“Yes,” Audra muttered, barely able to speak for
the sensations coursing through her body.
“You like your body . . . here . . .” he kissed her
thighs again. “And here?” Another thrust of his
tongue down deep where no surgeon had touched.
“Mmmm,” Audra moaned, knowing she could no
longer withstand the teasing torture of his touch.
“Say it!” he growled, his voice gruff with impa-
tient command. “Say you like it!”
“I like it!” Audra shouted like a new recruit at ba-
sic training. “I like it! Just—just—”
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Karyn Langhorne
She didn’t have to say more. Art let loose a feral
shout and dove his tongue into her, tasting her until
Audra’s legs shuddered, barely able to hold her
weight. She grabbed his head, pressing him deeper
between her thighs, while the mirror recorded pas-
sion and release playing across her face.
“Art . . .” she hissed, breathless and ready. “I need
you . . . inside me . . .”
“Your wish is my command,” he muttered,
pulling her down on the floor beside him and cover-
ing her with himself. Audra spread herself wide and
he plunged deep, so deep Audra reacted, arching
herself to accommodate the size and thickness
of him. He hesitated just a moment, but when Audra
groaned, “Harder, deeper . . .” he grabbed her be-
hind between his two hands and pounded himself
into her with an energy and passion that brought
her to an explosion so complete, Audra forgot
everything but the feeling of the man’s hardness
against her softness. She was no longer a body, but a
soul, in union with a kindred soul.
Art was insatiable. He bent her body in ways she
hadn’t known it would move, bringing waves of fresh
desire with every position, every angle, until at last,
he muttered, “I’m coming . . . I’m . . .” and she felt
him release the last of his energy deep inside her,
while she shuddered against him, accepting his pas-
sion and returning it with a passion all her own.
Audra didn’t remember later how they moved
from the floor to the bed. But she remembered the
feeling of complete satisfaction and the comfort of
their two sweaty, spent bodies, entwined.
DIARY OF AN UGLY DUCKLING
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I love Art Bradshaw, she thought as his arms slid
around her and she felt his breath on her neck, even
and slow with sleep. I love Art Bradshaw . . . and he
loves me.
Chapter 28
October 27
Dear Petra,
My Ugly Duckling show airs tonight. I was really
hoping you’d be here to watch it with us. It sucks
that your discharge date has been delayed again .
Kiana’s miserable. I don’t know how much more
disappointment she can stand. She really misses you
both.
Art and Penny are coming over, and so is Laine, the
cousin I told you about. Penny is bringing a couple of
girls from her school. In a weird sort of way I’ve
actually helped her make a few friends. Ma has a
couple of her stylists coming, and one or two of her
“special” clients. It should be a regular party. This is
the last episode, so there will be voting for the Top
Three after my “package” airs. I really don’t expect to
make it, but who knows?
DIARY OF AN UGLY DUCKLING
337
I called Shamiyah and asked her about her
promises to Ma, and the whole telephone thing. She
said the phone was disconnected briefly while I was
out of it during the first few days of surgery. I asked her
what to expect on the show and she laughed. She said
“Nothing to do now but wait and see.” Then she
started on how “great” it all was, and how her “career”
is “made” . . .
Somehow none of that made me feel any better. But
then, I have lots of things on my mind.
After the latest incident with Haines at the prison,
I’ve really been thinking. I’d like to do some work with
girls on body image. I was thinking about asking Dr.
Goddard and maybe using some of the show’s
publicity to help me get started. Shamiyah always said
I could be the voice for some of the sisters out there
who have issues. Maybe I really could be. Then it really
would be like Now, Voyager wouldn’t it? Remember
how at the end, Bette Davis helps Paul Henreid’s
daughter break out of her shell and discover her
beauty? Well, just call me Bette . . .
Be careful out there,
Audra
“I’m sick and tired of being fat, black and ugly,”
the woman on the TV was saying earnestly on
an obviously inexpert video tape. There was a sort
of loping grin on her face that did little to conceal
her obvious pain. “Just once, I want to be the
woman who everyone looks at, everyone desires.
Just once I’d like to be pursued, sought after. I’d
like to preen around.” The woman in the video
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Karyn Langhorne
assumed an exaggerated strut, but her legs rubbed
together, making a whistling sound that would
have been funny if it weren’t so pathetic. “I’d like
to toss my hair.” She shook the short curls of her
natural. “I’d like to know what it feels like to be a
swan.”
