tape of yours!”
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Karyn Langhorne
Shamiyah—for this was surely the woman; Audra
recognized the voice and the emphatic use of certain
words—grabbed her by the shoulders and pulled
her close, planting two quick butterfly kisses on
both her cheeks.
“Let’s get a look at you!” she said, pushing Audra
away as suddenly as she’d grabbed for her, her face
crunching with the effort of inspection, as though
they weren’t standing in the middle of a leafy side-
walk, outside an utterly unremarkable-looking Bev-
erly Hills office complex.
Audra stared back her, conducting an inspection
of her own. Shamiyah was older than she had
sounded on the phone, probably as kissing close to
thirty as Audra was herself. She was a petite, sepia-
toned person with a heart-shaped face framed by a
mass of unruly black springs of hair, held off her
face by a pair of designer sunglasses. She was a little
rounder in the behind than Audra expected—
carrying a little of Africa in her hips and thighs—
but her tight white tank T, her low-slung jeans and
high-heeled mules suited her figure perfectly.
“Girl,” she said in her Ivy-league ghetto voice,
“you weren’t kidding. How much have you lost?”
“Not sure,” Audra replied, her mind racing.
These people were expecting some quick-thinking,
comedienne version of herself and she had no inten-
tion of disappointing, even if it cost her every line in
her personal arsenal, plus a few from the old movies
as well. “Fat girls don’t weigh themselves, you
know. Axe-wielding mass murderers don’t scare fat
girls.” Audra rolled her eyes. “Hell, I’d probably just
ask to borrow his knife to carve my chicken dinner.
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But the scale?” And she made her voice like a Vin-
cent Price horror movie from back in the day.
“Scaaaarrrryyy . . .”
Shamiyah chuckled her appreciation for the per-
formance. “Well, we’ll get some numbers today,” she
said, taking Audra’s arm and guiding her toward
the lobby of the building. “What did you think of
the hotel?”
Audra rolled her eyes. “When that car rolled up in
front of it, I thought I was going to have to prostitute
myself just to pay the bill. Can you see me, hanging
out on the street corner in this neighborhood, flash-
ing passing cars with a little leg?” And she struck a
pose she knew looked utterly ridiculous—especially
for a woman of her size and build.
Shamiyah broke into another gale of laughter.
“That would be hilarious.”
“Probably wouldn’t make me enough money to
pay for the newspaper they left on the threshold.”
“You’d be surprised,” Shamiyah muttered, her
voice losing a bit of its bubbly edge. “Strange place,
L.A. People literally sell their very souls here and
consider it worth the bargain.” She shook her head.
“I’ve been here for almost eight years . . . and I some-
times wonder if I’m one of them.” Before Audra
could ask her any questions about herself or her
adopted town, the woman frowned. “But you
shouldn’t have needed any money. The room should
have been totally comped—”
“Yeah,” Audra said. “That’s what they told me
when I went to check in. That everything was com-
plimentary . . .” she grinned. “Except the tips.”
“Well, there’s a few things a sister’s gotta handle
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Karyn Langhorne
on her own. But for everything else”—she gave Au-
dra a cynical eye roll—“there’s an expense account.
Now.” She grasped Audra’s arm again. “Before you
meet everybody, there’s some stuff they want you to
do.”
“What kind of stuff?” Audra asked, suddenly feel-
ing on guard.
“Medical kinds of stuff,” Shamiyah said, waving
her fingers vaguely as if she weren’t certain of the
details. “Basically they want to do the whole exam,
like you were going to be on the show. It’s pretty
comprehensive—takes hours and hours—so we’d
better get started.”
Shamiyah steered her toward the elevator and along
the third-floor corridor to a glass-encased office. The
words alan bremmar, m.d., and herbert koch,
m.d., graced the door, each man’s moniker followed
by a long line of letters like a perverse alphabet soup.
Through the glass, Audra could see an elegant recep-
tion desk and an even more elegant receptionist.
“These guys are absolutely the best,” Shamiyah
murmured as though it were a secret, guiding her
through the glass doors with one surprisingly firm
and determined hand. “They’ve done everybody.
More stars than the Walk of Fame . . . Hi Maisy!”
Shamiyah said with a gushing enthusiasm that Au-
dra couldn’t decide was real or fake. “Here she is,
Audra Marks! The Ugly Duckling candidate we’ve
been talking about?”
