BURGER OR BURRITO? Which are you? Maybe you didn’t know that all people can be divided along these culinary categories. They can. Grab something to munch on while I explain it all to you.

We’re cooking up a great deal here at TSP, and while some of us are celebrating the ladies auxiliaries, others of us are sisters in the kitchen who slow cook. That is if we’re not too busy showing off our waistlines. And when people reveal themselves to me by their habits (or their bellies), I sort. It’s a coping mechanism, a sort of Roach-sister taxonomy that keeps things straight by dividing them—in this case, people—into categories.

So, which are you? Are you comfortable in a mere bun, letting the sun shine on your sides, your condiments visible to all? If so, you’re a burger. Or do you need your ingredients tightly wrapped? Everybody is one or the other. I’m a burger, my sister being the burrito of the family. I married a burrito and we have a burrito for a child. Only our dog is the other burger in my life, and I’m glad he’s here, surrounded as I am by these mightily-cinched-up humans.

This food metaphor thing isn’t all that out there, at least not if you remember your Mendel, that being Gregor Mendel, the father of genetics, who experimented with 30,000 peas, growing them and cross-pollinating them to explain dominant and recessive qualities in us all. The man knew his peas.

Mendel, a burrito, was interested in our ingredients, giving us the answers to many of the questions Charles Darwin, a burger, posed. See how this works? And it would take a burger like me to transpose the whole thing to asking the question of how we reveal or conceal our make-ups–bun or tortilla? I can see my older sister rolling her eyes, especially when I state flat out that all older sisters are burritos and the next sisters are always burgers. Third sisters, fourth? Let me hear from you.

Like me, do you think of the womb as a great genetic pantry, providing and parsing out to each child a distinct different stew? And if so, does that make the environment in which we are raised nothing less than a great big test kitchen?

I can push this metaphor around my plate all day long, particularly since it occurred to me while I was cooking. Viewed as food for thought, families become a whole lot less dicey and a lot more palatable, if only emotionally. Bun or tortilla? Burger or burrito? After you know which you are, the only other thing to decide is if you want fries.

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IHAVE SCHEDULED A TOUR OF MY CLOSET for the next time Marion visits my tiny house. Apparently she has not seen it, though her post the other day about how different we are on this score of closets would lead you to infer otherwise. This is how it is between sisters, I think: We know them so well, and yet not at all, and that’s what makes the bond and also the friction that is the unique chemistry of siblings. I have just gone upstairs to take my closet’s measurements, to try to get this straight.

My little 1880’s house boasts just one clothing closet, a 48-inch-wide afterthought I managed to tuck into one of my impossibly small rooms a few years back. With two hanging racks installed in this mere shoebox, I have a total of 8 feet of space, period.

That doesn’t mean that, as Marion has told you with complete certainty because she really is sure of it the way only a sister can be, I have just the latest year’s wardrobe models hanging there—not an extra thing. Would that it were so.

Quite to the contrary, my tape measure reveals that I devote 2 of my precious 8 feet to a stretch of Brooks Brothers shirts I wore daily under suits more than 15 years ago when I worked at Newsday newspaper. Since then they have been in their plastic bags from the cleaners, who laundered them for me each week (hanger, not box, thanks).  Why do I still have this space-hogging inventory of shirts I do not ever use? I have no idea whatsoever.

In the rest of the squeezebox that is my absurdly mini closet, more than 3 feet are likewise dedicated to clothes I don’t wear, ranging from “Would not be caught dead in but sentimental attachment involved” to “I’m too old for that cute outfit, but love remembering when I wasn’t.”

It’s hard to let go of the possibility of being young again, I say as the older sister, nearing 55. On little sister Marion’s end, I think she was saying this in her post on our comparative closets: It’s hard to let go of the image of your older sister not having it together, knowing the answers, having the secret.

And one more thing: The deluxe hand-me-downs she says she’s “on to me” about, and suspects I actually bought for her? They’re hand-me-downs. A size 6 or 8 throughout my 20s and 30s, by 40-something I shrunk. I know, it’s supposed to head in the other direction as women age, but I’m a 2 this last decade, apparently headed for old age as one of those women whose housedress she inhabits like a clanger in a bell.

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IF YOU KNEW US only for an instant, you might think us to be something that we’re not. That’s because I’m the loud sister. Always have been. And loud gets mistaken for tough, especially in women. But Margaret is the tough one, hand-down. Don’t believe me? See what she sent me in the recent ice storm.

