introducing ourselves to our guest. I’m Alan Brem-
mar.”
One by one, the experts announced themselves.
The blonde doc was actually a cosmetic dentist
named Katherine Martin, the athletic white man,
the plastic surgeon Herbert Koch, whom, Audra re-
alized with a shock, she recognized from another of
the Beautify! Channel’s many makeover shows. The
only African-American expert was a clinical derma-
tologist named Dr. Reynolds Jamison . . . and from
the way he stared at her, she suspected that
he thought she might be just to the left of crazy, and
that she needed far more than a new nose to correct
what ailed her. Audra felt the man’s eyes still trained
on her face, even after he’d introduced himself and
the process had moved on to the next person.
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The rangy young woman was Julienne Rapista,
the celebrity personal trainer—also vaguely familiar
to Audra for her various TV projects. The bespecta-
cled woman was a shrink with an expertise in body
image named Anna Goddard. Audra had the feeling
she’d seen her on the talk-show circuit recently, but
she couldn’t be completely sure.
Audra stared at each one for a long moment, com-
mitting their names and responsibilities to memory.
It was weird: on the one hand, she felt like she’d
been asked to audition for an important role, and on
the other hand, she felt like a woman pleading for a
pardon.
How do I play this scene? she wondered. What ex-
actly is happening here? She tried to ask Shamiyah
with her eyes . . . but the woman had her face in her
own copy of the file and didn’t look up.
“Good,” the sound guy said, showing Camilla—
who still hadn’t introduced herself—his thumb.
“You guys ready?” Camilla’s steely gaze swept over
the cameras and lights, and receiving affirmatives, she
smiled sweetly. “Roll cameras, please.” She paused,
and then spoke as smoothly as if reading from a
teleprompter. “This is a preliminary meeting of our
expert panel on the case of Audra Marks, a candidate
for Ugly Duckling. Each of our experts has reviewed
medical and personal history information provided
by Audra with an eye toward determining if she is the
right kind of candidate for our unique makeover pro-
gram.” She paused, shooting Shamiyah daggers until
she jumped up and hit a key on the laptop, filling the
TV screen with Audra’s underwear-clad image.
“Dr. Bremmar, let’s begin with you.”
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119
* * *
Carla was right: They were brutal. Even Dr. Brem-
mar, who, Audra’s intuition told her, always tried to
be kind, had very little positive to say.
“We can do the surgery before you lose the rest
of the weight—to reshape your thighs—” He drew
on the keypad in front of him, tracing a slimming
purple line that appeared over the bulges in the im-
age of Audra on the screen. “And your tummy.”
More lines. “And your derriere.” Still more lines.
“But you wouldn’t really be able to see the effects
of the liposuction until you lost a substantial
amount of weight. Probably about, what? Sixty more
pounds—”
“I’m thinking more like seventy,” the nutritionist
piped up, bending back over the sheaf of papers in
her hand. “And even with a fairly low-calorie diet
and a pretty strenuous exercise regimen, I’m not
sure she could lose that amount in only three
months. She’ll lose some fat in the process of the
surgery, but as I calculate it, even on only 1200 calo-
ries, it comes out to about three or four pounds a
week, or”—she scribbled—“between thirty-five and
forty-five pounds overall.” She shook her head.
“Any faster than that, and I’m afraid we’ll be court-
ing a host of nutritional deficiencies—”
“But it says here that Audra’s got a pretty decent
ratio of fat to muscle,” interjected Julienne, the fit-
ness chick. She popped a lazy bicep, admired it,
loses forty-five pounds of fat and builds up her lean
muscle mass. She could easily look sixty or even
seventy pounds slimmer than she appears today.
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Karyn Langhorne
And she’s already in pretty good physical shape, by
nature of the kind of work she does.”
“That’s one of the things that argues in favor of her
as a candidate. Her excellent overall health,” Dr.
Koch interjected.
“For the body, I agree,” Dr. Bremmar nodded.
“But the face . . .” He shook his head and sighed.
Dr. Koch echoed the sigh. “Yes . . . the face,” he
repeated, and said no more, letting the room lapse
into a prolonged silence.
Audra stared from expert to expert, but suddenly
no one in the room was looking at her . . . except Dr.
Jamison, whose velvety brown eyes had never once
wavered from her features since he’d entered the
room, even though, since his introduction, the man
hadn’t said a word.
