63 pages • 2 hours read
Katherine DunnGeek Love
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1989A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaBook 3, Chapter 12Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Book 3: “Spiral Mirror”
Book 3, Chapter 12 Summary: “{NOTES FOR NOW}: Miss Lick’s Home Flicks”
The novel returns to Oly’s notes on the present day. Oly investigates Miss Lick’s background, discovering that she inherited her family’s frozen-dinner empire at a young age and has always been a loner. Oly finds that Miss Lick’s daily routine includes swimming at an athletic club; Oly becomes a member so that they can meet. Oly strategically puts Miss Lick at ease; in return, Miss Lick offers to teach Oly how to swim.
Miss Lick invites Oly to her home and opens up about her personal history. After finding Oly so easy to talk to, Miss Lick decides to tell Oly what she really does, and they go into a locked room full of recorded materials. Miss Lick shows Oly a recording of a woman named Linda, who has hideous burn scars all over her body. Miss Lick went to school with Linda, who was pretty and popular before she was burned in an accident. Linda became a successful chemical engineer and told Miss Lick that the fire was the best thing that ever happened to her. This gave Miss Lick the idea of intervening in the lives of beautiful young women and paying them to undergo surgeries to make them unattractive, so that they cannot be exploited by men, and can realize their intellectual and professional potential. Oly says that Miss Lick “herself is an example of what can be accomplished by one unencumbered by natural beauty. So am I” (162).
Miss Lick says that she was also inspired by “the Arturans” and that she would “have run off and joined up with that particular carnival myself if my old man hadn’t needed me in the business” (158). Oly is stunned at the reference to Arty, but she conceals her feelings. Miss Lick continues to show Oly secretly-recorded films of young women that she has “helped” over the years transforming them physically.
Oly moves into a new apartment so that Miss Lick will not connect her to Miranda. Oly considers how to stop Miss Lick from changing Miranda and decides that the only way is to kill her. Oly knows that she must succeed the first time, because trying and failing to kill Miss Lick would turn her into a real monster.
Book 3, Chapter 12 Analysis
This chapter examines Oly’s relationship with Miss Lick. Oly manipulates Miss Lick into a close friendship, using the skills she learned in the carnival for dealing with norms: “I’ve taken her on her own hook and I have to be careful. She thinks she’s adopted me, that she’s doing me a kindness […] She is hideously lonely” (154). Oly finds it easy to get Miss Lick, who has no confidants, to open up to her.
Oly reassures Miss Lick that she has not made a mistake in confiding in her. Oly warmly tells her, “You know that all my life I have been in a position to understand what you’re doing” (161). Miss Lick is tremendously gratified and says that Oly is the first person she’s ever dared show the recordings of her “work.”
Oly genuinely likes Miss Lick, which is important to the plan to kill her and thereby protect Miranda. Arty had told her, “If you can like them they’ll be helpless against you” (161). Oly admires what Mary is doing for the young women, but her primary impulse is to keep her from Miranda. At first, Oly thinks that perhaps she can financially ruin Miss Lick to prevent her from paying for Miranda’s surgery, but Oly realizes that if Miss Lick could not buy their disfigurement, she would find another, more monstrous way to change young women’s bodies.
