VISITING PAMELA

No more friends visiting you if you won't go to their house."" It's a pretty stiff ultimatum to serve on a five-year-old, especially coming from a with-it New York mother like narrator Carrie's. But it forces Carrie to go home on the noisy school bus with Pamela, use the bathroom that smells from the baby's diapers, eat grapes even though they have little seeds, and generally reconcile herself to the discomforts of a strange home--which, when her abruptly summoned mother arrives, Carrie has begun to find compensations for. ""Could I play a little longer?"" And so her mother, with a sigh, does some shopping, while Carrie and Pamela--garbed companionably as Batman and Wonder Woman--settle down to watch TV. ""The first time is the worst,"" Mommy says on the way home; but true as that may be, we still haven't seen Carrie stand up to grabby Pamela (part of her hesitancy about visiting) or solved the problem of a threatening dog. Still, in environs like New York where children aren't in and out of each others' houses, this may serve as a preview of the worst that isn't all that bad--busily and amusingly projected in Kay Chorao's pictures.