I had three of them in my adolescence, all adult working women and all friends of my mother. One was a dark, snarky alto. One was a petite, curly-haired brunette. And one was Shannon, a bawdy, buxom blonde who drove a nut-brown 1978 Mustang whose creamy white back seat was loaded down with size 6 Candies.

She was my favorite.

Shannon smoked Virginia Slims and was never without her can of Tab, which she slung, along with the Candies, into her back seat. She wore Jovan Musk, took three showers a day and used Vidal Sassoon shampoo exclusively, giving her the peculiar scent of a cherry almond civet cat.

She was, in other words, the complete inverse of me, a flat-chested tomboy in running shorts, tube socks and Converse All-Stars. I wanted nothing to do with puberty, the complexities of underwire bras, purses or high heels and Shannon knew it. "How's it goin', kid?" she'd say, as she sashayed into the living room. "Got any boobs yet?"

I wanted to evaporate.

But I also wanted to be around her, if only because what other suburban teenager gets to hang around an updated version of Dorothy Parker? Shannon was the Bizarro World me, a chain-smoking, cocktail swilling sexpot whose throaty contralto was littered with curses and innuendo. Around her, I was always blushing and sweating, cracking wry smiles at every double entendre and pretended to understand.

The rotating trio of Babysitters of which Shannon was a part came to my house on weekends when my mother was out of town, performing with her band. The gigs were long enough that my mother did not feel comfortable leaving my two brothers and me alone, but too short to send me to my grandmother's, which would have been safer and uneventful. The Babysitters were about 10 years younger than my mother and therefore 10 years older than me, giving me a glimpse of what it might be like to be a young, single working woman in her 20s.

They were all secretaries. Their lives did not look appealing.

They did look exhilarating - saucy, exotic and slightly dangerous. Oh, to have the freedom to motor about in a Ford Mustang with low-slung bucket seats and drink all the Tab you wanted. Imagine lathering one's hair up with coconutty meringue of Vidal Sassoon instead of Wella Balsam or Prell.

One Saturday night, when my brothers were busy having a normal boyhood, Shannon said to me, "Let's go to the mall," which was tantamount to Sinatra saying to Dean Martin "Let's take my jet to Vegas."

The Mall, wow. The place where all the cool girls prowled for dates and adults who had never heard of Marshalls paid full price for everything. I was going to the Mall with a woman who sounded like Lauren Bacall, wiggled like Marilyn Monroe and was probably going to offer me a cocktail and get me to try on (gulp) bras.

But she didn't. And she didn't embarrass me. Instead, she scanned the posse of high school girls in their Calvin Klein jeans, satin baseball jackets and Ralph Lauren polos, pulled me into Filene's and said, "We got to do something about you."

She pulled out a baby blue satin jacket straight off the rack, told me to try it on, looked me up and down and said, "It's yours."

I can still see her tomato-red nails sliding over the forget-me-not-blue Filene's credit card as if all of life could be as as fluid and painless as a card swipe. That was what it was to be young, single and free. You had the power of gratuitous generosity. For me, that ridiculous jacket made me not merely hip - for a fleeting instant - but appreciated and loved by a version of myself that I would never be.

Had Shannon scanned the entourage of cool girls and registered my inaptness? Was the jacket a sartorial equalizer, a remedy for my terminal unhipness? Or was it simply a gratuitous act of affection from an older woman showing a younger one the real power of female independence?

Last week, my mother called me to tell me that Shannon Harrington had died. She had, like some 140,000 Americans annually, drank herself to death. There had been too many cocktails, and then anything at all, it seems, leaving my beautiful babysitter swollen with the poison of alcohol.

Her death infuriated my mother, who had ceased talking to Shannon years ago when it was obvious that she would not or could not stop. "It was a waste," said my mother, whose default tends toward anger. "It infuriates me."

But I had no appetite for fury, only a haunted trench of regret that a woman who had been the vehicle of such an inrushing of grace had been undone by demons I had never recognized and that, had I seen, would have been helpless to subdue.