Audra sank a little deeper into her sofa, covering
her face with her hands. The living room of her
mother’s apartment had been lively with conversa-
tion only a few moments before, as the assembled
group prepared for Audra’s television debut. Now
the room had gone deadly silent. Audra didn’t dare
glance around at any of them, didn’t want to see the
pity in their faces. She looked ridiculous up there:
not funny or clever or amusing as she’d always
imagined. Just ridiculous.
“It’s okay,” Art rumbled into her ear, his arm
tightening around her shoulders. “That’s the old
stuff . . . you’re a different person now . . .”
But the Ugly Duckling people had chosen to air a
good deal of her original tape, including the embar-
rassing confessions about her pants ripping at the
jail, and the ugly names the inmates called her as
she went about her job. Even Penny Bradshaw’s
words were repeated, but in a voice-over as Audra
emerged from a car and walked alone into the
building that housed the offices of her plastic sur-
geons.
“Wait and see.” That’s what Shamiyah had said.
And now Audra understood. There was no way she
wanted to admit to this. No way she didn’t know
how angry Audra would be.
But was this Shamiyah’s doing? Audra wondered,
DIARY OF AN UGLY DUCKLING
339
thinking about how she’d complained about the ed-
iting ahead. Or had she been pressured to change it by
&
nbsp; the evil, ratings-hungry Camilla?
She pushed aside her questions and focused on
the next segment and saw herself, seated at the long
conference table, marking up the photographs with
the experts who had become her friends.
But so little of that long afternoon had made the fi-
nal package. In the end, the world saw Dr. Bremmar
drawing purple lines over a hefty Audra’s body, out-
lining procedures, and Dr. Jamison explaining the
process of skin lightening, while Audra appeared to
listen eagerly. But somehow, none of her questions or
reservations about the process had made the final
cut—not even the whole discussion about scarring—
because when the man finished speaking, the cam-
eras quickly cut to her face and the only words that
fell out of her mouth were, “I’m in.”
Several of her mother’s customers groaned in dis-
pleasure. Audra bit back the impulse to shout out,
“There was more! They cut it!” and gripped Art’s
hand even more tightly.
“Do you realize you’d be changing your cultural
identity? That decision will impact how you will be
viewed in the African-American community.
Friends, family—”
“I don’t think I have any friends or family whose
opinion holds much influence,” the Audra on tape
replied, and the Audra in her home living room,
surrounded by friends and family, could have
crawled into a hole and died.
over as the camera zoomed tight on Audra’s face.
340
Karyn Langhorne
“And so, Audra Marks made the choice to leave
behind fat, black and ugly for a new image: one she
calls, ‘light, bright and beautiful.’ Our team of ex-
perts set to work on the most challenging of Ugly
Ducklings ever.”
The next scene found her in Dr. Jamison’s office,
learning about the application of skin lightening
cream and donning her hat, scarf, and long gloves
for the first time. As she left the office, Dr. Jamison
spoke to the camera, explaining the risks associated
with high doses of hydroquinone and expressing
his concerns about the self-image of those seeking a
radical skin-color change.
“I think in Audra’s case, there’s been a lot of hurt
and trauma associated with her skin tone . . . and
I’m hoping she’ll address those internal concerns as
well as the external ones.”
“He never said that to me,” Audra muttered
no longer able to keep silent as the sweeping heat
of anger burned from her heart to her lips. “He
never said any of that shit to me! Every time I asked
for your input you just looked at me!” she told
the man.
Dr. Jamison was gone, his screen time finished.
Now, she was sitting with Dr. Goddard, being
lectured on the tensions between light- and dark-
skinned blacks in America. It was ludicrous, watch-
ing herself, a black woman, being told about
blackness by a white woman, and Audra leaned for-
ward, remembering the conversation clearly, re-
membering her response, which she’d launched
from her own private Africa, down deep inside.
None of it made it into the package. None of it. To
DIARY OF AN UGLY DUCKLING
341
the world, she was just as passive, submissive and
agreeable as the “old Mammy” characters in the
movies she loved so much.
Another quick voice-over teased, “Audra gets
dropped a bombshell from home that rocks her mo-
tivation. Will she complete the Ugly Duckling pro-
gram or will she drop out?” Then the program
jumped to a commercial, leaving Audra’s angry re-
sponse to the doctor’s condescension on the cutting-
room floor.
The silence in the room was like a weight
around her neck, pulling her down into a darkness
worse than any feeling she could ever remember
having.
