Legoland was overwhelmingly yellow, and Leo, abashed, hated it. The rides had electric signs outside which estimated how long you’d have to stand in line to ride them. The log flume was a forty-five-minute wait. The polar roller coaster, an hour and five. It was an ordinary overcrowded amusement park. They had flown from Boston to Paris, then Paris to Billund, to end up at this place, the first day of their vacation. He wondered how long they would have to stay for his mother to get her money’s worth. She could be grim about expensive fun. The crowds of children upset him, blonder than the blondest American blond. Flaxen hair, he thought. Like from a book. Flaxen hair and cornflower-blue eyes, though he’d never seen flax or cornflowers in real life. If he had, he might think, Blue as a Danish child’s eyes, pale as a Danish child’s mullet. The blondness itself seemed evil to Leo. A blond child who screeches and steps on your foot is compelled by its blondness; a blond mother who hits you with her stroller—here comes another one, rushing after her child, who is attempting to climb into the lap of the life-sized Lego statue of Hans Christian Andersen—does it out of pure towheadedness.

In America he would have cried out, but in Legoland he felt he had to bear it.

Even the gift shop was disappointing. He’d been imagining something he couldn’t imagine, some immense box that would allow him to build—what? A suit of Lego. A turreted city big enough to live in. Denmark itself. He did not dream in Lego, not anymore, but sometimes he still raked his hand through the bins of it beneath his bed as a kind of rosary, to remind himself that the world, like Lego, was solid and mutable, both.

Joanna, too, found Legoland terrible; Joanna, too, could not confess. It was a kind of comfort, because Aksel had always been exhausting on the subject of Denmark versus America. Denmark was beautiful, and so were Danes; America was crass, and every moment of American life was a commercial for a slightly different form of American life, you could not so much as enjoy a hamburger without having your next hamburger advertised to you, though the hamburgers would be exactly the same: spongy and flavorless. “Americans have garbage taste,” he would say, tucking into an American banana split. “Not you, Johanna.” He always added a spurious h to her name. “But someday you will go to Denmark, and taste the ice cream, and you will understand.” Clearly the man had never been to Legoland, where even ice cream required a half hour’s wait in line, and then was a tragedy of dullness.