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despite being the class’s clumsiest ballerinas. Being short we were up-front, dancing dangerously close to the edge of the stage.
    My sister, nearly three years younger, overtook me early on. She was the one who did eat. In many aspects, Nancy and I divided up the first child/second child duties as if we’d studied Psychology 101. She bounded into rooms, singing and chattering to announce herself. At my most outgoing, it could be said that I was timid rather than shy. I could smile but not speak when introduced to adults. We did a lot of carpooling, and occasionally a father, it was always a father, forgot my stop because I was so quiet. I sank into the enormous backseat, too mortified to tell him I was alive.
    Nancy and I exemplified psychologist William Sheldon’s classification of basic body types and the temperaments to go with them, a personality lineup taken very seriously for a long time. I was the linear ectomorph, particularly skinny in the arms and legs, as was Jacob. I imagined that I would age into the shape of my dad’s father, who in his later years resembled a tangerine on tooth-picks. Like Nancy, Lisa was a muscular mesomorph, gaining weight more easily than Jacob. Lisa couldn’t help noticing these differences and finding them unfair.
    During Nancy’s and my youth, being a little more meso than ecto was good for girls. On daily episodes of The Mickey Mouse Show , celebrity teenage Mouseketeer Annette Funicello had noticeable breasts under her short-sleeved turtleneck sweater. On Saturday afternoons, we watched the ideal girl handed down from my mother’s generation. Impossibly cheerful, apple-cheeked Shirley Temple sang and tap-danced into our hearts in Curly Top and Poor Little Rich Girl , that like our era’s enduring Pollyanna , promoted the notion that if you kept your sunny side up things would turn out fine. These were our heroines.
    Nancy was the good eater, beloved by grandmothers everywhere, but she had a nonweight health problem that drew concern. Eczema caused her neck, the backs of her knees, and the insides of her elbows to redden, swell, and itch like crazy when she encountered an allergen. For a while, she went to bed with plastic wrap swaddling her elbows and knees, which caused her to crinkle and me to mock. Because of her sensitivity, the nut tree in our back-yard had to go. One day she played in the neighbor’s tomato patch and broke out so badly that she was sent to the closest grandparents to recover. She endured endless creams. But the biggest effect on her life, on family life, was her restricted diet.
    The regimen kept changing. Nancy definitely couldn’t eat oranges or eggs, but the other culprits weren’t so clear. For several weeks, she ate only applesauce, rice, and lamb. For years she took her breakfast cereal with apricot juice, and later with soymilk. One day Mom gave evaporated milk a shot, but Nancy noticed she was the only one and refused to try it. I offered to pour it on my cereal, too, expecting something that looked like milk to taste somewhere in the same ballpark. It was an early lesson in looks being deceiving, especially for food.
    Chocolate and nuts are what Nancy remembers as being more problematic. The best candy bars, the Butterfingers and Snickers bars we got at the Saturday movie matinee, were all about chocolate and nuts. “You got chocolate and I got caramel,” Nancy says now, a little edgily. “Luckily I still like caramel.” Or not so luckily. Caramel is melted sugar, with none of the antioxidants and endorphins associated with certain kinds of chocolate.
    Also less lucky for Nancy, mesomorphs often find weight control a constant struggle. Nancy never got fat, but she never got over the mind-set that food and drink required constant vigilance.
    Our grandmothers were German-born Jews, one laser-focused on tidiness and order, the other alert for constant danger. One inspected our drawers for unfolded clothes; the other thought eight was too