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eBook Category: Mainstream
eBook Description: Christine Leslie was American wealth and American wild, insatiable and unfulfilled no matter how many roads she traveled. [Strong Sexual Content] [Author Comment: "When you become deeply involved in writing a novel, the characters take on a life of their own. You spend day after day in their company, and sometimes they begin to talk back to you, seeking different choices and lives from the ones you had planned for them. "In an American Vein," while standing as a story in itself, presents a variant life for Christine Leslie, one of the central characters in my 1993 novel, Stained Glass Rain."--Bruce Boston]

eBook Publisher: Fictionwise.com, Published: Sequitur, ed. Rachel Drummond, 1992
Fictionwise Release Date: June 2002

34 Reader Ratings: Great Good OK Poor

Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [66 KB], eReader (PDB) [29 KB], Palm Doc (PDB) [16 KB], Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [15 KB], Microsoft Reader (LIT) [66 KB] - PocketPC 1.0+ Compatible, Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [88 KB], hiebook (KML) [62 KB], Sony Reader (LRF) [45 KB], iSilo (PDB) [13 KB], Mobipocket (PRC) [17 KB], Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [44 KB], OEBFF Format (IMP) [25 KB]
Words: 4626
Reading time: 13-18 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Format:  Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud DISABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED

Christine Leslie was an American woman. Christine Leslie was New England wealth. Christine Leslie was so pale that one could trace the fine blue veins of her throat, a delicate river map with estuaries, tributaries and shoals. In the proper light the blue could change to silver-blue metallic threads, intricate networks of suprafine electronic circuitry. Christine believed in those veins. She trusted her mirrors more than money or lovers or the fashions that turned with each season.

As a little girl she went swimming in the cold blue waters of Cape Cod Bay. She picked berries bluer than her veins in the woods of her grandmother's estate. In church she would throw her head back so her ribbon thatched hair, blue on blond, would tumble over her ears and into the pew behind. She would ignore the priests and the swinging censors and the mumbling ritual so she could bare her throat to the vaulted baroque, hoping those veins might catch a sacred imprint, rearrange themselves in some blessed stigmata of sanctity.

For her ninth birthday, in the slanderous and oppressive year of 1953, her mother gave her ballet lessons. Although "Chrissy" had never shown any interest in the art of dance, the present was mandatory. The dancing master was the first man she could remember touching her body. He was German, with an accent like old iron. His hands were firm and insistent, but Chrissy was an awkward, ill-proportioned child. Her gangly limbs could only miss the bar or collapse upon it like wilting stalks. "Your daughter is impossible," he stated after nearly three years of instruction. The columns of muscle in his neck did a jerky pas de deux. "I can make nothing of her."

Little did they know that Chrissy's limbs would pace their growing to proportion, that her flesh would find the perfect shade of pale and she would begin to glide from room to room with feline grace. At the age of twelve, in the space of one year, she claimed beauty all at once. The scabs fell from her knees. Her freckles, all but a few, disappeared. Her blue eyes turned wide and serious. She refused to wear braces and despite ongoing forecasts of orthodontic calamity, her teeth straightened themselves. They were perfect, except for a tiny gap between her upper incisors, which more men than not found irresistible.

On the eve of her thirteenth birthday, in the bland and conventional year of 1957, Chrissy's father accompanied his daughter up the wide staircase to her bedroom to help her pick out a dress for her forthcoming party. He had shown little interest in such matters until recently. When her mother came upon the two of them, Chrissy was slowly posturing in front of her full length child's mirror, wearing only her underpants and socks. Her father was sitting on the floor next to her. His eyes were avid and full of terror. He was stroking the blond down on his daughter's calves.

To complete Chrissy's transformation and save all of them from catastrophe, her mother quickly dispatched her to an all-girl Catholic finishing school.