Maisy stretched her face into a smile, staring at
Audra as though she were some interesting new
species that required great analysis, while Audra
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stared back at her with similar interest. Up close,
Maisy had the look of someone who had seen a few
cuts of the surgeon’s knife herself: her eyebrows
were suspiciously high, her nose perfectly straight,
her breasts impossibly perky. Add to that the warm
glow of a paid-for tan, and the perfect lowlights of a
custom dye job and Maisy looked fake right up to
her enhanced eyelashes.
“Nice to meet you,” she said in a voice far too
high and girlish for her years, but pleasant enough.
She stood up, showing them a lean figure clad in a
tight black T-shirt and black pants in some clingy,
sexy fabric that would have shown every bump of
cellulite, if the girl had had any. “Carla—she’s one
of our nurses—is waiting for you in Room One. But
first . . .” She pulled a thick folder full of papers
from the cubby beneath the elegant desk. “Papers to
sign,” she said, handing them to Audra.
“Good grief! More papers?” She shook her head,
turning to Shamiyah in amazement. “My hand still
hurts from the stack you sent over last night.
Haven’t I released you people from all liability for
just about every conceivable accident imaginable?”
“I—I don’t know,” the girl said, looking gen-
uinely confused. “But these are the medical forms
so Dr. Bremmar and the others can do their prelimi-
nary consultation. Did someone already send you
these? Because—”
“No, no,” Shamiyah patted the girl on the arm, re-
assuringly. “The forms she got last night were from
the Ugly Duckling show. Consenting to her appear-
ance on the program, for the use of her image in
promotion, release from libel and slander—stuff like
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Karyn Langhorne
that. Not the same. She’s got to do these, too.” She
cast a significant glance at Audra. “Just skip all the
financial and insurance information. Write Ugly
Duckling. They know where to send the bills.”
“So basically, I’m giving these docs permission to
kill me and your production company permission to
film it.” Audra quirked an eyebrow at Shamiyah. “Is
that about right?”
For once, Shamiyah seemed to forget to smile.
“Yes, that’s about it,” she said levelly, meeting Au-
dra’s eyes. “You’re cool with that, though, right?”
For the first time, a current of the seriousness of
this undertaking charged the air between them like
ions before a lightning storm. Audra grabbed the
edge of the reception desk, steadying herself.
The whole point was to remake herself . . . and
she was actually here, in Los Angeles, to find out
if—and how—it could be done. She imagined her-
self transformed into a swan of unimaginable
beauty, and inhaled.
“Ice-cold chilly,” Audra told the woman, clench-
ing and unclenching her fist, making ready for the
work at hand. She grabbed the folder, crossed the
room and threw herself into a nearby chair, feigning
exhaustion. “I’m gonna need surgery for carpal tun-
nel by the time you guys get done with me.”
“Carpal tunnel?” The blonde’s confusion seemed
to deepen even further. “I don’t think Dr. Bremmar
does that. It’s somewhere in the foot, right?” She
smiled and continued before either Shamiyah or
Audra could respond. “Can I get you ladies some-
thing? Espresso? Latte?”
“Double skim latte sounds great to me,” Shamiyah
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103
breathed. “You’re a life saver, Maisy. Just a life saver!
Audra?”
A Snickers bar would really hit the spot, Audra
thought, but she decided against saying that out
loud in this company. Instead, she shook her head,
“No, thanks.”
“We also have all kinds of fruit juices,” Maisy
tempted, as though it were specifically in her job de-
scription to make sure every guest had a cup of
something. “Papaya? Kiwi? Guava?”
Audra grimaced. “No, thanks,” she insisted and
watched the girl’s face crumple in disappointment.
“Are you sure?”
“How about just a bottled water?” she said to
keep the girl from feeling like a failure, and watched
a smile twitch Maisy’s lean face again. “Okay, so
that’s one double skim water”—she slapped herself
on the forehead—“Double skim water! I mean,
latte—and a water.” She nodded. “When you finish
with those”—she nodded at the forms—“Room One
is the first one on the left. Go on in, she’s expecting
you. I’ll be back in a flash with your drinks.”
“Thanks, Maize,” Shamiyah said, already pulling
Audra down the hall. The second they were out of
earshot, she murmured, “You can do those forms
later. And don’t mind her. She’s nice enough . . . but
she’s not here for her brains. She’s a walking adver-
tisement for Bremmar and Koch’s work. Nose, eyes,
chin, boobs, lipo—you name it.”
Audra nodded. “I suspected as much.”
They stopped outside a door upon which a silver
1 had been affixed. Shamiyah lay her hand on the
knob, then paused, staring hard into Audra’s face.
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Karyn Langhorne
“I’m not supposed to tell you this,” she said at last,
“but I really want you to have this chance, Audra.
