In line for It’s a Small World, you admire the walls, painted so very Dutch and mod. There is something about that gold paired with that blue—the blue of old Mustangs and rotary phones and luggage sets. You think of your parents at the 1964 World’s Fair, where the ride debuted, and how they use the word “marvel” to describe it. They never, you’re pretty sure, used that word any other time. They marveled. It was marvelous.  

It’s been 25 years since you yourself have ridden on It’s a Small World. Even though around some corners the light is bright, it is considered to be a “dark ride,” meaning it is entirely enclosed from the hot Florida sun, and it can, in places, feel like nighttime down there. It does feel to you like an enchanted canal at night, as the water laps against your rail-guided boat.

There is the song of course. The dolls glide in time on wooden ice skates and circle above you on magic carpets. They swing, some slowly and some fast, and they dance the varying Dances of the World. Wooden hands wave maracas and tap drums. They spin and bob on beat. The Japanese dolls bow and the African ones make an elephant’s trunk into a drum. The hula dancers shake. A small Big Ben passes time at a speed that induces an almost laughably unsubtle panic in you, the hour hand lapping the twelve over and over again, as though you’ve been down there for days. You begin to feel an odd ache in your arms between your elbows and your wrists—a sadness that settles there, not often, but sometimes. Surreal lily pads loom above, and still you are marveling.

When you were a little girl, the ride was magical to you, and utterly prescribed how you would envision different countries for the next few decades. Clean and stereotyped and presented for your observation in mood lighting. You feel Not Okay about the strange longing you abruptly feel for this world view. The ride did not prepare you for that time you were followed by two men through the streets of Santiago. Or the turned ankle and the smell of piss on a Budapest sidewalk as you sat, swelling.

After the ride ends, you find yourself on a bench 30 yards away, near Prince Charming’s Regal Carousel. The corners and edges of the bench’s wood are worn very, very smooth from decades of butts and hands and you feel the ache spread to somewhere in the lung or liver or heart area. The heat from it pushes out the memory of unwanted dolls dressed like little girls from far-away places—Russia, Mexico—that your grandmother bestowed upon you. Doll-babies, she called them. Of your parents long ago, youthful and always right. Your crow’s feet, like tiny splitting rivers, bend as you squint out the sun. 

Later in the night, you will get stuck in the Carousel of Progress, from the same World’s Fair at which It’s A Small World debuted. It too was a marvel, truth be told, for its slowly revolving theater, the animatronic family calling to one another as decades passed and refrigerators arrived to keep milk from spoiling. The magic will be challenged when something mechanical becomes jammed and the teenage operator frantically presses buttons and begs all 26 of you not to exit at this time because this would be extremely dangerous. You will feel patient and tired at first, so you just sit and watch 1904 happen over and over again, thinking of the dolls. The recorded voice of the family’s teenage daughter calls out from somewhere off-stage to her father. She repeats herself as the show replays and replays, and everyone groans. You think about how you will not call it marvelous, and how you never want to come back here again. Your body had become the ache, such that you couldn’t likely stand up from the slowly rotating row seat anyway, given the chance. Or is it the stage that’s rotating? You place your feet firmly on the floor and try to steady yourself, but you can’t quite be sure.