margaret erhart
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starving

7/12/2021

4 Comments

 
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Laura Matlaw joined our sixth-grade class at the school I went to in New York City. She had thick brown hair, the thickest and straightest hair I’d ever seen, and she was of medium height for a sixth-grader, and medium build. That changed, as you will discover, but this was her condition when she arrived. What was most notable about her at first was that she was from Hawaii. She was a pale girl, neither ethnically Hawaiian nor a sun-worshipper. It surprised us, too, that she had never learned to surf.

Laura loved Simon and Garfunkel. On weekends we walked around the city singing Homeward Bound and other S and G favorites, harmonizing in front of the Alice in Wonderland statue in Central Park, or outside the Plaza Hotel which was Laura’s favorite place to go. Often we hung around the Plaza, waiting to see famous people arrive by limousine, and just as often we were disappointed by the poor showing. But at least once our patience paid off, when Charlie Chaplin, white-haired yet still balletic, stepped out of a black car and made his way up the steps to the hotel’s front door. He wore an old raincoat, much like my father’s, and the grace was unmistakably still with him.

Yes, we were best friends, Laura and I. I don’t remember how it happened but it happened quickly and naturally. She was a funny person. Most of my friends were funny, but she brought out the humor in others. And the wickedness. It seemed just right to spend an hour on a Saturday afternoon shoplifting from a store on Lexington Avenue called Paper East. We took pencil sharpeners and little notepads—things you could stick in your pocket—and left with a wave to the unsuspecting ladies behind the counter. “Thanks,” we said as we waltzed out the door, then doubled over with laughter out on the sidewalk.

My mother always thought Laura was a bad influence, and she was right, but I wanted a bad influence that year. I needed a little excitement in my life. Laura Matlaw, my mother always called her, as if her full name gave her more of an outlaw air. “That Laura Matlaw,” she would say. “Laura Matlaw made you stop eating. Laura Matlaw made you anorexic.” Everything but Laura Matlaw made you a thief.

Laura Matlaw looked like a walking skeleton by the time seventh grade began. She was a frightening presence with sunken eyes and band-aids on her knees. The malnutrition did something to her balance and depth perception so she stumbled and fell a lot, and every fall bloodied her knees. Her hair thinned and took on the texture of straw. Her lips were so dry they cracked every time she smiled. She stopped smiling. And singing. And shoplifting. I was still in her thrall at this time, and at school I began to skip lunch and instead headed to the gym to practice my foul shots. When my mother noticed my new aversion to food, or at least to eating, she sat down across the table from me after the rest of the family had finished, and she read to me from The Joy of Cooking the nutritional value in a hotdog bun. I was impervious and felt a terrible sense of satisfaction in seeing her cry—in making her cry. I wish it had been short-lived but it wasn’t. For a year after that I led an ascetic’s life, leaving the dinner table after a few miserable bites of whatever was put in front of me, and floating off to my room with my nightly indulgence: a cup of black tea.

Anorexia leaves its mark long after the complications of eating have been resolved. Every day I pay attention to a certain self-discipline that is punishing and not productive. I pay attention to moments of withheld generosity, especially to myself. I pay attention to states of want, states that seem to enhance experience when in fact they rob me of life’s richness. I pay attention to my undermining of success, in my career, in my intimate relationships. I pay attention to my attraction to having less, in case it’s a way of being less. When I put on raggedy clothing, I’m starting to ask myself why.

Years later, Laura Matlaw was the second in our class to die. The first was Sue Sanders, my best friend before Laura came along. She died, and the baby inside her died also, when her car was hit by a drunk driver. And Laura, she died not of starvation but of Lou Gehrig’s disease, a terrible death for an outlaw mind.
4 Comments
Carol
7/12/2021 03:42:26 pm

What a moving, courageous essay. Thank you. Carol

Reply
Lucy Watson
7/13/2021 04:11:53 am

Margaret,
Thank you for your blog. I also suffered from an eating disorder. You and I ate cottage cheese together in the cafeteria. Did you mix it with mayonaise and ketchup like I did? Laura and I went on a diet together and I couldn't stick with it but she could. That year our Randall's Island sports day was held at Brearley because of the rain. Everyone was in the gym and all the picnic baskets were in the classrooms. I stayed back from the gym and ate and ate and ate until I couldn't move. I was alarmed and scared and felt beyond full. I was furious with myself for breaking my diet. Important to note that I was not fat but quite slender and athletic. A lifetime of obsession with food and weight. I ran away a few weeks before graduating and I was the class valedictorian but I thought I was too fat to give a speech
I discovered OA and spent 40 years weighing and measuring my good in one of the stricter factions. Finally, after years of deprivation and rigidity I have started to try and live more peacefully with food and am learning how to enjoy the occasional linzer torte from Greenberg bakery whenever I am in NYC.
You brought back so many memories- you, Laura and Susan...my goodness...I was so hungover from a binge one day that I fell asleep in the library. Mrs. Roudebush, our librarian, discovered me asleep (passed out) and said "you Can't sleep in the library." I was mortified and still hold a resentment to this day. Maybe today there is more help for young girls. Or old girls...XOXO

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Grace Osora Erhart link
7/13/2021 03:49:42 am

I know this anorexia monster well. Sometimes I think about Twiggy, that starved model splashed all over the the media of the 70’s. As I would sit, a bored 12 year old I used to look at ridiculous magazines and pray to be like her.
At 13 I was also anorexic, my parents didn’t seem to notice how I dumped my food at dinner into a napkin and lived on low fat cottage cheese and diet soda. Strangely enough it was the cool kids that introduced me to smoking pot ( now we say cannabis? So many words for this plant..) that brought me back to food.
However I have a friend that lives in my town now, we became friends in High School because of our marijuana love, but then she went the other way, becoming more and more thin until she almost died, spending a year in special hospital, and fighting food all the way.
Now she’s a grandmother, but quite trim in her yoga clothes, I have sense she still doesn’t like food, but has made her peace with it. Something still bothers me though...but what is it? Is it being less? Or any of a range of many other “gifts” we give ourselves? Anxiety? Too much stuff? Keeping too busy? Not busy enough?
I can’t begin to answer any of it for myself, but thanks for the look into your past, Margie, and thoughts of today.
One thing, I celebrate many young women today coming out into their “fatness”, there, I said it.... It’s liberating to see, but looking at myself, now that’s a bit harder.

Reply
Linnette Bliss Erhart
7/14/2021 11:07:57 am

Thank you Margie for your vulnerable sharing. Your story filled in some wonderings I have had over the years about how the person I see came to be. Life is such a mystery, with so much unknown and so much to be curious about.

I wonder about my own history with various forms of fundamentalism...first macrobiotics and then the Sikh spiritual path. I so longed for the sense of safety all the rules gave me.

Now I am deeply grateful for the Buddhist path, with the view that I am inherently good, not evil/bad/in need of saving, redemption. Thus I have learned to be more kind to myself and patient and generous to self, and slowly those qualities are spreading to include others. And while the illusion of safety is still sometimes attractive, I understand it is an illusion and can laugh at my folly.

And I really like having fun with food, savoring all the flavors. And yes I am carrying 10 extra pounds from that fun and I say so what! And I have found a new favorite clothing line, which I am also having fun with, all color and flow and comfort. I celebrate just decorating myself and laugh. Because impermanence rules.

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