The rest of the candidates won’t do this step until
we bring them here in three weeks. We’re doing this
now for you, because, of all the tapes we got from
African-American women—and there weren’t that
many, I’m sorry to say—yours was absolutely the
best.” She lowered her voice. “But these docs,
they’ve got real concerns about whether they can
make your transformation work. The only way I
could convince them to consider you was with this
advance consultation to work out the . . . details. But
you can never tell anybody about it and . . .”—she
leaned closer, her eyes intent—“it will really help if
you show them that you’re willing to do whatever it
takes. Whatever it takes,” she repeated. “Okay?”
Whatever it takes. The words echoed in Audra’s
brain, sounding suddenly dark and dire, as if some
kind of shadow had suddenly engulfed this sunny of-
fice space. In the movies, this moment would have
been accompanied by music so tense and ominous
that Audra shivered a little, just imagining it. For a
second, running back out into the California sun-
shine and finding her away aboard the next flight
back to New York seemed like the wisest course, even
if she had to walk all the way to the airport. But then
she imagined herself a finished swan of a woman, as
pretty as Petra, able to silence her mother’s criticisms
with a single bat of a perfectly mascaraed eyelash.
She closed her eyes, carrying the fantasy further,
imagining herself running into Art, Penny and Es-
meralda Prince—his long-haired, long-legged, fat-
free Esmeralda Prince—and heard herself saying:
DIARY OF AN UGLY DUCKLING
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Marks!” and watching their mouths fall open in
amazement as she tossed her hair, and struck a pose
for their admiration. She could almost hear him
stuttering out his “hello,” could almost see the ex-
pressions of interest and desire competing on his
face. In the fantasy, the two of them walked on to-
gether, chatting about old times while poor little
Essie stood on the sidewalk with her vapid little
mouth hanging open in surprise and disappoint-
ment.
“Okay,” Audra said grimly. “Okay.”
Shamiyah’s small bosom heaved in relief and she
ran a café au lait hand through the wiry strands of
her kinked-up hair. “Great. Sisters in Lala Land—or
anywhere else for that matter—really need to stick
together, Audra. Remember that.”
Nurse Carla was another athletically thin woman,
with red hair and a real-looking nose, but suspi-
ciously plump lips. She greeted Audra warmly, then
commanded her to strip to her underwear “for the
examination and the photos.” Audra did as she was
told, glad she’d brought her newest matching pair of
skivvies. The examination part made sense—but
photos?
“What are these for?” she asked as the nurse used
&
nbsp; a digital camera to take front, side and rear views of
her body, then close-up profiles of her face at several
different angles.
“The doctor uses them in a software program to
get an image of what your body can look like after
surgery.” Carla snapped the camera again and
106
Karyn Langhorne
again until Audra felt like some kind of super-sized
model doing an underwear shoot. “They’re also our
before and after shots. We’ll send copies to Shamiyah
and the other producers of Ugly Duckling. No doubt
they’ll be a part of the package when your show
airs,” Carla replied.
“You sound like you know quite a bit about this
TV stuff.”
Carla laughed. “Drs. Bremmar and Koch consult
on about half a dozen of these makeover shows. It’s
a solid half of their business!”
“And the other half?”
Carla shrugged. “Celebrities and celebrity
spouses.”
Shamiya had said as much. Audra wondered if
she would recognize the names of the stars if she
heard them. “Like who?”
Carla just shook her head. “We never tell,” she
said lightly, then lowered her voice a little. “Out
here, just about everyone has a ‘little work done’ . . .
but no one admits to it. This office is the repository
of some of the best-kept secrets in Hollywood, be-
lieve me. Okay, Audra,” she said in her normal tone
again. “Hop up on the scale, then we’ll do the blood
and urine work. Then we’ve got to get downstairs to
the pool—”
“Pool? Why?”
“To test your fat-to-muscle ratio, of course. How
else are we going to figure out exactly how much
weight you have to lose?” She grinned. “You don’t
actually think we just use one of those silly height-
weight charts, do you?”
“Uh . . . no . . . of course not,” Audra mumbled,
DIARY OF AN UGLY DUCKLING
107
not wanting to admit that that was exactly what she
had thought.
“Then hurry up. You’re meeting with the other
experts at noon—”
“Other experts?”
“Didn’t Shamiyah tell you?” Carla’s reddish hair
bobbed from side to side again. “Between the show
people like Shamiyah and Camilla, the fitness peo-
ple and the doctors, you’ve got a whole baseball
team!”
“Camilla? Who’s that? Shamiyah’s assistant?”
Carla barked out a short, bitter laugh. “The other