A reality check for the old ideal of exclusion in the suburbs

Sometimes, while watching an Islanders game on television, I see one of those "Island of Surprises" commercials by the Long Island Convention and Visitors Bureau. The commercial strings together images of white-looking couples -- all apparently heterosexual, some with kids, some without -- engaged in frankly unsurprising tourist activities: the beach, a museum, a vineyard.

As someone who grew up in Syosset, and who recently moved back to the area after nearly 20 years, I cringe a little every time this commercial comes on. Here is the Long Island stereotype in all its unabashed glory: a place of comfort, uniformity, predictability.

When I returned to Long Island, I knew I would have to confront my own ambivalent feelings about a place I often thought of in the same broad, bland way it appears in its own commercial. And my first year back has in many ways only left me more confused. For even though I spend my days working with students who are interesting, diverse and perpetually surprising, the stubborn myth of Long Island as a distinctly unremarkable, one-size-fits-all community somehow lives on.

I got to confront the question of what kind of community Long Island really is somewhat unexpectedly last month through the vehicle of Doris Kearns Goodwin's "Wait Till Next Year," the historian's memoir of growing up in Rockville Centre in the 1950s and rooting for her beloved Brooklyn Dodgers.

I was leading discussion groups as part of "Long Island Reads," the library system's project in which readers across the Island all study the same book for a month. Goodwin's story is very much about the dream of suburban "normality" that has defined our Island for more than half a century.

In describing her family's move from Brooklyn to a neighborhood she saw as harmonious and safe, she is familiar and comforting. And early on in our conversations, readers were eager to reminisce about the glory days of Long Island -- their blocks, and the butchers and barbers who knew their families by name.

But then something surprising happened: With only the slightest nudge from me, these discussions quickly turned to the darker side of suburban life -- secrets, anxieties, tensions, hostilities. Trying to get the groups to think more critically about Goodwin's description of her white, straight, soundly middle-class block ("our common land -- our playground, our park, our community"), I asked them to think about the price of such an appearance of perfect consensus. This was all it took for the whole house of cards to come down.

At the Farmingdale library, one reader who grew up near Goodwin in the 1950s described Goodwin's ideal of uniformity as a kind of "tribalism" that excluded the "freaks." He remembered a bicycle-riding black man whom the town's white children called "Sardines" (without really knowing why). As a child, he reluctantly stopped riding his bike because he feared being ostracized like that man. After describing the stigma that his parents' divorce brought upon his family, he concluded, "I would never want to go back to those days."

Similar tales popped up in North Merrick and Port Washington. A Merrick woman who grew up on Long Island during the same era recognized Goodwin's description of the homes on her block "clustered so close to one another that they functioned almost as a single home." Indeed, the woman told us, "this is exactly how my block saw itself." That is, she clarified, until two couples on the block got divorced and the ex-husbands moved away together, as lovers.

The last of my library sessions took place on a recent Friday afternoon. As we sat around a table, the Parente family from Garden City had already checked in to their Maryland hotel. By the end of the weekend we would have the most recent in a seemingly endless string of graphic reminders that Long Island has never been as simple as we might pretend it is. In this latest tragedy we would confront a quintessential Long Island nightmare: the pressure of keeping troubles secret, the fragile belief that our neighbors are just like us.

We already knew about the diversity and volatile social tensions of 21st-century Long Island. The 2006 Miller Place tragedy -- a racially charged shooting of a white teen by a black man -- highlighted the profoundly segregated nature of our communities, while last year's murder of Marcelo Lucero brought to light horrifying stories about violent gangs of white Long Island adolescents seeking out immigrant victims for attack.

Like Goodwin, I grew up on a Long Island that I imagined as a place of safety and uniformity, defined against the dangerous and disorienting chaos of a city that both beckoned and loomed. But after spending a few recent hours with a diverse, and rather surprising collection of Long Islanders who began to question that view in themselves, I am left asking why we continue to sell ourselves as precisely what we are not: all the same.

Peter West is assistant professor of English at Adelphi University.