As I said in my reply to her post, that characterizes her. No mere basket of cheer for Margaret; when her sister was in trouble, that sister sent power tools. She’s tough, and never tougher than on gifts, though not only in the giving.

Perhaps the best example of her toughness on the receiving end is the sweater I knit her one Christmas that I have never seen her wear. And this is after I let her pick out the yarn, the color, and the pattern: wool, gray with no flecks of color, no cables, bobbles or anything to break up the boredom of the knitter. Made to spec, I have never once seen it on the woman.

The big sister screws in her jeweler’s eye and may or may not deign to actually wear the gift, but in accepting it, accepts the giver.

I’m the younger sister and true to pecking order, I not only find her response to the sweater hilarious, but when she’s around, I’m always either wearing or using at least one thing she’s given me. I also use the moisturizer she recommends, the shampoo she started me on, as well as the lip balm she does. Whenever I read those social-science pieces about birth order I always laugh, so clothed are they in clinical language while naked of the real-life illustrations that any sister can provide.

Here, from my side, is what the Christmas adult big-sister/little-sister relationship looks like: The older hands a wrapped box to the younger, the other nods enthusiastically, opening it, shucking her shirt beneath the Christmas tree, and putting the new one right on her body. Reversed, with the little sister as giver, the big sister screws in her jeweler’s eye and may or may not deign to actually wear the gift, but in accepting it, accepts the giver. And on they go.

These quirky roles can irk the hell out of husbands and boyfriends. Many a wife or lover has been asked the ridiculous holiday question by an onlooker of, “Why do you let her do that?” or heard, “But you don’t wear pajamas” in the aftermath.

Trust us on this: Sisters know best. Along with the candles, tinsel or bourbon balls, these are the prescribed roles that keep the holiday train moving forward. You want to get to that turkey and stuffing? Let us enact our ancient ritual. Question it, and we might just cook your Christmas goose.

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I F THERE IS a seasonal cycle between the Roach sisters, it begins each year in winter when I ask which seeds to order. In early spring it’s whether I can yet prune my apple trees. Following a purely horticultural calendar, I know that midsummer brings a need to know the absolute drop-dead date for pruning lilacs; a call in autumn is all about when to harvest pumpkins.

I don’t stick to a purely horticultural calendar, of course, when there is so much more to ask of my older sister, Margaret. With the same seasonal regularity, at 4 PM the day before Christmas, the question is how to make the buttermilk in which to marinate the turkey. (Of course she denies that she makes buttermilk, but don’t let’s get started on that.)

The context for the next day’s call will be cranberry sauce and cranberry ice. The subtext, too, remains the same. Writing down none of the answers, frequently calling with pruning shears or whisk already in hand, I perform the task right then, the whole ritual of call-and-response identifying and re-identifying me, securing my place as younger sister. She knows it, I know it, and no one says a word about it. It’s not about doing as I’m told, though. It’s just about doing. Doing is what I do best.

She thinks and plans, executes, re-plans and makes note of it all, whether the topic is the art and science of horticulture, the physics of cooking, or the rational use of time. She looks and considers. I prefer to plunge.

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NEXT TIME YOU get your feathers ruffled about where you stand in some pecking order, keep in mind that while you may have spent thousands in therapy on this topic, and others have racked in untold millions writing and selling books that define your prescribed sorry circumstances to you, remember that the guy who authored the idea of who pecks who, when, where, and why, was talking about nothing more than, yup, chickens.

But before you stop payment on that most recent $150 check to your shrink, read on. It will make you feel better.

It was Norwegian zoologist-psychologist Thorleif Schjelderup-Ebbe who, when studying how hens socially organized themselves, found himself needing to say it with words, and lacking the compound phrases to describe what he’d witnessed came up with what translates into “peck order.” On this side of the pond, University of Chicago zoologist W.C. Allee explained it all to us, transposing the whole thing in a rather off-handed comment he made about “women’s clubs, faculty groups, family groups or churches.”

According to William Safire’s marvelous book, Safire’s Political Dictionary, from there it was a skip and a leap from Aldous Huxley to Margaret Mead to W.H. Auden to me and you using the phrase in a popular culture kind of way to prescribe just who gets the shiny red bicycle under the tree, who gets the banged-up wheels in the garage, and who goes to therapy first.

Ah, chickens. How they come home to roost.

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