“Well?” Audra looked around the room, forcing
her voice to its most jocular tone, even though her
heart was pumping loud in her chest, and her ears
were ringing with ugly phrases like dude with tits
and not my daughter. “Don’t tell me my face is too
ugly to fix. I mean, look at me,” she gestured toward
the screen. “Almost anything you do will be an im-
provement. How can you lose?”
This time there was no laughter, and still no one,
not even the staring Dr. Jamison, spoke. Shamiyah
cast a quick look at Audra that conveyed nothing
but her nervousness, but she said not a word.
Finally, Dr. Bremmar cleared his throat. “See, the
thing is, darker skin poses some .. . particular
problems,” he began, cutting his eyes at Dr. Jami-
son, as though, as a black man he should be the one
to speak. But Jamison just kept staring at Audra,
DIARY OF AN UGLY DUCKLING
121
wordless and soundless, his expression as blank as
the gleaming surface of the conference table. “And
while your medical history doesn’t suggest any par-
ticular predisposition for those problems, we can’t
be sure—”
“He’s talking about keloid scarring,” Dr. Koch in-
terrupted, seeming impatient with the other man’s
gentle, hesitant style of speech. “Do you know what
that is?”
Audra frowned. She was about to reply when
Camilla jumped into the silence with, “Big, ugly,
raised scarring.” She grimaced. “We do your face
and you heal badly and—”
“I wouldn’t sue you, I promise—”
“Of course you wouldn’t. The re
leases you signed
would completely bar any type of lawsuit. That’s
not the point. The point,” she continued dramati-
cally, “is that the entire show is on the line. The
show may be called Ugly Duckling, but we make
swans here. If you’re not going to come out a swan,
then we’re not gonna spend production dollars on
you—” She cut her eyes at Shamiyah. “No matter
how much ‘character’ you have.”
Audra blinked at the woman, assessing her qui-
etly. She wasn’t unattractive, but from where Audra
was sitting, she certainly wasn’t good-looking
enough to get away with this kind of crap. Still, no
one seemed to take any position to correct her bad
behavior, and Audra got the feeling, today wasn’t
the day for her to take on the job.
“I’ve gotten cuts before—some of them pretty bad
ones—and they didn’t heal badly,” Audra offered.
“I mean you guys have inspected almost every inch
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of me. You don’t see anything that suggests that this
surgery would be any different—”
“Unfortunately, Audra, it could be quite differ-
ent.” Dr. Bremmar sounded a little like a school-
teacher, patiently giving a lesson to a resistant
audience. “We’re talking about a fairly serious and
dramatic surgery here with the possibility for infec-
tion and serious scarring under the best of circum-
stances. Darker skin, as I indicated earlier, often
tends to show darker, more noticeable scarring, even
if it’s not the keloid variety.” His purple marker
reappeared, as a close-up of Audra’s face dominated
the screen. “See, what I would want to do—and I’m
sure Herb has similar ideas—is liposuction here to
create a stronger jaw line.” He drew purple lines on
the skin beneath Audra’s chin. “Restructure the
cheekbones and the nose”—more lines—“to give
the face more definition, then pull some of the fatty
deposits from beneath the eyes and the brow
bone . . .” He kept drawing until Audra’s face looked
like it had been scribbled over by a two-year-old with
a new crayon. He stopped abruptly, surveyed the
screen and shrugged. “Every one of these lines is a
potential scar—a black line on your face, at best. At
worst—”
“It doesn’t help that you don’t have any family
history from your father’s side. That information
might help us determine if it would be wise to go
ahead—”
“No, there’s no paternal history,” Audra inter-
rupted, shrugging aside the feelings that simply
mentioning the subject brought to the center of her
consciousness. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw
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123
Dr. Goddard make a move for her notebook and be-
gin scribbling animatedly, but the shrink’s notes
were the least of her concerns at that moment. “Why
don’t we do a test, then? I mean just do a cut and see
what happens?” Audra offered. “I mean, I could
even pay for it—”
“There’s no reason to put you through that,” Dr.
Bremmar said, just as Dr. Koch murmured, “That’s
really not necessary.”
“Your acne suggests you might be prone to a cer-
tain amount of scarring, Audra,” Dr. Bremmar
said, cutting his eyes in Dr. Jamison’s direction
again. “I’m no expert, but I do know there are drugs
that could make a substantial difference in that
condition—even minimize the scarring you already
have, but they won’t have the same effect on post-
surgery scarring unless—”
“Then I’m not sure why you even had me come
out here,” Audra interrupted, staring at the purple-
marked images of her face and body. “Sounds like
you’ve already decided it’s hopeless.”
“No, not hopeless. Far from it.”
