Puerto Vallarta Squeeze by Robert James Waller

rule, though the village women seemed unconvinced
     when they said it. In the way things were, and are, Luz would be expected to endure her husband’s beatings when he’d turn
     up drunk and to treat him perpetually as if he were his own small god of the household. “The man isn’t perfect, but he’s yours.”
     That’s something else the village women had said.
    Two years later she’d awakened in the same way in the same room, on a straw mat next to her parents’ bed. She had the mat
     to herself then, since a space for Pedro opened up when Jesús-the-second found a job near Teacapán, working as a gardener
     in a small gringo colony. Luz was fourteen, and the younger men were beginning to stare at the front door of Jesús Santos’s
     house. Sometimes they talked to her at village fiestas. She kept her eyes downward most of the time while they talked, but
     not all of the time. Luz was different, which was a third thing the village women had said.
    Luz had been fortunate in one way, since a spasm of educational reform provided the local school with teachers who could take
     her all the way through sixth grade. No farther, but at least that far. By Mexican village standards that was good. Her brothers
     had never gone beyond fourth grade, except for Jesús, who completed five years before he’d gone to work for the gringos near
     Teacapán to bring money back home.
    Jesús-the-elder had spoken to her mother, saying grade three was enough for a girl, saying also too much education made women
     difficult to handle and a husband for Luz would be that much harder to find. Luz’s mother had argued with him and 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