I am putting up this little "time" segment to illustrate something else about establishing time and the uses of backstory.  This excerpt is from my hypermedia novel, Califia.  In hypertext, one can sometimes set up a framework so that characters "tell" backstory directly to the audience.  In this case, Calvin, who is organizing the materials that comprise the "novel" has asked the other two narrators, Kaye and Augusta, to do a backstory [Calvin, by the way, is a kind of assistant director type in Hollywood, so he thinks in screenplay terms like backstory, etc.]

Anyway, here is Augusta's backstory.  Here, I needed to establish a vivid moment that would have been in Augusta's childhood that defined her as a person.  She can be seen as an unsympathetic character, as she is a rather typical California woman - wearing her tennis bracelet, sun-bottle blonde hair, knowledge of all the shopping centers, and with a vision of only what she can see from the car window.  But I don't want the reader to dismiss her outright - she came to be this way because she did see what was around her to be seen, and she shaped her life accordingly.  This backstory sketch is told in the "Real Time" present, and the backstory brings us from childhood to the current time frame with an outline of the time vectors that will be most significant.  Almost every detail in the backstory (all right, every detail) will be important in the "real time" plot in other parts of the hypertext.

[ha, you will see the singing father, here, too - but this is not the same father as in my character sketch!]

Augusta's Backstory

Calvin has asked me to write a backstory, as though my life were a screenplay. If it were, something would have happened to me in childhood, something defining. Instead, I was a crushingly ordinary little girl in what I thought was a normal, middle-class family (including the mildly colorful relatives). My parents were nice and drove a late-model Chevrolet. I had Republican hair, owned lots of dolls and books, and was on TV once in the Howdy Doody show.

The only thing remotely resembling an epiphany was when I realized exactly which subset of average we inhabited. One day we went to the beach. I took my copy of Paintbox Summer to read in the car. On the way home, Mother suggested we go to a new, drive-in restaurant in Inglewood—The Witchstand. She loved drive-ins, where you had a tray set outside the window of the car, and the waitresses brought frosty malts in tall, silver goblets. The Witchstand was new then, the granddaddy of drive-ins, better, even, than Bob's Big Boy. It was a circular building, and the cars lined up six rows deep in front of the serving areas; when a car left at the front, the one behind moved up. That way, you could see different people in the cars next to yours.

So, I was sitting in the back seat at The Witchstand, in our pink and gray Chevrolet, in 1960, waiting for cheeseburgers and fries. My mother had struck up a conversation with the people in the next car; my father was humming "There's a Long, Long Trail A-winding" very softly because he liked hamburger stands, too—thought they were gold mines and often talked of buying one.

Suddenly I realized that my life was not like the book. Nothing in Beverly Cavanaugh, or anything else I had read, took place in families like mine or on streets like Inglewood Boulevard. Books, and even movies, depicted parents who were sophisticated and important. The characters lived on streets with trees and brick buildings and sturdy banks and town halls and restaurants with waiters. Inglewood Boulevard, even then, was a bright, tacky, slapped-together assemblage of used-car agencies, beauty parlors, weedy, dry vacant lots, TV and appliance outlets, bars, and record stores. And, of course, the huge, drive-in hamburger stand. If you couldn't eat, get pretty, see screen dreams, sing along, or drive away, it wasn't there.

In that moment I knew that there were two kinds of normal. One kind (A) lived in the East, or in books, or on the screen. The other kind (B) lived in Southern California. Type (A) people had a reason for being, every right to live out their dramatic lives just as they were doing. Type (B) were temporary, in transition, perpetually expected, and expecting, to be something else: famous, rich, the subjects of their own screenplays, younger, faster, happier, more beautiful. No question which was the inferior brand.

And, I knew my own future, however predictable and normal, would be shaped by the forces that had made L.A. a place of eternal impermanence, of abiding hope, of endless ridicule. Place mattered. The car ahead left, and we moved up.

I fell in love and got married during college because that is what we did. I got a real estate license because the alternatives were becoming a decorator or a grade-school teacher. At the usual time, I entered the undistributed middle of California middle age. I hoped, like the rest of us, to appear somewhere between twenty-four and thirty-five for at least forty years—always seeming to just dash in from a tennis match or the beach, with sun-blonde hair, French manicure. The only thing to be was in the process of getting better.

I fell out of love and got a divorce later on, because that is what we did, too.

Then, one day, the real estate market went bust.

Not even a listing to show. And what to do with one's life, when there was no romance and nothing to get a percentage of, was a mystery.

I would drive the freeways like some wandering soul in a Joan Didion novel. I didn't know how to play it. Statistics said I had as much chance of getting re-married as I did getting hijacked in an airplane. Good sense said that I needed to have some earning power. I'd start in the south, drive up the Riverside Freeway, go onto the Santa Ana Freeway, transition to the San Bernardino, cut to the Ventura, and drive until I could see the leopard spots of sage on the low hills, smell the dry, desert air coming through the canyons. Then back down the Hollywood Freeway, through the Cahuenga Pass, and on to visit Mother at Paradise Home.

Later, Father would bar-be-que on the back terrace and we would talk about old times on the Boulevard.  About him parking cars at Grauman's Chinese Theater, or about the old house at Yucca and Wilcox.  If the light held, he would draw me out to the hillside, show me the new location of the comets.

I sometimes wondered if the family lore might reveal what they learned about living here, if the files in the study held a clue about what to be next.  But, really, I believed, I didn't need to search the old papers and deeds to know what they said about Southern California.

Just the other day, I happened by the corner of Inglewood Boulevard where the Witchstand used to be. There's a 7-11 there now, and it was draped with signs announcing the final day of a big lottery promotion; people were lined up for three blocks to get a last chance to play.

I knew the real estate market would turn around, I'd make a big sale, and my troubles would soon be over.