It's a little dot on your face that you were born with.”
    “That is a wart and it's something icky that boys hate but always wind up with.”
    There was a silence for almost ten seconds when a small voice said, “That's what I said in the first place. Bless these gifts which we are about to receive from the Brownies....”
    Sibling rivalry in our family began the first day I brought our second son home from the hospital. His brother looked at him and said, “Maybe later we could get a dog.”
    The rivalry was subtle at first. Like he'd stand on the baby's windpipe or trap him under the casters of his playpen. At the grocery, he pushed his cart into a blank wall and left him.
    “What's with you and your brother?” I'd ask. "He's dumb.
    He doesn't do anything. He just slobbers and eats the