NEW YORK — Jennifer Rodriguez circled the Rockefeller Center rink as her parents, Joe and Barbara, watched. Every winter this is what the Rodriguezes do, throughout the world. As if on cue, they step into their assigned roles, like actors in a long-running production.
This year it was different, despite the family's best efforts at acting as if everything were normal. The Rodriguez women swapped roles. Barbara became the tireless fighter, succeeding against improbable odds, and Jennifer, her inspiration and her pillar.
The Rodriguezes' two-day visit to New York earlier this month was a business trip for Jennifer, a Miami native who was talking up a family-friendly Olympic program initiated by one of her sponsors, Bank of America, and taking one last lap for the news media before returning her energy and focus to long-track speedskating. She has a pre-Olympic tuneup this week in Salt Lake City, followed by a trip to Turin, Italy, for her third Winter Games.
For her mother, the trip to New York from Miami was a blessing. That much was evident even before she said so, by the bewitched look on her face as she stared at the magnificent Christmas tree.
"I've been dying to come here for years," Barbara Rodriguez said, meaning Rockefeller Center during the holidays. "Time gets away from you, and you never do it. But here I am, standing looking at the Christmas tree and all the decorations."
Time has taken on added significance for Barbara Rodriguez, who had a bilateral mastectomy before the 1998 Olympics in Nagano, Japan, and found out last year that the cancer was back and had spread to her liver.
If Rodriguez, 29, tracks time by the Olympic calendar, her mother measures it in chemotherapy cycles. For the better part of this year, nothing the doctors tried seemed to work. "We were dealing with the issue of, this thing is not really progressing the way we want," Joe Rodriguez said.
So Barbara Rodriguez was put on a different form of chemotherapy. She takes a pill and once a week gets a drip. The early results have been encouraging. The first Wednesday in December, she met with her doctors. They told her that a tumor in her chest wall had gotten smaller during the first cycle and that there was no sign of cancer on her liver.
Six days later, Barbara Rodriguez sat in a 24th floor boardroom in a Midtown Manhattan office with intoxicating views of the city and spoke in a voice as dispassionate as a train conductor's.
"I have needles that I smuggled on to the plane for my white blood cell counts," she said. "They're sealed, but still. Tonight, Joe will have to give me a shot to produce the white blood cells because my immune system is so low. So there are a lot of repercussions to the whole thing."
Jennifer Rodriguez listened impassively. Her mother's illness is a distraction that Rodriguez, who lives in Park City, Utah, with her husband, KC Boutiette, cannot afford right now. So she has tucked it away in her compartmentalized world like a payment-past-due notice until after the Olympics.
"My parents kind of are sheltering me from any kind of tragic incident, which for me, as far as skating is concerned, is really good, because I don't have to worry about it as much," Rodriguez said. "On the other hand, as a daughter I really want to know. So that's what's tough about this whole thing. How much can they tell me? How much can I take in and not let it bother my skating?"
Barbara Rodriguez treads carefully around her daughter. "Jen is my dearest friend," she said. "You know, we're just very close. I want to be straightforward with her. I don't go and tell her every single detail about every single test. Usually there's a positive that goes with the negative, like if they found something that's not good, OK, what's the treatment that we're going to do?"
Asked if she feels the pull to be with her mother in Florida while she is training in Utah, Rodriguez said, "At times, I definitely do."
"On the skating side, I think it's a little easier on me being that I'm away, so I don't have to see everything day in and day out," she said. "On the daughter side, it's a little hard.
"Definitely the second bout last year made me kind of realize, you know, it's not all about speedskating. Even though I love it and it's great, life is so much bigger."
Rodriguez, a former world champion in inline skating, was 20 when she laced up her first pair of speed skates. Seventeen months later, she was on the 1998 U.S. Olympic team. She briefly held the Olympic record in the 3,000 meters on her way to a fourth-place finish.
In Salt Lake City four years later, she won bronze medals in the 1,000 and 1,500 meters.
"The first Olympics was such a whirlwind," Rodriguez said. "I was so new to the sport. I was just excited to be there.
"The second Olympics, there was a lot more pressure on me. I wasn't able to enjoy those Games as much. So this time around, I really want to enjoy the Games, enjoy the experience, enjoy racing and not be so caught up in first, second or third."
When Barbara Rodriguez received the news in November 2004 that her cancer had returned, she immediately set her sights on Turin. Her daughter was coming off a brilliant year in which she ranked first overall in the World Cup standings in the 1,000 meters and second in the 1,500 meters.
"All I could think of was the Olympics is one year away," Barbara Rodriguez said. "I told myself: 'I will be better. I will go to the Olympics.' "
Her doctors, she said, knew better than to point out that a trans-Atlantic flight was not what they would prescribe for her compromised immune system.
"I think they realized a big part of my positive attitude has to do with being able to go to the Olympics and see Jen skate," Barbara Rodriguez said. "If they told me I couldn't go, I would probably fall into a depression, and what would be the point of that?"
At the Rockefeller Center rink, skaters are instructed to go with the flow. That posed no problem for Rodriguez. Going with the flow has become second nature to her family, which includes her younger brother, Eric.
"Jen's skating has been what has kept her going," Joe Rodriguez said as he watched Barbara watch their daughter skate. "What my wife has gone through with the treatments, I'll be the first to admit it, I don't know if I would be able to handle it. She's a tough cookie."
Barbara Rodriguez sometimes catches her husband staring at her. The concern in his eyes makes her uncomfortable. She does not wish for people to look at her that way.
"I don't mind talking about it or anything," she said, referring to her illness. "But I don't really want it to be the focus of the Olympics for Jen or for me. I don't."
As Rodriguez was posing for photographs on the ice, the rink's recording of "O Come All Ye Faithful" started skipping. Joe Rodriguez did not seem to notice. He was too caught up in the moment.
"This is all gravy," he said. "Rockefeller Center," and then motioning at his daughter on the ice, "watching her. These are blessings we soak up and enjoy."