Audra turned toward the heavy bass of the man’s
voice. The room became quiet, the kind of quiet of a
dozen people listening eagerly for an important
man to make an important speech.
“There’s a way to do this kind of extensive facial
surgery that can minimize the risks of scarring to
the same level as a light-skinned or Caucasian pa-
tient,” Dr. Jamison continued softly. “But it’s highly
controversial. Not everyone believes it should be
done. And some people even find it offensive—”
“But it could be great for ratings for both of those
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Karyn Langhorne
reasons,” Camilla interjected, her eyes gleaming.
“Your transformation is sure to be one of the most
watched ones we’ve ever done if you agree to Dr.
Jamison’s treatments—”
“Treatments?” Audra stared at the man, meeting
his even gaze with curiosity. “What kind of treat-
ments?”
Dr. Jamison’s lips curled into the faintest of smiles.
“There are a variety of methods, actually. Usually a
combination of medications taken orally and ap-
plied topically.” His gaze narrowed, searching her
face. “In your case, we’d also have to work in med-
ication for the acne, but that shouldn’t pose any seri-
ous additional detriment. But you’d have to begin
immediately to hope to achieve any significant light-
ening effect before the surgery begins—”
“Lightening effect?” Audra frowned. “What are
you talking about?”
Dr. Jamison gazed at her, his liquid eyes seeming
to penetrate right to the heart of who she’d always
thought she was and what she’d always thought she
wanted. “You said on the tape you sent you were
sick and tired of being called ‘fat, black and ugly,’ ”
he said in his slow, sonorous voice. “Diet and exer-
cise will eliminate the fat, Drs. Bremmar and Koch
can eliminate the ugly.” He shrugged. “That leaves
only ‘black’ to be addressed.”
“Black,” Audra repeated. Her eyes circled the
room, searching for clarification, but she found
nothing in any of the other faces, except rapt inter-
est. These people were clearly waiting for some-
thing. Something monumental. “Black,” Audra said
again, forcing out a strangled little laugh. “Don’t tell
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125
me you can turn me into a white woman!” She
coaxed the laugh into a chuckle of merriment. “You
can’t possibly—”
Dr. Jamison’s voice rose above hers, drowning it
out with force and clarity. “The drug is called hy-
droquinone. If you apply it daily between now and
the Big Reveal, you’ll start this process a dark-
skinned African-American woman . . . and end it as
a much, much, much lighter-skinned one.” He wig-
gled his fingers in something like a wave. “Good-
bye fat, black and ugly. Fore
ver, if you like. There’s
only one catch,” he added a second later. “You have
to decide today. Right now.”
Chapter 10
“He’s kidding, right?” Audra swung her face
around the room, then fixed her eyes back
on Dr. Jamison. “You’re kidding, right? You can’t
actually—”
“I assure you, Ms. Marks, I can.” His voice was
calm and level, but his eyes danced as though he
found the conversation highly amusing. “Actually
it’s not all that uncommon in the entertainment
world. Surely you’ve noticed how some African-
American performers start their careers one shade
of brown and, as they become more success-
ful, seem to become a lighter shade of brown?
True, some of that may be attributed to lighting
and makeup . . . but in other cases, that shift in
skin tone is very much a direct result of our pro-
cess.”
He touched the keypad and cleared all of the
purple markings Dr. Bremmar had made on the
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127
close-up image of Audra’s face. “First of all, we ad-
dress the recurring acne itself with isotetrinoin—
it’s been proven to have a fairly decent success rate
in minimizing the occurrence of acne scars, even in
darker skin.” As he spoke, the picture was altered
and the clusters of bumps faded from Audra’s
cheeks, chin and forehead. “If all we were con-
cerned about was the acne, we’d address laser treat-
ments to the upper dermis—the visible layer of
skin”—Audra’s image’s skin became clearer with
the words—“but that’s not the effect we’re going
for. What we want is lighter coloring on all of your
skin—or at least on all the visible surfaces. The re-
sult is—well, obvious.”
As Audra watched, the image of herself light-
ened on the screen, from the deep, bitter chocolate
color she was used to seeing in the mirror . . . to
the color of coffee beans . . . and onward up the
color scale until the woman staring out of Audra’s
eyes and nose and lips was framed in a warm cin-
namon. She gasped. With the lighter tone and the
lack of scars and bumps, she saw her mother in her
own face.
“Audra, are you all right?” Shamiyah’s voice
reached her from far away, in a universe without fat,
black or ugly.
“Yeah,” she muttered, emotions tumbling and
swirling inside her. She turned back to the doctor.