A Summary and Analysis of ‘Wants’ by Grace Paley

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Wants’ is a very short story by the American writer Grace Paley (1922-2007). First published in the Atlantic in 1972, it was the opening story in Paley’s 1974 collection, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute and remains one of her most popular and widely studied stories.

Summary

The narrator bumps into her ex-husband at the library. She was married to him for twenty-seven years and they had children together. She goes into the library to return two long-overdue library books which she has had for eighteen years and owes a $32 fine on. Her husband follows her into the library and begins to chastise her for the failure of their marriage.

The narrator and her ex-husband have a tense but reflective conversation about their past, including their divorce, which he now blames on her failure (or refusal) never to invite another couple round for dinner. The narrator responds by pointing out that her father was unwell, then their children were born, then other engagements came up, and then the war began.

The husband points out that he always wanted something – a sailboat – but that the narrator never wanted anything. She tells him it’s never too late, and he agrees, but he’s still bitter about it. He tells her that it’s too late for her, as she’ll ‘always want nothing’.

Once he’s left her alone outside the library, mulling over this cryptic comment, she confides to us that she does actually want something, contrary to her ex-husband’s statement. For example, she wants to be someone else, who doesn’t have long-overdue library books and who stands for something.

She also wishes she could’ve remained married to the same man for her whole life, but whether the right man for that would’ve been her ex-husband or the man she is now married to, she cannot say. She tells us she saw the sycamore trees which the city council had planted a couple of years before her children were born had just come into their prime.

She interprets her decision finally to return the overdue library books as a sign that she is capable of taking action when she needs to, even if that’s not how most people view her.

Analysis

The word ‘want’ has two different but semantically linked meanings: as a verb, it means both to desire something and to lack it. This is because we desire what we do not (and maybe cannot) have: once we have it, we no longer desire or ‘want’ it, as we’re no longer in search of it or striving to acquire it.

In a way, Paley’s title is a provocation to reflect on this intricate double meaning of ‘wants’. The husband seems bitter that his wife was always satisfied and never wanted (i.e., lacked) anything. It’s as if he’s annoyed that, whilst he provided for all the wants and needs of the family, fulfilling his duties as a husband and father, she never took his ‘wants’ into full consideration.

Presumably, because he was providing for a family, this is why he lacked the funds to buy a sailboat. Now the children have grown up and he and the narrator have divorced, he can finally realise his dream to own a boat. He (wrongly) characterises his ex-wife as someone who had all of her ‘wants’ taken care of, but this isn’t true, as the end of the story reveals.

The difference between them, however, is that whereas the ex-husband channels his desires into owning something physical – a sailboat, representing independence and a dream of sailing away into the sunset, alone and without filial responsibility? – the narrator harbours more metaphysical ‘wants’, desiring to be a different person, a ‘better’ person who is a model citizen who stands up for her children and protests against the war.

Of course, this isn’t quite what she says: what she actually tells us is that she had promised her children ‘to end the war’, a telling piece of phrasing which marks out the gulf between the wants we have for our children and the reality of our powerlessness to bring about real change in the world. Of course the narrator was never going to be able to end a war, but this is the sort of thing a parent tells a fearful child who looks up to their mother or father with an exaggerated idea of their power and influence in the world.

So, in the last analysis, is the narrator too hard on herself? Are her ‘wants’ more unrealistic and unachievable than her husband’s, which at least has a measurable, tangible aim? It’s revealing that her desire to be a ‘different person’ (it’s suggestive that she doesn’t say ‘better person’, though this is how we might interpret it) embraces the mundane but easily achievable – returning a library book on time – and the more high-flown and ambitious (making the world better for her children).

Both of these ‘wants’ are also markedly selfless, contrasted with her husband’s more selfish yearning for independence aboard his sailboat. She wants to avoid a library fine, of course, but we sense that her main reason for wishing to return her library books more promptly in future is so that she will be a better citizen who doesn’t fall foul of the bureaucratic authorities.

The two overdue library books which the narrator is returning, Edith Wharton’s The House of Fame and The Children, also carry significance. According to the narrator, these novels are about how life changed in the United States over the course of twenty-seven years: exactly the same length of time the narrator’s marriage to her ex-husband lasted.

But their titles are also ironic: the house she kept with her husband and children is no more, if it was ever truly ‘mirthful’, and her children have presumably grown up (sycamores typically reach their prime at around twenty-five years of age, so only two years short of the period of the narrator’s first marriage). Returning the library books feels like more than just a small effort to become a different person: it is also a way of drawing a line under her first marriage and moving on, just as her ex-husband, with his soon-to-be-acquired sailboat, will be doing.