Diary of an Ugly Duckling (40 page)

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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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

folks don’t need you no how—”

“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.

“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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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,

the pure embodiment of hurt . . . and only she was

too blind to see it. But there wasn’t even a minute

of the subsequent breakdowns and breakthroughs—

nothing that might have redeemed her in the eyes of

the viewing public.

“God help me,” Audra muttered. “Please . . .”

But if the prayer were granted, His help appeared

in a form Audra could not recognize. The show

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345

continued, marching through the healing process,

the gym workouts, the slow transformation of Au-

dra Marks, punctuated every so often by the narra-

tor’s comments, pointing out the obvious: Audra’s

skin seemed a little lighter, a little brighter, in every

scene . . . right down to the dramatic Reveal, where

Audra kicked and strutted and simpered and

pranced—and seemed just as self-centered and ob-

noxious as any pretty woman she’d ever disliked in

her fat, black and ugly days.

“For all Audra’s difficulties with relationships

with men in the past, it appears that there is some

possibility of a new romance on the horizon,”

Camilla Jejune narrated in a voice filled with high

drama, as Audra rushed into Art’s arms at the Re-

veal and some sappy music played. But at least in

that one brief scene, Audra seemed like a real hu-

man being, and not some kind of—of—

Character.

The realization hit her high and hard with its

truth . . . because for a good deal of the whole Ugly

Duckling experience—indeed, for a good deal of

her life—that’s exactly what she’d been doing. Play-

ing a character, a larger-than-life version of someone

she hardly knew—someone who didn’t really exist

at all.

“Wait a minute . . .” Audra stared at the screen, as

the thing that had been niggling in the back of her

mind for weeks took form and grew. “Wait a

minute!” she shouted over Edith’s continued curs-

ing. “That’s not right. That’s not how it happened.

The order is wrong.” She turned to her mother. “I’d

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already had the surgery when you told me that. Re-

member?”

“Oh they just got us all messed up on here,”

Edith declared. “All messed up! They make it

sound like you set out to turn yourself into—into—

some kind of white girl! Somebody get me

my switchblade—”

On the screen in front of them, Camilla Jejune was

explaining the rules of the voting for Top Three.

“Give me the remote,” Audra demanded and once it

was in her hand, she stopped the video tape they’d

been recording and hit rewind.

There it was again, herself, talking to her mother,

being told about her paternity . . .

“Ma! Look!” she pointed at the screen. “There’s

no bandages!”

“No . . .” her mother said slowly.

“But you didn’t tell me until after the surgery.”

“Well, I tried to call,” Edith said angrily. “We al-

ready been through all that. Shamiyah said she

couldn’t reach you, and then you was too out of it to

take any phone calls. She didn’t call me and tell me

you were ready ’til damn near a week later—”

“When there were bandages all over my face and

body. They’ve done some major editing here,” Au-

dra announced, her own anger sharpening. “They’ve

switched it all around to suit the story they wanted

to tell—”

“I don’t understand,” Penny interjected.

“Audra’s saying Shamiyah didn’t want Ms. Edith

to talk to her before the surgery,” Art explained.

“You bet she didn’t.” Audra grabbed the phone,

dialing the numbers from memory. “Because she

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347

knew if I talked to Ma, I’d back out! She knew I’d

call the whole thing off and she wouldn’t have a

show—” She stopped short as the ringing sound

from the phone at her ear was replaced by a familiar

voice.

“Audra! Woman of the hour!” Shamiyah sounded

breathless and excited. “My phone has been ringing

off the hook. You saw the show, right? Didn’t you

just
love
it?”

“No, I didn’t love it, Shamiyah!” Audra snapped.

“It’s bad enough that you made me look like some

kind of self-hating color-struck
freak
.” Audra let her

voice rise with the word. “But—”

Edith snatched the phone out of her hand. “You

lying little
bitch!
I’m gonna cut you from your ears to

where the sun don’t shine—”

Audra grabbed the phone away from her mother.

“You asked me to talk about the man I thought

was my father, that he thought I was ugly . . . and I

did. But you promised not to go any deeper than

that. You promised not to tell the whole world about

my mother’s—”

“She consented to the release of the phone call,

Audra,” Shamiyah said as though that were the

only consideration. “I have the paperwork right

here.”

“But—”

“Look, Audra, it was an important part of your

story. We couldn’t leave it out. Not when it’s so com-

pelling and—” There was a break in the line as an-

other call rolled Audra’s line. “You should probably

get that. I told you earlier that we’ve been getting re-

quests from all kinds of media. All the morning

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shows want to interview you and Dr. Goddard. To

talk more about color consciousness in the black

community and—”

“I’m not answering that damned phone,” Audra