the best of everything; For the young Mary Gordon, Suzy Parker was the epitome of womanhood: confident, glamorous, smiling.

Byline: Mary Gordon

Has anyone ever looked happier? Has anyone ever been more beautiful? Suzy Parker and Cary Grant. She the first supermodel, anointed by Coco Chanel and Diana Vreeland. He is-well, Cary Grant: in uniform, decorated, his hand stretched out. It is perhaps a bit unsubtle, the hand. Is he trying to get our attention, take attention away from her, or is that simply a manly gesture? He is a naval officer, after all, but a bit in the shadow, his tan face dusky in comparison to hers, which is dazzling, in dazzling light, her smile dazzling-those white teeth, those red lips. Her smile is worldly, energetic, yet a bit withholding. And his smile: so well acquainted with the good life, so ready for another day of it. The year is 1957, so theirs is a constructed beauty, a knowing happiness. She wasn't born with that hair. She didn't wake up with it. How did those waves come to be? Were they set with rollers, or pin curls, or those plastic curlers like rubbery snails? Her hair shines like the brass of his decorations, earned in combat somewhere far outside the picture's frame.

Where could I have seen this picture in the year 1957? Certainly not in my own home on Long Island, the home presided over by mother, who did not believe in fashion, who prided herself on being too smart for it, too serious, above that sort of thing. It must have been in the room of my baby-sitter's daughter, in the house where I went while my mother worked as a legal secretary, the house that was dark, wallpapered, and voluptuous, decorated with paintings of fattish babies, while we had on our spare cream-colored walls pictures of the Virgin or the Sacred Heart.

The baby-sitter's daughter believed in fashion. She was glamorous. She would have been nineteen that year, newly engaged. Every movement she made was slow and provisional; she was languid by nature, and her two plainer sisters served her. She lay on her bed and smoked cigarettes and slowly turned the pages of magazines. Her sweaters clung to her curvy bosom as if it were a privilege; before going out, she would stand for a long time in front of the mirror making sure the seams were straight on her long, well-muscled legs. She had, below her lip, a beauty mark, which I believe she accented with some kind of pencil. On the top of her dresser, always in disarray, was a collection of items that puzzled and fascinated me: tweezers, tubes, pencils, eyelash curlers, mascara with its magic wand, and in the air a heavy scent of perfume. Dangerous, even in its name: My Sin.

Although I was supposed to be watching cartoons, I was drawn to her room, to be near her as she lay in her bed; I understood that she knew something important about being female, something my mother and my pious, no-nonsense aunts didn't know, or had deliberately forgotten, or were keeping from me. I was eight years old, stiff and uncomfortable in my Catholic school uniform, white socks, and navy-blue oxfords. My mother would not allow me to wear straight skirts or shoes with a hint of a pointed toe. Yet when I was in other people's houses, I often looked in magazines (not the ones we had at home, which were Catholic, except for The Saturday Evening Post, which had no information I believed to be of use) for hints in the creation of my future womanly self.

But one day I learned that the baby-sitter's daughter was of no use to me either. I read a letter she had written to her fiance. It began "Dear Darling." I knew that was a mistake, and from then on, her way of being female seemed to me slothful and error-

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