Puerto Vallarta Squeeze by Robert James Waller

said Luz was special, that she had dreams and should go as far as the teachers could take her. For such insolence Esmeralda Santos was beaten, but she was stubborn about it, and Luz was allowed to continue in school. She’d learned to read and write and studied basic Mexican history, a history colored by emotion and not entirely accurate, but no worse than colored-up history anywhere. She’d also learned to hunch her shoulders and bend a little forward when passing the village men, hiding in that fashion her breasts, which already were large and seemed to grow more so every day.
    The other village girls were envious when a gringo photographer had visited Ceylaya and had chosen her for a series of portraits. He’d followed her into the fields and photographed her in her straw hat and feed-sack dress. And later a package had arrived with a picture of her, neatly matted and framed in silver. The photograph showed her standing, with the sea wind whipping her light dress about her legs and bending the brim of her hat. She was barefoot and smiling in a shy way back over her shoulder at the camera. The quiet, long-haired man in khaki shirt and orange suspenders had also smiled when he’d finished, lowering his camera and saying what he had just done would make a nice photograph of her and that he would send a copy. She kept the photograph as one of her prized possessions, a reminder of her village days.
    Cholera—first from a traveler’s hand, then from water or fruit—blew north. It had taken Luz’s mother, then her father, then one of the middle boys. Luz escaped the disease, and the decision was clear: stay or go. Two young men in the village had needed wives, and everyone said Luz was a good catch; she not only had beauty but also knew how to work. Her only flaw was intelligence coupled with a slightly rebellious nature, but a few good beatings and seven or eight children would smother those qualities. As the men liked to say, “If they are pregnant, they will not wander.” And machismo demands they do not wander—always, always, there is the fear of a woman giving favors to another man, for that is as bad as things get for un hombre macho married to the woman.
    In the same gringo colony where he worked as a gardener, Jesús found Luz a maid’s position in an American’s house. She was fifteen and worked as hard as she did at home. But there was more food, and she was given shoes and a uniform and a bed of her own over the garage in a room she shared with two other young women. At night, she could hear the Pacific waves slapping the shore only fifty yards west of where she lay.
    When the American’s son had visited on holidays, he’d noticed Luz, noticed the fine legs and prominent breasts showing beneath her uniform, the pretty face with only the slightest hint around the eyes and high-cheeked facial structure of Indian blood left from generations back. The son was called David, and he was her first man. That he and Luz were swimming together at night and doing other things was understood by all, understood and accepted. David’s father had worried about disease, so the boy always used a condom.
    David was seventeen and clumsy, but Luz hadn’t known any different and presumed such things lasted no more than the thirty seconds the boy made them last until his breath came fast and he lay still upon her afterward. Her mother had said it was the man’s prerogative and whatever the man did was the right thing. But that’s not what the images in magazines implied, not what the television soap operas suggested. The magazines and television made it clear that wearing fancy dresses showing off your woman’s body was permitted, that it was all right to smile and speak unafraid in the presence of men. The stories said there should be moments of abandon in which the woman reached ecstatic heights of her own. It was all very confusing.
    But David was a decent boy, and the family was decent overall, better than Luz had