I also called Raven. Raven, an ex-Alvin Ailey and Bob Fosse dancer and runway model, had set up shop downstairs from the yoga place in a studio named for her cable TV show: Image & Style (this on an island devoted to neither.)

At times, I had peered through its rattan blinds into the depths of an Asian/ African interior and seen a long shadow weaving and dancing amidst jars and boxes of exotic unguents and Far Eastern food supplements. I think I saw a turban.

In the dim and forgiving light, Raven taught women of a certain age how to remake themselves, mind and body: hair, skin, wardrobe, makeup, and a slinky runway walk somewhat wasted on the aisles of Publix. She made them models of a sort and she made them look and feel a lot better. Naturally, I had avoided going inside.

But one day, though transformations make me nervous, I knocked on the door and entered her studio. It was a turban.

There were lots of mirrors. Over a cleansing tea laced with Sunny Dew, she explained that her clients were women who never took time for themselves and now felt they deserved her makeover as a treat.

“They come to me and they have always seen themselves through someone else’s eyes. As a mother, a wife, a daughter, someone telling them they are too fat or too thin…They are dreaming someone else’s dream. This is their gift to themselves. They do not have to look like beach bums,” she said with more emphasis than I would have liked.

In fact Raven, who once modeled at Chanel, was eyeing me with her professional eye, a full Karl eye almost. She was pausing on the ends of my hair, hair that Anna Wintour had told me to chop off twenty years ago, hair frayed to a frazzle by the chlorine of the forbidden Ritz pool. I had to distract her so I asked about her life.

She was a New York girl from the barrio who, because of her superior brain, had been sent into the merciless world of Manhattan private schools. It was my world, only I had come to it from money, she, with no preparation, had been taken from the streets.

She had studied Chinese Herbal Nutrition and learned about herbs at the feet of her grandmother, a master herbalist and shaman with hair down to her waist. As a child, Raven used to go with her grandmother collecting herbs for creams and potions and wrapping them in brown paper twists to sell to the Hasidic Jews, Asians, Native Americans and the Hispanic people who consulted her.

Raven graduated from Dalton, then Sarah Lawrence, and danced on Broadway in seven shows. Coming back from one tour, her car had been run over by an eighteen-wheel truck, and she spent two years in physical therapy. Then, in her thirties, she became runway model.

“This is a healing place,” Raven said. And obviously a place full of metaphysical searchers, for she told me about things I had never heard of, like The Unstoppable Woman Course, Landmark Forums—“how to turn a bad situation and create something out of it”, and EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) which involves “tapping out the negativity everyone stores in their chakras. If they stay in your system they stop you from all you can be.”

She began showing me places—my earlobe, my wrist, under my armpit—energy meridian points that I might tap with my fingertips. But I, like the writer Fran Lebowitz, did not especially want to shed my negativity. For me, a friend has always been someone I can complain to at length.

“This is all ontology, the study of life skills,” she said. “The women want to move on but can’t. They have to open and tap and open and tap.” I think she saw she was not getting through to my heavily blocked chatkras.

Raven, who is a keynote speaker for the American Business Women’s Association, obviously had come here out of another kind of life. At first, she visited the island a little at a time, since her husband, one of the first African-American sports managers, the manager of Andre Agassi and others, had come down for tennis tournaments. Then she made this her base and, unlike me, had joined support groups like the Newcomers and Centered Women. There were many such groups. Quite deliberately, I had avoided them all.

Raven’s calendar was crosshatched with appointments and events. It looked just like my calendar when I went back to New York. I wondered if perhaps I had done things wrong. Aside from the Writers and Poets, I had never joined anything here. As a journalist, it was my habit to stand aside watching, doubting all I saw, knowing there was more to the story. As a novelist, I wanted to make up the story and change it. As a beach bum, I was squinting for the sun to be over the yardarm.

Raven walked me outside and, peering way down, took another look at my face in full Florida sunlight. I noticed her skin was flawless. She tapped her caramel cheek with one long finger and turned her head just like a bird. She was pondering deeply. By now, I knew her motto was “Look great, feel great.” Mine was more along the lines of “Mercy!” with a deep sigh.

But maybe she was right. If I looked great, or in my case, better, I might feel great or in my case, less grouchy.

I could see she had big plans for the virgin territory of my face and neck—creams, potions, small shocks from electrical wands. Where would it end?

Immediately I lost my makeover enthusiasm. Instead, I looked up—way up—into the face of someone I knew would become my next friend.