Synopsis

The bridge at Sagamore was closed when we got there that summer of 1956. We had to cross the canal at Buzzards Bay over the only other roadway that tethered Cape Cod to the mainland.

Thus twelve-year-old Lily Grainger, while safe from ‘communists and the Pope,’ finds her family suddenly adrift. That was the summer the Andrea Doria sank, pilot whales stranded, and Lily’s father built a house he couldn’t afford. Target practice on a nearby decommissioned Liberty Ship echoed not only the rancor in her parents’ marriage, a rancor stoked by Lily’s competitive uncle, but also Lily’s troubles with her sister, her cousins, and especially with her mother. In her increasingly desperate efforts to salvage her parents’ marriage, Lily discovers betrayals beyond her understanding as well as the small ways in which people try to rescue each other. She draws on her music lessons and her love of Cape Cod—from Sagamore and Monomoy to Nauset Spit and the Wellfleet Dunes, seeking safe passage from the limited world of her salt marsh to the larger, open ocean.

Amazon

Praise

“What happens when a writer plays cello in a professional orchestra for her entire career? Her prose soars. In Water Music, Marcia Peck traces one intricate, intimate melody through the symphonic complexity of a disintegrating family’s summer on Cape Cod. Music and love are interchangeable. Here is a book worthy of reading aloud—and cherishing.” —Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew, author of Swinging on the Garden Gate

“Peck has written a moving and melodic triumph of imagination and story, a fine harmony of intimacies and passions.” —Nicole Helget, author of The Summer of Ordinary Ways, The Turtle Catcher, Stillwater

Excerpt

Prologue

There was no bridge at Sagamore the summer of 1956. We had to cross the canal at Buzzards Bay over the one slender, arched roadway that tethered Cape Cod to the mainland. That was the summer the cello proved to be my steadiest companion, although I would have had it otherwise. My mother had to make do without a piano of her own, which did not augur well: music had always been her refuge. And my father was dead set on building a cottage—built the right way, which was to say, better than Uncle George’s—when we couldn’t afford it. We thought we spotted the Andrea Doria moments before it sank. And I discovered the small ways in which people try to rescue each other.

Our property fronted a salt pond whose fertile waters hatched clams the size of a toenail, infant eels no bigger than a bobby pin, and young crabs so fragile you could crush them between two fingers. When they matured, they found their way to the creek, an outlet booby-trapped with rocks from an old abandoned mill, and followed it out to Pleasant Bay, that vast shallow body of water which, like a long adolescence, spanned the distance between our pond and the full-fledged, fathomless ocean.

Tides filled and emptied our small world and I tried to figure out who belonged to whom.  I longed to belong to my mother. But I learned that summer that she was like a teacup, spilled out and upside down on the saucer, and she couldn’t right herself. She thought she was mad at my father; she didn’t recognize that fiercer winds than his tore at her. All summer the storm gathered and gathered, took its breath from every direction we thought we knew, and lashed us into spindrift.

And all the while, surrounding us, holding us up like the sea we floated on, was the music.

About the Author

Marcia Peck’s writing has received a variety of awards, including New Millenium Writings (First prize for “Memento Mori”) and Lake Superior Writers’ Conference (First Prize for “Pride and Humility”). Her articles have appeared in Musical America, Strad Magazine, Strings Magazine, Senza Sordino, and the op-ed pages of the Minneapolis StarTribune.  Marcia’s fiction has appeared in Chautauqua Journal, New Millenium Writings, Gemini Magazine, and Glimmer Train, among others.

Growing up in New Jersey with parents who were both musicians, Marcia set out to be the best cellist she could be. She spent two years studying in Germany in the Master Class of the renowned Italian cellist, Antonio Janigro. Since then she has spent her musical career with the Minnesota Orchestra, where she met and married the handsome fourth horn player.

Marcia has always been a cat person. But she has learned to love dogs—even the naughty ones, maybe especially the naughty ones.

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