“They left out a lot of stuff,” Audra told her guests
in a soft voice. “There was all this stuff about keloid
scarring—about changing the tone of my skin to im-
prove the plastic surgery results . . .” she added
lamely.
Her explanations were met with a few mutter-
ings, but no one seemed to want to look at her. So
when the telephone rang, Audra yanked it up, any-
thing to escape from the awful pall that had been
cast over what was supposed to be a happy, celebra-
tory gathering.
“Hello?”
“Is this Audra Marks?” an unfamiliar female
voice asked.
“Yes?”
“The Audra Marks that went on the Ugly Duckling
show?”
“Yes,” Audra said slowly. Shamiyah had told her
she might get calls from people who’d seen the show,
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Karyn Langhorne
and had even suggested she make sure her number
was unlisted. But Audra had forgotten about that
warning until this very moment.
“I think you’re a pathetic excuse for a black woman,
you self-hating bitch.”
“Who is this?”
“A proud black woman who’s sick of people like
you,” the woman hissed furiously. “The white man
said you were ugly, and you swallowed it whole,
didn’t you? I can’t believe you went on TV with this
trash. You want to be a white woman, be one. Black
“It wasn’t like that!” Audra told the woman, but
she hung up as soon as she’d said her piece. The
phone rang again, almost instantly.
“Audra Marks, you ought to be ashamed of your-
self, my sister,” an educated male voice lectured.
“And I feel sorry for you, a beautiful black sister,
for giving up your power for some light, bright
bullshit—”
And even as this stranger filled her ears with his
lesson, the call waiting was beeping through his
message, signaling another caller eager to drop
more curses on her.
Art wrestled the phone out of her hands. “We’ll
just turn it off,” he said, even as the line in Audra’s
bedroom jangled the steady jangle of another call.
“Go—”
But the show had returned and Audra stood still,
not wanting to watch and yet arrested by the un-
folding train wreck that was her appearance on
Ugly Duckling.
“Troubles from home threaten Audra’s progress,”
DIARY OF AN UGLY DUCKLING
343
the narrator was saying and Audra saw herself sit-
ting in the mirrorless apartment that had been her
home for months, the telephone pressed to her ear.
In white letters superimposed beneath her image
were the words, on the phone, audra’s mother,
edith.
And suddenly she knew exactly what she was go-
ing to hear and see.
&n
bsp; “No . . .” she whispered as her heart stopped beat-
ing in her chest and the room became suddenly as
cold and dark as an arctic winter. “They wouldn’t
do that . . . She promised she wouldn’t . . .”
“Andrew Neill,” Edith’s voice said over the phone
with a loud beep replacing the syllable of the last
name. “He’s your father.”
“No she didn’t!” Edith exploded, jumping out of
her chair as ready to fight as any boxing champion
at the sound of the bell. “No she didn’t!”
But on the television, the conversation continued
as it had in reality: “If he’d lived, I would have left
James Marks—I would have left Petra’s father for
him and you would have known him, Audra. Then
maybe you’d be proud to look like him instead of
ashamed—”
“I’m gonna kill that little bitch Shamiyah,” Edith
hollered. “Somebody get my switchblade. I’m hop-
ping the next plane, train or automobile and”—she
looked wildly around the room as if pleading for
her guests’ understanding—“She swore on her life
they were gonna leave that out—”
“Undaunted by her mother’s entreaties, Audra re-
ports for surgery the next morning,” the relentless
narration continued, and the next images were of
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Karyn Langhorne
the actual surgical process, sped up like a comedy
sketch, as three long, hard days of procedures were
compressed into less than thirty seconds.
Audra could hear the phone, still ringing in the
bedroom . . . and now the cell phone in her handbag
was jangling along with it, but she couldn’t make
her feet move to silence either one of them. She was
still staring at the TV in utter disbelief.
She’d just told the world she was illegitimate—
just outed her mother as an adultress—just opened
the Pandora’s box of family secrets and dumped
them out, soiled and foul, in front of everyone.
The cold room went hot, then cold, then hot
again, and she felt herself falling.
“Sit down,” Art murmured, but between her
mother vowing to cut Shamiyah from curls to calf,
the sound of several of their guests excusing them-
selves and the noise of the TV, she barely heard him,
barely felt the sofa beneath her legs.
It wasn’t over, the humiliation. Because there she
was, swaddled in bandages from forehead to neck,
talking to Dr. Goddard, denying her anger, denying
her hurt when it was so plain—so plain. The woman
she was looking at was the personification of anger,